We make companies more resilient.
Critical Thinking. Logical Planning.
Helping you beat the averages is what motivates us. Our clients understand that risk is part and parcel of doing business. But in today’s changing world, there has never been a more urgent need for coherent, whole business resilience.
Risk and Resilience is a leader in delivering practical resilience solutions for complex and challenging client requirements. Every day we help organisations develop the competencies, skills and knowledge they need to react and respond to unexpected events.
We specialise in risk, crisis and continuity training, exercises and advisory support.
Mission Critical Thinking
We believe risk and operational resilience are business-wide issues that require executive board attention. Our collective experience and tailored consultation strategies protect organisations, large and small, against damage to assets, lost revenue and tarnished reputation. We help our clients determine what is mission critical to their company, where they are most vulnerable and help them to develop actionable, practical plans.
Who We Are
Planning for and managing disruption is in our DNA. All our client facing staff have at least a decade of practical experience and provide a wide variety of clients with outstanding results. We offer the support of best in class expertise to deliver our support in partnership with our clients. We will take the time to understand your organisation, what makes you tick and what you want to achieve, and design a bespoke approach and that works for you.
Alan Elwood
Alan is a highly experienced, award winning resilience professional with particular expertise in Crisis and Business Continuity Management. He is a seasoned practitioner and has worked with a range of organisations from blue chip multinationals to SME family owned businesses. Alan has advised clients in the aviation, aerospace, manufacturing, charity, food, public, construction, media, utilities, energy and banking sectors. He has guided multiple organisations to BS 25999 and ISO 22301 accreditation, including one of the first companies in Ireland to achieve ISO 22301. Alan holds an MSc in Management from Cranfield University and is a member of the Emergency Planning Society, the Business Continuity Institute and the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management.
Rupert Johnston
Rupert draws on 25 years practical experience in risk, crisis and continuity planning and operations. He advises Boards and their supporting teams on risk and resilience, including planning, mitigation, response and recovery and underpins this with the design and delivery of training and exercises. Rupert has supported manufacturers, retailers, technology companies, universities, ports, airports, healthcare bodies, arenas, councils and government departments, professional service firms, financial institutions, food manufacturers, utilities and energy companies, routinely achieving highly positive outcomes. Rupert holds an MSc in Management from Cranfield University and is a member of the Emergency Planning Society and the Institute of Risk Management.
Louise Elstow
Louise is an emergency management consultant with a variety of public and private sector experience. Her work includes London local authority standardisation work, multi-agency exercise design and delivery, developing the nationally adopted Rail Incident Care Team deployment manual, assisting Kensington and Chelsea to re-write their emergency response plan after Grenfell, and developing and implementing a business continuity programme across a major private healthcare organisation. She currently holds the post of Deputy Chair of the Emergency Planning Society’s CBRN Professional Working Group, holds an MSc in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management and is currently undertaking research towards her PhD in Science and Technology Studies. Previously she worked in the nuclear sector, for local government and has voluntary sector experience. Louise has international experience, having undertaken research and collaborated on projects in Germany, Sweden, North America, East Africa and Japan. With an eye for detail, her strengths lie in bringing together disparate groups and ideas into a cohesive concepts and tightening up documentation.
Philip Baxter
An experienced practitioner, Philip has a wealth of experience in crisis operations and contingency planning. This experience was gained over a thirty year career in resilience and consulting roles having held emergency planning and continuity responsibilities for large, complex organisations in the UK, USA, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Philip has advised companies in the energy, manufacturing, food, ports, retail, entertainment, health, aviation, travel and construction sectors. He helps clients build fit for purpose resilience plans and has advised and supported risk, crisis and continuity planning, embedding their capabilities into their thinking and actions. Philip holds and MSc from the United States Strategic Studies Institute.
Nichola Ashcroft
Nichola brings a wealth of unparalleled experience, operational knowledge and prime contacts to our team. She has worked managing terminals at Birmingham, as an ATCO for National Air Traffic Services and on airport operations as well as running the largest ATC operational training section in Europe. In her long career she has been responsible for incident management preparedness and led responses to real incident events from operational unit evacuations to air traffic incidents and creation and management of full contingency operations. She has also designed, delivered and reported on incident management training and exercises that have supported capability development at all levels and across all grades of teams. Most recently as a member of our team she supports clients, from sectors as diverse as aviation to finance, with incident and crisis capability enhancement programmes.
Keith Chamberlain
Keith has over 30 years of operational experience, built across the public and private sectors, as a practitioner and in providing advisory, training and exercise support relating to Organisational Resilience. This covers incident, cyber and crisis response, continuity and recovery. He is a confident and experienced advisor and facilitator who consistently delivers valuable learning outcomes to a range of clients including government departments, health boards, emergency responders, universities and sectors such as finance, aviation, oil and gas, public utilities and recreation and retail. Keith, who has also worked at UK national level providing exercise support, has delivered a number of complex resilience capability improvement programmes and has worked across Europe and the Middle East.
Malcolm McFarland
Malcolm is a highly competent strategic leader with 30 years of exceptional practical experience in emergency planning and organisational resilience environments in the UK’s emergency services. This includes planning for and responding to natural hazards, accidents and terrorism threats. Throughout his career he has participated at Bronze, Silver and Gold levels and has lead a Local Resilience Forum. He equips the clients he supports with best practice techniques and tools by drawing on his experience working in the UK and Ireland as well as the USA, Africa, the Caucasus, Asia and the Middle East. Malcolm has a BA (Hons) in Public Policy & Management, a Certificate in Emergency Planning and Civil Preparedness and is trained in Chemical, Biological, Radioactive and Nuclear Incident management.
Sarah Elwood
As our Business Support Manager, Sarah keeps the show on the road and supports all areas of R2 operations, communications and finance. Sarah is an experienced communicator and administrator having worked in both the Public and Private Sectors. Her experience includes finance and policy administration; she was previously Diary Secretary to a Northern Ireland Executive Minister. Sarah also holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Degree from Queen’s University, Belfast.