Resilience at OECD: Current State and Future Directions

Resilience is an emerging approach that emphasizes the capacity of an organization to expeditiously recover from and adapt to adverse events. Theoretically, such an approach could help many organizations and systems address the inherent uncertainty and complexity within their operations and better overcome disruptions or shocks, which would otherwise threaten to degrade or destroy the organization's core operations. In practice, however, a lack of consistency in how resilience is applied and measured can limit its effectiveness to assist organizations in this task. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is particularly interested in applying principles of resilience to emerging threats to economic and social prosperity amongst its member states, yet also applies resilience in various application areas via comparable yet different definitions. A greater harmonization of resilience across OECD's Directorates and affiliate groups is intended to improve the organization's capacity to identify and address emerging systemic threats and produce suggestions for good governance to meet these threats as they arise in the coming years.