Reflections from Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ) Spring 2026

I left DRJ Spring 2026 with a strong sense that the resilience profession is in the middle of a reset. Not a gradual evolution, but a real shift in how resilience is understood, practiced, and valued inside organizations. Across sessions and conversations, the same themes kept surfacing. Different words, same direction. Not only in the field itself, but in the role of the profession within organizations. Here are the takeaways that stood out most.

From static plans to validated capability

For years, resilience has been built around plans, reviews, and exercises that happen on a set cadence. The work centered on documentation, coordination, and proving that the right artifacts existed. That model hasn’t disappeared, but it’s no longer enough.

What stood out most was how consistently the conversation has shifted from static preparedness to active capability. Resilience is no longer being treated as something you maintain. It’s something that needs to stay alive. That’s a fundamental change.

The old model assumed organizations moved slowly enough for resilience work to catch up in cycles. Today, that assumption doesn’t hold. Businesses evolve faster, dependencies are more layered, cyber risk is constant, and third-party exposure is harder to see. In such a context, a resilience program that updates once a year starts to look less like assurance and more like lag.

This shift is also reflected in expectations around proof of resilience. Not proof that a policy exists or that a review was completed, but proof that the organization can actually continue operating following a disruption. Conversations emphasized validation, measurable readiness, dependency awareness, and continuous testing.

The changing language in the profession also reflected this shift. Resilience is increasingly being expressed in financial terms, customer impact, service tolerances, and executive metrics. It’s a simple yet significant change in rhetoric: it’s no longer enough to say resilience capabilities exist. Leaders and regulators expect that they work practice.

Getting a seat at the table

Another noticeable shift was in how people talk about the role itself. Resilience is moving up. What was once seen as an operational or compliance function is increasingly being reframed as a leadership capability. The question is no longer just: Do we have plans? It’s: Can leadership actually see, understand, and act during disruption?

That shift is closely tied to one of the most persistent challenges in resilience: silos.They show up in the same way every time: different teams working from different assumptions, workflows, and definitions of impact. One team sees a technical issue. Another sees a business disruption. Another sees reputational risk. Leadership sees… too little, too late.

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that integration is not just an improvement area, it is a defining marker of maturity. Less mature organizations tend to operate in fragmented structures, where resilience activities sit within functions. More mature organizations move toward a connected, shared operating picture, where risk, impact, and response are understood across the enterprise.

As that level of integration increases, so does the strategic relevance of the resilience function. The organizations that are advancing aren’t just improving within individual functions, they are connecting those functions and elevating resilience into a capability that informs leadership decision-making.

In that context, the role of the resilience professional also evolves. It looks less like a document owner and more like an orchestrator; someone who connects functions, validates readiness, translates impact into business terms, and helps the organization make decisions under pressure.

Demystifying AI in practice

AI was everywhere, as expected, but what stood out was the tone. The most credible conversations weren’t hype-driven. They were grounded, practical, and focused. That was a welcome shift. The question is no longer whether AI is exciting. It’s where it actually helps. The opportunities AI presents to the BCM and resilience community are significant, but they need to be measured and understood. It’s another means to an end, and this time, the focus was firmly on the outcomes, as it should be.

There is clear interest in using AI to reduce manual work, synthesize information, support exercises, and maintain a more current view of readiness. But just as consistently, there was concern about governance, auditability, explainability, and over-reliance. That balance matters.

Companies are only as strong as their weakest link

Another clear takeaway is how central third-party resilience has become. Suppliers, cloud providers, software ecosystems, and external partners are no longer side considerations. They are core to resilience itself. And yet, many organizations still lack visibility into the full picture of their dependencies.

There’s a growing recognition that resilience is not just about internal capability, it’s about understanding and managing the broader ecosystem you rely on. It is no surprise, however, that even when companies fully recognize this, executing on it remains challenging. Value chains are increasingly complex and layered. Untangling the web of dependencies is very difficult, and keeping it up to date even more so.

Resilience is still human

For all the discussion of automation and AI, one thing remained constant: resilience is still deeply human: leadership behavior under stress, role clarity, trust across teams, decision-making under pressure, and the ability to adapt when reality breaks assumptions. These are still the factors that determine whether resilience works in practice. If anything, as systems become more complex, the human elements become even more critical.

Final thoughts

DRJ Spring 2026 reflected a growing recognition of resilience as a strategic capability. Resilience is moving from static to living, from siloed to connected, from manual work to continuous execution, from qualitative to measurable, from operational support to strategic leadership. At the same time, many organizations are still grappling with familiar challenges: stale data, fragmented ownership, and recovery capabilities that are hard to prove.

But what stood out just as much was the community itself: Open, collaborative, and actively working through these challenges together. There’s real momentum.

That is exactly why I am so passionate about this space. Everyone has a stake, and there’s a shared effort to move the profession beyond maintaining plans and toward building systems of awareness, coordination, and action that are truly fit for today’s world.