Building a Resilient Government

Resilient governments demonstrate six characteristics: prudence, modularity, redundancy, diversity, embeddedness and adaptiveness. 

After years of working with a variety of organizations, the Boston Consulting Group conducted research to explore resilience within systems. Their findings revealed six characteristics needed to build resilient governments: “prudence, modularity, redundancy, diversity, embeddedness and adaptiveness.”

The prudent government prepares for a variety of scenarios because it recognizes that “if something can plausibly happen, it eventually will.” Government prudence means identifying risks, then distinguishing between scenarios that are more and less likely to occur, and conducting scenario-planning exercises for each. Planning should involve authorities at the city, state...