Nature's Blueprint: A 3,000-Mile Butterfly Trek On Building Resilience

Forbes

07-07-2025

It takes up to four generations for monarch butterflies to complete a migration pattern south for the season, one mired by threats including habitat loss. Trekking thousands of miles, 3,000 to be precise, they congregate together along the way, building the foundation for the future as they breed and lay eggs of a new generation. Sensing that their existing strengths may not be enough to overcome these stress factors, they adapt to the factors around them, taking calculated risks and approaching the journey as a collective rather than alone, ensuring their future and livelihood.
Business leaders can learn a lesson from these small, barely four-inch, creatures in the versatile ways they've responded to volatile environmental factors, from weather and predators to everything nature throws at them. Interestingly, monarchs nourish themselves with milkweed, which is toxic to most animals – a symbol of the versatile ways they've responded to their environment. For c-suite executives, this adaptability and resilience is more than just a virtue. It's a business imperative that must be built into a company's DNA.
Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles south as a collective, a sign of how they use ... More disruption to build resilience. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
In just five years, CEOs, the c-suite, their employees and most people have experienced waves of systems shock that have moved volatility from a passing phase to the new norm. To better understand how companies are responding to these disruptions, Accenture has published the Resilience Index, the third since 2023. Our proprietary analysis of more than 1,600 of the world's largest companies reflects a business's percentile position within its industry peer set and across critical technology, commercial, operational and people dimensions.
Here's what we know: Resilience on an absolute basis has rebounded to post-pandemic highs. However, when we unpack what that means, we find its foundation is starting to show cracks.
The gap between strong and weak organizations has expanded by 17 percentage points. Companies are selectively investing in some areas while neglecting others (e.g. technology resilience has increased by 3% but people resilience has been cut by 7%), and time and time again, we're seeing leaders hold on to yesterday's playbook despite AI's transformative impact.
In short, resilience may be holding steady, but it is more fractured, misaligned and stagnant than ever before.
In fact, less than 15% of companies are consistently achieving long-term profitable growth. What sets this group of high performers apart? They don't simply view disruption as something to endure. Rather, they see it as an opportunity to establish their competitive edge. This mindset enables them to raise revenues 6 percentage points faster with profit margins that are 8 percentage points higher than their peers.
And at a time when agentic AI, AI-workforce integration and operational optionality have entered the corporate vocabulary – terms barely on the radar until recently – resilience is certainly in need of being redefined. Otherwise, companies will risk getting left behind.
As disruption expands and the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment brings more change, we often see companies retreating. Yet, high-performing companies thrive on change. They're not simply bracing for impact; they view it as a launching pad for sustained growth. For monarch butterflies, for example, pursuing migration is effectively agreeing to constant disruption and a sustained, adaptable response – whether depending on the sun or their internal clocks as they head to overwintering sites.
For companies, resilience is no longer about responding to a crisis when it happens or just being prepared for risk. It's about making an organization flexible and able to change so that when change does happen, the company can react effectively.
Take, for example, the initial response to proposed changes in trade. Automotive companies that have a small supply chain were much more likely to be hit by shocks. Life sciences companies with a larger supply chain, on the other hand, could adjust their supply chain more quickly. It speaks to the benefit of having built in that resilience across the enterprise that can make it possible to adapt when necessary.
Without that strategic investment in your company, it's much harder to handle change in the future. Our data shows organizations that make these investments early do better than those lagging behind. Leaders looking to fortify their companies' enterprise resilience must first redefine resilience as being balanced across the four key pillars of technology, commercial, people and operations. Here's what that looks like:
Fortified with steel, the butterfly embodies the importance of strengthening not just to withstand ... More disruption but to build resilience from it.
As part of our research, we undertook a series of simulations to calculate how a company's position on the Accenture Resilience Index would relate to its response to systemic shocks. The benefit is clear: 60% of companies in the top quartile of the Resilience Index would see a positive return on profits, versus just 21% of the bottom quartile (almost 3x as much).
By embracing what we call 'adaptive resilience,' these leaders can anticipate potential shocks, rather than simply respond to them, and achieve long-term profitable growth in the process. In the time of 'no regret' moves, they are pursuing scenario planning with multiple situations in mind and constantly reevaluating their strategies to determine whether they are meeting the moment for today's crisis. Take for example, a multinational European technology company that created a risk management system that alerts decision-makers to disruptions before they escalate. This key move was shown to lead directly to a 30% increase in their supply chain efficiency.
With their milkweed diet being a core tenet to how monarchs protect themselves from predators, other butterfly species have evolved to resemble monarchs' coloring as a way to gain protection. These viceroy butterflies, in adopting a sense of mimicry, prove what we know about responding to today's disruption. While critical, absolute strength alone will not equip you for the future; it's about looking around the corner and toward what's in front of you to build resilience that is well-rounded, versatile and adaptable. It's the leaders that will prioritize these capabilities, in the face of external volatility or other stress factors, that will lend themselves to long-term growth.