Building resilience: Mark Gregory, EY

When we're thinking about resilience as a business at EY, we start by really trying to think about what are the plausible scenarios that we might have to deal with. So what's the range of variability. And then trying to test our business key metrics, like our cash flow, our people, against those potentially the more extreme points of the scenario. And if we feel we can cope with that, then probably we can cope with more minor adjustments.

Resilience is more important now than it's been for a long time, I would say to businesses. You know we have from Donald Trump through to Brexit, we have events we've not really seen before, and so we don't have much history to base our responses on. That means it's really important businesses think about are they resilient to what could be a wide range of shocks that might come up and very quickly. Resilience requires a lot of things, and there's certainly flexibility because you are going to have to move as different events develop. But courage is important as well because at some point you have to make decisions. And if you don't make decisions, and even if you've got the best plans, you are going to find yourself in a difficult situation. So, courage and flexibility are really at the core of resilience.