The Case for Hiring a Chief Resilience Officer

Igor Linkov · rss · 2026-05 source ↗ Reader 🖥️

practical · argumentative — An argumentative practical piece advocating that organizations establish a new C-suite role (CResO). The structure is: problem (governance gap) -> evidence (company examples) -> role description -> business case. The thesis ends in a 'you should do X' (hire/empower a CResO).

Structure

Key terms

• Resilience
  The ability of enterprise functions to keep running when disruption affects multiple systems at once, plus end-to-end recovery when failures cascade. Defined operationally: time-to-detect, time-to-recover, continuity of critical services. Distinct from prevention.
• Governance gap Leadership Under Pressure
  A structural condition where responsibility for a capability is widely distributed across functions, but no single executive holds authority to coordinate organization-wide action on it
• Horizontal mandate Leadership Under Pressure
  Authority that runs across functional silos rather than down a single vertical hierarchy — the CResO is responsible for whole-organization performance under stress, not for optimizing within a discipline
• Critical functions
  Services and capabilities the business cannot operate without (production, digital services, customer ops, supply-chain coordination); the CResO's first job is identifying these and mapping their dependencies
• Cascading disruption Leadership Under Pressure
  Failures that propagate across connected systems — technical fault becomes operational halt becomes customer disruption becomes financial/regulatory loss
• Recovery objectives
  Pre-defined targets (implicitly RTO/RPO-style) the organization commits to meeting when functions fail, set and aligned across functions by the CResO

Propositions

• explicitThe greatest damage from disruption comes from how failures cascade across connected systems, not from the initial eventconf: high
• explicitNo existing C-suite role is accountable for enterprise-wide resilience as an integrated wholeconf: high
• explicitResilience fails not from lack of expertise but from diffused responsibility paired with absent coordinating authorityconf: high
• explicitResilience is an enterprise governance function, not an operational or technical concernconf: high
• implicitA new senior role solves the coordination problem better than reorganizing existing roles or creating cross-functional mechanisms (RACI, councils, standing committees)conf: high
• implicitAdding a person at the top of an organization changes how the organization behaves under pressureconf: high
• implicitAuthority and accountability are the binding constraint on resilience (not visibility, tooling, incentives, or organizational design)conf: high
• explicitResilience is measurable in concrete terms (time-to-detect, time-to-recover, continuity of critical services)conf: high
• explicitA CResO can demonstrate meaningful recovery-time improvements within the first yearconf: medium
• explicitcorroboratedDisruption is no longer exceptional; it is a permanent feature of modern operationsconf: high
  supports ←The New Rules for Becoming an Enterprise Leader · p2 — Both treat disruption/turbulence as a now-permanent condition leaders must structurally orient around, rather than an exceptional event to plan past.
• explicitResilience generates economic value via reduced revenue interruption, customer retention, and reduced total disruption costconf: high
• explicitExisting capabilities (risk, security, ops, BC) are competent within their domainsconf: high
• implicitListing example companies that have made the appointment is sufficient evidence that the role worksconf: high
• explicitResilience does not generate profit directly but protects the ability to generate profitconf: high

Arguments

Narratives

• CrowdStrike July 2024 outage: routine Falcon update cascades across airlines, hospitals, logistics; 8.5M Microsoft devices affected; recovery uneven and prolonged because no single executive owned coordinated recovery
  → Carries the central argument — that the damage was not the technical failure but the coordination failure. Without this example the article has no concrete claim to make.
• CrowdStrike itself appointing a CResO reporting to the CEO after the outage
  → Implicit argument: even the company at the center of the precipitating event has adopted the solution — therefore the solution is validated. Also: penance / lesson-learned framing.
• Financial services examples (State Street, Goldman Sachs, Allianz)
  → Argues that in industries where cascades are best-understood, the role is already standard — appeal to authority via early adopters
• Novo Nordisk's global head of resilience for pharma manufacturing
  → Argues the role generalizes beyond financial/tech — regulated production with low disruption tolerance also needs it
• UNDRR Network of Corporate Chief Resilience Officers (Nestlé, Hyatt, Honeywell, Syngenta, Marsh McLennan, Sky, bp, Holcim, Swiss Air, Lombard Odier)
  → Manufactures a sense of inevitability — the role is now embedded in international institutional architecture, not just isolated appointments. Note: the authors are acknowledged by people inside this network, suggesting the article is partly an artifact of the network advocating for itself.

Questions addressed

• ✅ Why does cascading disruption produce prolonged enterprise-wide damage even when individual teams perform well?
  Because no executive owns end-to-end coordination — siloed competence cannot aggregate to integrated recovery
• ✅ What should organizations do about the governance gap?
  Create a CResO with horizontal mandate, direct CEO/board reporting, and authority over recovery standards and crisis decisions
• ✅ Is the role economically justified?
  Yes — costs are modest, avoided losses substantial
• ⭕ Why is the CResO different from a coordinator, program manager, or empowered COO?
  Asserted (horizontal mandate, real authority) but never argued
• ⭕ How does the CResO actually exercise authority over peer C-suite executives during a crisis (CISO, COO, CRO-Risk)?
  Not addressed
• ⭕ Is resilience one domain or many? (Cyber, supply chain, financial, geopolitical, climate, regulatory — can one executive credibly govern all of these?)
  Treated as one domain throughout, never argued
• ⭕ Why has the CEO — the only other horizontal role — failed to integrate resilience, and what does that say about CEO span of control?
  Not raised
• ⭕ What is the failure mode of having a CResO? (e.g., resilience theater, accountability laundering, single point of failure in the resilience function itself)
  Not raised

Gaps

• incompleteThe article never canvasses structural alternatives to adding a C-suite role: explicit resilience portfolio for COO; resilience standing committee with rotating chair; embedding resilience accountability in existing role mandates; redesigning the boundaries between CISO/CRO/COO so the gap disappears. The choice between 'new role' vs. 'redesigned roles' is never made an argument — it is assumed.
  Read next: Donella Meadows on leverage points (a new actor is a relatively low-leverage intervention compared to changing rules, feedback loops, or paradigms); Cutler on accountability culture and DRIs (whether accountability needs a title or a clearer commitment); Yourdon & Constantine on coupling and cohesion applied to org structures — when do you add a module vs. refactor existing modules?
• incompleteNo theory of how horizontal authority operates in practice. The CResO is said to have 'real authority' to set standards, make operational decisions during crisis, and report to CEO/board — but during a cascading event the CISO is restoring infrastructure, the COO is running operations, the CRO is managing exposure. The article does not explain by what mechanism the CResO's decisions override or align theirs.
  Read next: Incident command system literature (NIMS/ICS); how military and emergency services handle cross-functional command; product organizations on dual-track authority (functional vs. mission); papers on matrix organizations that survive vs. collapse.
• incompleteThe implicit theory of resilience is person-centric (resilience is governed by appointing an accountable person). But resilience could equally be a property of system design — redundancy, loose coupling, graceful degradation, blast radius limits, runbooks, chaos engineering, fast feedback loops. The article never engages the possibility that resilience scales through architecture and practice rather than through a single executive.
  Read next: Nassim Taleb on antifragility and skin-in-the-game; SRE / Google production engineering on error budgets and blast radius; Resilience Engineering tradition (Hollnagel, Woods) which explicitly argues resilience is a system property, not an organizational role; chaos engineering literature.
  closed byPresentation: Understanding Progressive Collapse: How To Avoid A Cascading Failure — Directly supplies the system-design view of resilience the HBR piece never engaged: Newman's entire framework treats resilience as an architectural and organizational property achieved through redundancy, loose coupling ('reduce interconnection'), blast-radius limits (multi-region strategies), and learning from incident postmortems — not through appointing a single accountable executive.
• uninformedNo engagement with the Resilience Engineering academic tradition (Hollnagel, Woods, Dekker), which has spent 20+ years arguing resilience is the adaptive capacity of a sociotechnical system — not something that can be 'owned' by a single accountable executive. The article reads as if this body of thought does not exist.
  Read next: Hollnagel, Woods & Leveson, 'Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts'; David Woods' lectures on graceful extensibility.
• illogicalThe 'companies that adopted the role' evidence chain has a selection-effect problem: companies that publicly appoint CResOs are companies that have had high-visibility cascading failures (CrowdStrike) or operate in high-cascade-risk industries (finance, pharma). The adoption rate does not establish that the role causes better outcomes — it establishes that organizations with the problem buy the solution. The article treats adoption as evidence of efficacy.
  Read next: Pfeffer & Sutton, 'Evidence-Based Management'; any introductory text on selection bias in management research.
• incompleteAuthor conflict-of-interest signal in the closing note: the authors thank executives at Syngenta, Novo Nordisk, Nestlé, and 'Group Resilience' — all members of the UNDRR network the article cites approvingly. The article is partly the UNDRR network's case for itself, but this framing is not surfaced.
  Read next: Look up Igor Linkov's affiliations and the UNDRR Network's funding and membership economics.
• incompleteNo discussion of failure modes for the CResO function itself: accountability laundering (other executives off-load problems to CResO), resilience theater (dashboards proliferate, actual capability does not improve), single-point-of-failure (a strong CResO leaves and capability collapses), incentive misalignment (CResO scored on time-to-recover incentivizes minimizing reported incidents).
  Read next: Goodhart's Law literature; Cutler on metrics that displace work; security industry's experience with CISO accountability since SOX/Sarbanes-Oxley.