North East England Chapter Meeting Summary
On 2 September 2026, the North East England Chapter held a meeting. It was an engaging session with great contributions from our speakers, Martin Fenlon and Paula Toma, along with valuable conversations and networking during the breakout discussions.
Martin Fenlon: BC, OpRes and OrgRes
Martin talked us through the differences between Business Continuity, Operational Resilience and Organisational Resilience, including the new BCI Good Practice Guidelines mini-series for Operational Resilience.
A key point was that the guidance is designed to be industry agnostic. It is not intended to be a prescriptive “how to” guide but instead provides a framework to help organisations have the right conversations about what Operational Resilience means for them and how it could be implemented. This is particularly important as Operational Resilience is often associated with financial services, where there are specific regulatory requirements and guidance to follow, but the principles are relevant much more widely.
Martin described:
- Business Continuity as a reactive process, focused on maintaining prioritised products and services at a predetermined level during disruption.
- Operational Resilience as a proactive capability to anticipate, mitigate, respond to and recover from disruption to operational activities.
- Organisational Resilience as a strategic capability that enables organisations to adapt to change, opportunities and threats, so they can survive and develop in a changing environment.
This led to useful discussion about changing terminology, practical implementation and how organisations are evolving their resilience approaches. Many BC professionals are already moving towards Operational Resilience through a greater focus on anticipating disruption, understanding critical services and dependencies, and working more closely with risk and governance teams.
The group also challenged the idea that every service needs a standalone BCP, highlighting that the response should be proportionate to the service’s recovery requirements, including its RTO and the level of disruption that can be tolerated.
Organisational Resilience was seen as a helpful umbrella for aligning existing capabilities - such as strategic risk, change, planning, continuous improvement, BC and security - rather than necessarily creating a new function. Participants also discussed the challenge of sustaining Board and senior-leadership interest once a major disruption has passed. Keeping resilience relevant, visible and linked to organisational priorities remains essential.
A recurring theme was the practical challenge of delivering this work within small resilience teams, often while supporting complex organisations and managing a wide range of competing priorities.
Paula Toma: AI supporting BIA and BCP
Paula’s starting point was that AI can support even a small team serving a complex organisation by building self-service and automated tools. These tools replace the repetitive, administrative tasks of the Resilience Team, allowing them to spend more time interacting with the business.
She shared two tools built around that idea:
- A BIA interview chatbot that guides staff through completing their Business Impact Assessment. It asks the questions defined by the Resilience team, but it is able to coach them along the way, answering user questions, providing examples if prompted and ensuring the users have provided all of the expected information. The BIA entries are then sent to a database (Google spreadsheet) owned by the Resilience Team.
- A "BIA to Plan" assistant that takes completed BIA submissions and provides a structured output for the resilience plan (a list of all submitted activities, in order of priority, with dependencies and suggested workarounds for different scenarios), giving plan owners a solid starting point instead of a blank page for their resilience arrangements.
A few practical takeaways Paula shared, applicable to any AI tool:
- Use enterprise-approved tools only. Anything used for real business data should be a tool your organisation has vetted for data privacy. Check what happens to your data before you use it for real work.
- You don't need technical skills to build with AI. It can write its own prompts, produce the code, sanity-check its own work, and fix its own errors. Your job is to describe accurately what you want and show it examples of what "good" looks like - the AI handles the technical background.
- Build in a human checkpoint. For example, before the "BIA to Plan" assistant finalises the document, it stops and asks Paula to confirm anything it is not sure about (such as two spellings of what appears to be the same team, and other questions it may have), so nothing goes out that hasn't had a human sanity check.
- Human judgement is still the key ingredient. AI can produce a technically working solution, but it takes a person's perspective - user experience, professional expertise, real-world context - to judge whether it actually works well.
- Expect to iterate a lot. Neither tool worked well on the first try. Getting them right took repeated testing and refining.
- Treat AI output as a draft, not a final version. Always check it, always test it, whatever tool you're using.
The overall message: you don't need deep technical skill to get value from AI - just curiosity, a willingness to experiment, and good judgement about where a human needs to stay in control.
Thank you
The breakout sessions were a real strength of the event. It was great to hear members sharing what they are doing in their own organisations, discussing common challenges and asking each other practical questions.
Thank you again to Martin and Paula for sharing their experience, and to everyone who contributed to the discussions. It was a great reminder of the value of the BCI North East community as a space to learn, share, challenge ideas and support one another.
Events like this don’t happen without the effort of those behind the scenes, so a big thank you to the Committee and the BCI Events team for organising and supporting the session.
We’ll be starting to plan the next Chapter event soon, so keep an eye out in the Chapter LinkedIn group for updates. In the meantime, let’s keep the conversations going.
Please note that we are unable to share the individual speaker presentations. We hope the event summary and the overarching session materials are helpful.
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About the author
Jennifer Wilkinson
Director
Jenny is the Founder of Rule28 with over 10 years’ experience in financial services and the healthcare sector, working across the business continuity, operational resilience and emergency planning disciplines.
North East based with significant experience in the development and delivery of business continuity and operational resilience programmes. Experienced in operational resilience, Business Impact Assessments (BIA), business continuity strategy and planning (BCP), incident management, third party supplier resilience, resilience in change, training & exercising, and business continuity & resilience system implementation. Supporting organisations to effectively implement continuity and resilience programmes across the strategic, tactical and operational levels.
An MBCI member who is a certified ISO22301 Lead Auditor and Practitioner, with a MSc in Emergency Planning, Resilience and Response. Jenny has a breadth of experience in the analysis, planning, and validation of continuity and resilience activities, ensures the delivery of quality outputs to support the continuous improvement of resilience capabilities within any organisation.
