Building Resilience — Calderwood Logistics' Evidence-Based Portfolio

A four-round, advanced organisational-resilience simulation set inside Calderwood Logistics plc, a mid-cap UK third-party logistics group (GBP 620M revenue, 6% margin, 4,300 staff, 8 distribution centres). A 48-hour outage of the core warehouse-management system — a failed supplier update with no tested fallback — has just cost GBP 1.1 million, put a GBP 48M healthcare contract under review, and convinced the board that a decade of relentless cost optimisation has made Calderwood one of the leanest and most brittle operators in its sector. You lead the strategic-change team chartered to make the organisation genuinely resilient, on evidence rather than consultancy fashion, within a hard GBP 6 million two-year budget against a GBP 14M wish-list and a 120-day board deadline. Grounded in David Denyer's Cranfield/BSI framework, the simulation runs the dual spine of organisational resilience and evidence-based management across four rounds: (1) diagnose vulnerabilities across six domains — operational, financial, supply chain, people, cyber, culture — and distinguish the two-to-three could-kill-us existential threats (the untested WMS single point of failure foremost) from the merely costly; (2) rate the evidence behind each proposed intervention as strong, moderate or weak/vendor-driven, and refuse to fund a fashionable AI 'resilience platform' backed by a single case study; (3) build the funded portfolio within GBP 6M, balancing defensive resilience (redundancy, tested failover, continuity, insurance) against progressive resilience (sensing, adaptive capacity, learning loops, culture change) — every pound spent defensively cannot be spent progressively; and (4) commit and defend the plan to the board chair, answering the central challenge 'how is this different from the risk management we have always funded, and will it actually stop the next failure?'. The math rewards the concept-correct play — existential gaps fixed first, evidence-led funding, a genuine defensive/progressive balance, and a cultural intervention that sustains the capability — and measurably punishes the six classic errors: funding without evidence, an all-defence or all-progression portfolio, treating resilience as a one-off project, diagnosing everything as equally urgent, and ignoring the cultural root cause. Final KPIs track Resilience Score, Existential Coverage, Adaptive Capacity and Budget committed against the GBP 6M cap.