Co-hosted with Skipton Group at Leeds Digital Festival, Mon 28 September 2026
Most organisations can answer the question "are we resilient?" What's harder to answer is whether that resilience would actually hold together on a Monday morning when something goes wrong.
That was the premise behind Resilience Roulette, a breakfast session we co-hosted with Skipton Group as part of the Leeds Digital Festival at The Queens Hotel in Leeds. The format was deliberately uncomfortable: a spinning wheel, a random crisis scenario, and a room full of professionals voting live on how to respond as the situation unfolded.
Around 30 risk and resilience professionals joined us from across a mix of industries, and what made the session work was the diversity of perspectives in the room. Different sectors, different risk appetites, different operating models, but the same fundamental challenge: how do you know your organisation will actually perform when it matters?
Why we ran this session
We wanted to close that gap, even if only for two hours, by putting real decision-making pressure on the room and seeing what surfaced.
Raj Kohli and Bryan Hurcombe from the DCR team joined Iain Wardle, Nick Cameron and Duncan Ratcliffe from Skipton Group's Security, Resilience and IT teams to facilitate the session, with the wider DCR and Skipton teams supporting throughout.
What the room took away
These weren't scripted takeaways. They emerged from the live discussion and the choices people made when the scenarios landed.
There's rarely a "right" answer in a crisis, only trade-offs: Every option costs you something: time, money, trust or reputation. The job is to know which cost you're willing to pay before you're asked to pay it. When the room voted on responses, the split decisions told us something important: reasonable people with good experience will disagree, and that disagreement needs to be surfaced before a real crisis forces it into the open.
Resilience isn't an IT problem: It's a people, customer, reputational and financial issue. The technology is often the easy bit. What's harder is the human dimension: who makes the call, who communicates with customers, and how leadership holds steady when the picture is unclear.
The first hour shapes the next month: Who gets pulled together, who decides and who talks to customers matters more than the plan sitting in a drawer. The room's instinct was often to focus on the technical fix first, but the scenarios showed that communication failures and unclear decision rights create more lasting damage than the incident itself.
Attention is the scarcest resource you have: Organisations don't usually fail because they didn't see the risk. They fail because they were looking the other way. In a world where regulatory expectations, cyber threats and third-party dependencies are all competing for leadership attention, the ability to focus on what matters most is itself a resilience capability.
Resilience by design pays you back: The organisations that invest ahead of time, with tested backup options and regular practice, don't just survive disruption. They win work because of it. For building societies and mutual organisations in particular, where member trust is the foundation of the operating model, visible resilience capability is a competitive advantage, not just a regulatory requirement.
Rehearse it before you need it: Exercising is where plans meet reality, and where you find the gaps while it's still cheap to fix them. Many financial services organisations still have significant gaps between their documented resilience capabilities and their tested performance under stress.
Every untested assumption is a bet: Resilient organisations just place fewer of them. The session reinforced that the biggest risks aren't usually the ones you've identified and planned for. They're the ones sitting in the assumptions you haven't questioned yet.
The bigger picture
Resilience Roulette was designed to make one point clearly: the distance between having a plan and being able to execute it under pressure is where most organisations sit. That gap doesn't close with more documentation. It closes with practice, honest assessment, and the willingness to find out what doesn't work before you need it to.
This is the core of what DCR Partners works on with organisations across financial services. Whether it's through our Minimum Viable Company framework for defining what must be protected, our testing, training and exercising programmes that build genuine leadership capability under pressure, or our broader enterprise resilience advisory, the starting point is always the same: find out what's true, not what's comfortable.
A huge thank you to the Skipton Group team for the collaboration that made this session possible. Sessions like this only land when there's strong partnership, and that's exactly the kind of relationship DCR and Skipton Group have built together over 11 years. And thank you to everyone who joined us, voted, debated, and challenged the room. The best conversations happened when people disagreed.
Want to explore what resilience looks like in practice for your organisation?
Whether you're preparing for regulatory expectations around operational resilience, strengthening your crisis management capability, or simply want to find out how your leadership team would perform under real pressure, we'd welcome the conversation.