Resilience is in danger of becoming the next buzzword.

That was an observation by Jackie King, executive director, corporate affairs at Ibec*, Ireland’s largest business organisation, at this year’s Corporate Affairs Summit in Dublin, shortly after we sat down to talk about resilience.

She’s not wrong. Back in 2019, Dave Ramsden, deputy governor for markets & banking at the Bank of England, actually produced a graph demonstrating the dramatic rise in Google searches for the term ‘resilience’ as he prepared to deliver a speech on that very subject.

Ramsden opened with a dictionary definition of resilience as ‘the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness’. King sees it differently.

Resilience, she argued, is the operating system for competitiveness.

For years, businesses optimised for efficiency through lean systems, just-in-time supply chains and global reach. But, while that was a successful strategy in a relatively stable environment, the world now looks rather different.

Cyber-attacks. Geopolitical instability. Wars. Supply chain shocks. Infrastructure pressures. AI disruption. Extreme weather. The list of potential disruptions is endless; it’s the environment in which business operates today.

Which raises an obvious question. If resilience matters this much, why has nobody built it in already? King’s answer is that they didn’t need to. Disruption used to arrive one at a time, with enough breathing room in between to absorb it. Risk sat on the register, business got on with business, and the external pressure that would have driven internal alignment simply was not there. What has changed is not the recognition. It’s the frequency.

So, the question is no longer whether disruption will occur, but whether a business can continue to operate, adapt and grow when it does. As King put it, that’s resilience. ‘It’s not replacing competitiveness. Competitiveness is the goal… it is about resilience being that underlying principle for competitiveness,’ she said.

In that sense, resilience has moved from the risk register to the board agenda.

‘Resilience now means the ability to anticipate disruption, protect continuity, adapt quickly and maintain trust, and keep delivering for customers, employees, investors and society,’ she explained. ‘A company can have a strong strategy, but if it can’t withstand pressure, the strategy doesn’t hold.’

The paradox is that good resilience rarely gets recognised. Crises that never happen do not generate headlines, but they are often the result of years of preparation, relationship-building and organisational alignment.

This broader definition of resilience elevates the role of corporate affairs. As King put it, the ability to help organisations understand external risks is more important than ever. Corporate affairs is uniquely positioned to help organisations understand what is happening beyond their four walls.

Yet that role comes with a challenge. Corporate affairs cannot simply be the function that communicates decisions once they have been made. To influence strategy, it needs to understand the business itself, its priorities, its vulnerabilities and what drives performance.

Identifying risks is only half the battle. The real challenge is persuading leaders to act. King’s advice is to make the consequences tangible, and personal. ‘Here’s what the data is showing. Here’s what our analysis shows. And here’s the potential impact, not only to the business but to you as a leader. This is what it means for our reputation, and if our reputation does this, here’s what will happen to our stakeholders.’

This means it is essential that the corporate affairs function is enterprise-wide.

‘Corporate affairs has to understand the business as much as it understands communications,’ said King. ‘If you don’t understand corporate priorities, if you don’t understand what the business is trying to achieve, you’ll be designated as a silo function within the business.’

It is a theme I constantly hear. Communications expertise might secure that elusive seat at the table. But it is an understanding of how the business creates value, and where it is vulnerable, that determines whether anybody listens when you are there.

*Ibec was the ‘in association’ sponsor for the Dublin Summit.

Flexing the muscles

And we return today to one of my favourite sports – PR kicking.

A bout of reactive arthritis in my left leg has prevented me indulging in this activity of late, but today I’m strapping on the knee brace.

This week I received a press release. Nothing strange about that. It was also irrelevant. Sadly, nothing strange about that either. But here’s a thing: I only knew it was a release because it said so.

What I actually received was the opening paragraph from an RNS statement, in other words: the official announcement to the London Stock Exchange. It confirmed X company had completed the acquisition of Y for an undisclosed amount.

And this is the part that really needs kicking.

The PR person sent the paragraph, plus link, with the accompanying words.

Hi there!

This is the body of your email.

Happy pitching!

What the [expletive deleted]? Why bother filling in the press release template? Just send it through with no introduction. No context. No explanation. No hook. And, fundamentally, no story.

(Maybe it was a mistake, but there was no follow up - and my email to the PR went unanswered. So the previous par stands. Leg flexed, ready for action!)

I can just imagine pitching this to an editor.

‘Okay. I’ve got a corker here. A company that few people have ever heard of has bought another company that even fewer people have heard of. What’s that? Why should our readers be interested? Er… Sorry, is it an exclusive? Well, no. It’s a stock exchange announcement. Yes, I know there are roughly 1,000 of those every day but… this one was sent to me personally. Do I know the PR? Nope. What’s that? Press delete.’

I am not a typical journalist. I don’t receive hundreds of press releases a day – for which I thank my lucky stars – but those hacks under siege always stress the same thing. The pitches that catch their eye demonstrate that the sender has done their homework.

They understand the journalist’s beat.

They understand their audience.

They can show why the story matters.

Sending me an RNS and calling it a press release is like sending me a shopping list and calling it dinner. (Alternatively, sending me a bottle of wine and calling it a bunch of grapes would be totally acceptable.)

Book for this year’s Corporate Affairs Summit

Seeing as I have brought up the Irish one, this year’s Corporate Affairs Summit in London takes place on 7 October and the agenda is a good one! It has been constructed with the audience front of mind.

I will be having a ‘fireside’ chat with Alice Macandrew, corporate affairs director at the BBC, who has promised a ‘no holding back’ conversation.

Russ Brady, director of group communications at Co-op, will be sharing the lessons learned following last year’s cyber-attack, which the retailer has said cost at least £206 million in lost revenue.

And thirty-five years after ‘Doing a Ratner’ entered the communicators’ lexicon, Gerald Ratner will be sharing his memories of that fateful speech to the Institute of Directors.

We’ll be looking at the corporate affairs function of the future, talking to in-house practitioners who have restructured in recent times to reflect today’s realitiess. We will also consider what the next wave of AI deployment might look like for corporate affairs, plus the thorny issue of misinformation and disinformation and what role AI might play in tackling that.

Plus plenty more besides.

Only open to senior in-house communicators, as always. Book here.