Continuity of activities and resilience to changes are two distinct levels of organization’s ability.

• Continuity is the capability to prevent, endure, and recover from disruptions to sustain activities.
• Resilience is the “ability to absorb and adapt in a changing environment.” (ISO 22300:2018) The DHS Risk Lexicon adds on, “resilience is the ability to quickly adapt and recover from any known or unknown changes to the environment.”

“Continuity management is essentially returning a business to ‘business as usual’, and nothing more. Resilience… not only enables organizations to continue with business as usual, but also to learn, progress and flourish… which will likely involve transformation.” (Bhamra, 2015)

“In short, business continuity returns us to where we were before an incident but a resilient organization will evolve and grow from the incident.” (Massie, 2018).

References

• Bhamra, R. (2015). Organisational Resilience: Concepts, Integration, and Practice. CRC Press.
• Massie, R. (2018, August 29). What is Organizational Resilience? Retrieved from The Business Continuity Institute: https://www.thebci.org/news/what-is-organizational-resilience.html