Resilience

Resilience studies the capacity of a system — organisation, building, chain — to absorb a disruption, adapt and recover, even when the disruption was not foreseen. Unlike continuity and emergency management, which work from specific scenarios, resilience concerns generic capacity to cope: slack, redundancy, diversity of sources and the ability to learn from deviation.

FM constantly faces disruptions that were not in any scenario — an unexpected market shock at a supplier, a prolonged climate anomaly, a cyber incident at a chain partner. Resilience thinking helps FM build in capacity for the unknown, not only plan for the known risk.

• Where does slack sit in this system, and was it deliberately built in or is it incidental?
• What happens when two independent disruptions occur simultaneously — something no scenario prepared for?

• Resilience engineering literature (Hollnagel et al.); ISO/TR 41019 on sustainability and resilience within the FM standards series.

• Efficiency and resilience often stand in tension: the most efficient chain has the least margin to absorb shocks.
• Resilience is not free; slack must be explicitly justified as investment, not eliminated as waste.

• Multiple Part 3 services carrying redundancy requirements (technical management, sourcing, security)

• Chain diversification and supplier redundancy

• Regieorganisatie — managing organisation / intelligent client function

  Multiple suppliers add resilience through diversity, but raise the burden of oversight.

• ISO/TR 41019:2024 — status as a technical report, not a standard with requirements; see the standards atlas.

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• Resilience used as a synonym for business continuity, when the former is generic and the latter scenario-bound.

No generally accepted metric exists to measure resilience before a disruption occurs; most indicators are after-the-fact observations of how well a system turned out to recover.

• Hollnagel, Woods & Leveson, Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts.