From Awareness to Action: Contracting Resilience Is Key to Performance

Yet resilience is often talked about at a high level - personal, cultural, managerial. This overlooks fundamental business risks, such as the need to anchor it in the hard mechanics of how organisations create, execute, and govern their commercial relationships. This is where the 2025 Benchmark Report from the Commerce & Contract Management Institute (CCM Institute) adds essential evidence and urgency: contracting excellence itself is a core driver of organisational resilience. 

The Resilience Gap in Contracting

The 2025 CCM Benchmark Report shows that while 88% of executives recognise the importance of commercial and contract management (CCM) to performance, this recognition rarely translates into consistent capability or governance. In fact, 70–80% of organisations of those surveyed lack clear accountability for contracting outcomes, leading to confusion, friction, and systemic delays that undermine resilience.

This goes beyond issues of efficiency; it’s a structural vulnerability. In an environment where 87% of organisations say uncertainty is the new normal, the absence of process ownership, clarity of roles, and adaptive capability exposes organisations to risk accumulation rather than risk absorption.

Why This Matters

The Strategy+Business article argues that resilience is a skill that can be developed, and that organisations must look beyond technical competencies to cultivate adaptability. The CCM Benchmark Report complements this by showing that resilience is not simply psychological or cultural, it’s operational - embedded in contracting processes, governance, data, and decision flows.

For example:

• Governance clarity - who owns the contract outcomes? Without accountability, even the best technology and skilled practitioners can’t prevent fragmentation and value leakage.
• Adaptive processes - rigid, transactional contracting workflows do not equip organisations to respond to shocks mid-performance. 
• Strategic integration - whereas leading organisations align commercial strategy with risk and opportunity management, many treat contracting as a tactical, back-office function. 

A Call to Action

Resilience as a concept is valuable, but resilience as a capability must be engineered. This means:

1. Clarifying accountability for contracting performance within organisational governance.
2. Embedding structured, adaptive processes that can respond to unknowns during execution.
3. Investing in skills and leadership that bridge transactional know-how with strategic risk thinking.

The Benchmark Report underscores that organisations achieving these fundamentals of governance, accountability and process discipline are far better positioned to manage risk and turn uncertainty into opportunity. 

Resilience isn’t just a mindset. In contracting, it is measured in critical outcomes such as fewer unplanned surprises, faster effective decision cycles, stronger relationships and greater performance consistency during and after shocks.