The BCI’s latest research arrived with a confident covering email. The BCI Future of Resilience Report 2026, produced with the support of F24, describes “a profession on the verge of a significant transformation” and promises “the rise of the Chief Resilience Officer as a standard senior role”. Those are big claims about where our profession is going over the next ten years, so the first thing I wanted to know was how many people they were based on.
How many people answered?
The answer is 118. You won’t find that in the email, the forewords, the executive summary or the main text. It appears once, in a graphic on page 63 of a 72-page report. There is no methodology section, no fieldwork dates and no response rate. The BCI says it has more than 10,000 members, which makes 118 responses about 1.2% of the membership, and the people who took part chose to do so.
It gets thinner as you read on. The report never says how many people answered each question, but you can work it out from the percentages. By the later questions about 105 people were still answering. At that size, any single figure carries a margin of error of around nine percentage points either way, before you even consider who chose to take part. Last year’s Vision 2030 report had 218 respondents. This year’s sample is almost half that, with a different mix of regions and sectors, yet the two years are compared as if they were like for like.
The CRO that wasn’t
The headline I found hardest to accept is the Chief Resilience Officer. The report says that “an overwhelming majority of respondents (92%) expect a dedicated resilience leadership role at C-suite level to become standard over the next decade”. This is what respondents actually chose.
| Do you anticipate a dedicated CRO becoming standard? | Share |
| Yes, within most large organisations | 29.2% |
| Yes, but limited to regulated sectors | 27.4% |
| Possibly, but integrated into another C-suite role | 35.4% |
| No / too early to tell | 8.0% |
To reach 92% you have to count the 35.4% who said resilience would probably be folded into an existing C-suite role, which is the opposite of a dedicated one. You also have to count the 27.4% who think it will only happen in regulated sectors. The answer that matches the headline was chosen by 29.2% of respondents, roughly 33 people. Last year, 73.7% said organisations should appoint a CRO. Asked whether one will become standard, fewer than a third now say so. That fall is the real story, and the report doesn’t mention it.
For most organisations, and for almost every SME, there isn’t going to be a Chief Resilience Officer. Resilience will sit with a busy executive who owns several other things as well. That makes clear plans, good training and regular exercising more important than any new job title.
Other headlines that don’t match the charts
The executive summary says 93.9% expect regulatory expectations to increase “significantly”. The chart shows 56.5% said significantly and 37.4% said moderately. 73.5% expect investment in resilience to rise, but only 26.7% expect their own organisation to increase budget allocations, and expectations of larger budgets have nearly halved since last year. The 88.3% who think AI-driven predictive analytics will have the greatest impact were answering a multiple-choice question about “the industry”. When asked about their own function, only 8.4% expect AI to be used for risk assessment and forecasting.
There is also a slip on page 41 that should have been caught. An interviewee’s note querying their own quote (“I don’t think this was me?”) has been printed as part of that quote.
The same diagnosis, year after year
Put this report next to the BCI’s earlier work and a pattern appears. The 2019 Organizational Resilience report had 87 respondents and found that 76.9% felt their organisation was “adequately prepared to thrive” despite disruptive risks. Within a year, COVID had tested that. Silos, weak senior support, unproven return on investment and a shortage of leadership skills have come up in every report since. Each one describes a profession on the cusp of change, and each time the horizon moves a little further out. Last year it was 2030. This year it is “a decade”.
Why this matters
BCI figures travel. They turn up in sales pitches, business cases and board papers, usually without the sample size attached. Our discipline asks organisations to base decisions on evidence, to test assumptions and to validate recovery times before relying on them. We should expect the same of our professional body. That means stating the sample size up front, giving the number answering each question, publishing fieldwork dates and the questionnaire, and keeping what respondents hope for separate from what they actually report.
There is good material in the report, particularly in some of the practitioner interviews, and I have set out both the strengths and the problems in more detail in a white paper, The CRO that wasn’t. If you are being shown resilience survey figures in a proposal or a board paper, it also includes five questions worth asking before you rely on them.
