Disaster Recovery Institute (DRI) International has published its Ninth Annual Global Risk and Resilience Trends Report. The report provides an analysis of current and emerging risks.
Supported by the DRI Future Vision Committee (FVC), a group of international thought leaders in the field, the report is based on a survey of more than 500 professionals across all industries and sectors, the largest response in the report’s history.
The report includes the 2023 Resilience Index, which identifies the year’s top ten operational resilience issues. These are:
- Cyber events
- IT disruptions
- Financial Conditions
- Natural disasters
- Human resource issues
- Power shortages
- Major facilities incidents
- Infectious diseases
- Climate change
- Supply chain issues
The Resilience Index has been developed by considering the likelihood and the impact or a variety of potential threats.
In terms of likelihood of a threat causing significant problems in 2024, the top ten issues according to survey respondents are:
- Cyber events
- IT disruptions
- Financial conditions
- Human resource issues
- Natural disasters
- Climate change
- Power shortages
- Infectious diseases
- Increased regulation
- Supply chain issues
When it comes to impact, the ten areas that would have the largest impact in 2024, should they occur are:
- Cyber events
- IT disruptions
- Financial conditions
- Natural disasters
- Power shortages
- Major facilities incident
- Human resource issues
- Reputation issues
- Infectious diseases
- Supply chain issues
The survey also focused on longer-term strategic issues. Much like previous years, the topics of most concern are ‘uncontrolled/unregulated emerging technologies’ and ‘trust in organizations and institutions’. However, the fastest growing concern is ‘lack of natural resources to sustain a modern economy’.
This year’s report also includes a special section on environment, social, and governance (ESG). It considers the origins and influence of ESG, and how organizations are responding to the public’s changing expectations.
The report is available as a free download in the DRI Library
Resilience Forward comment: is survivor bias evident?
Given that the major disruption from COVID-19 is a relatively recent issue, it is surprising how low a ranking ‘Infectious diseases’ is given in terms of both likelihood and impact in this report’s survey results. This could be due to an assumption that governments will manage an outbreak more quickly and effectively next time because the COVID-lessons are fresh; or possibly it is some form of corporate survivor bias.
Survivor bias is where the survivors of an incident tend to believe that they can continue to survive such incidents again in the future. It ‘means that the more you succeed, the more you believe that what you did worked’ says Len Herstein in his book ‘Be Vigilant! Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance, and Safeguard Success’.
Obviously, each survey respondent will have had their own individual reasons for their perception of future pandemic threats, but the possibility that our risk decisions can be biased by past successes in managing similar risks needs to be considered in enterprise risk management programs.
