What does resilience mean to these CEOs?

Francois Barrault:

Chairman – IDATE DigiWorld

“When you have a very sophisticated system you need to be careful of counter-attack. The more points you have, the weaker you are. But the more events you have in the network, the bigger chance you have of having a bug. It’s like a car. If you drive your car just 50 kms as a test drive or you drive it 6 million kms. In the 6 million you will find lots of issues. So now you need to be very careful because the world is relying on technology. So every time you launch mission critical applications, such as for aeroplanes or new apps in which your health or security is concerned you need to do stress tests and push the limits of the resilience of the application”.

Massamba Thioye:

Project Executive – UN Climate Change Secretariat

“It’s the capability to build after a shock. We need to have economies and societies that are resilient but particularly in this moment that we’re facing, with a lot of challenges: short-term challenges such as Covid and more medium to long-term challenges such as climate change and loss of biodiversity. Societies need to be able to face these challenges and re-build after this shock”.

Moon Jerin:

Founder - Aeindri

“We need to have a mental, physical and emotional resilience built into us. We have to realise that there’s a lot of information saying social media is really bad for us and it’s true, it’s evidence-based – what is this information doing to our system, to our emotional intelligence, how do we relate in real life and what does it do to your health? These are very important topics that people have to address and understand. At the same time without these connections we cannot be a truly global society. We risk being ousted almost, not connected with others. So how does resilience come into play? In my opinion it’s about being able to be strong enough to identify what’s necessary and how to have the control over that access and that information”.

Beat Ulrich:

CEO – St Gallen Symposium

“It’s very important with the huge amount of information we get, that we have to find a way to manage this information and deal with information that’s often critical – in a war for example. So we as people have to find a better balance and that will be a huge challenge for the coming years I would say”.