Methodology and Framework: How Aon’s Resilience Quotient Works

January 15, 2026 4 mins

Methodology and Framework: How Aon’s Resilience Quotient Works

Aon’s Resilience Quotient is a decision-support tool designed to help leaders assess how resilient their organizations, sectors and geographies are relative to the risks they face — and how that balance shapes their ability to invest, adapt and grow with clarity and confidence.

Defining Resilience

Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to mitigate shocks, adapt to change and transform when existing structures are no longer sufficient. This definition draws on established systems-thinking and OECD resilience frameworks and has been operationalized in collaboration with Gallup, reflecting their expertise in measuring human, institutional and societal dynamics.

These three complementary strategies underpin the model:

Mitigating: the ability to absorb disruption and continue operating
Adapting: the ability to adjust as conditions evolve
Transforming: the ability to redesign systems when incremental change is no longer enough

ARQ — Ready to Explore Further

Download the Aon's Resilience Quotient Report

Learn More

Scope and Scale of the Data

Aon’s Resilience Quotient is built from a large-scale, global analytical dataset comprising:

866,132 datapoints
5,570 entities, including countries, industries, occupations and their intersections
303 geographic units, spanning countries and regions
455 distinct indicators, many with historical time series extending back to 1948

This scale enables high-resolution analysis across sectors, geographies and workforce dimensions, supporting both cross-country comparison and more granular, context-specific insight.

Framing the Risk Environment

Aon’s Resilience Quotient structures risk around four global megatrends identified by Aon as shaping uncertainty and volatility: Trade, Technology, Weather and Workforce.

These megatrends describe how risk is transmitted through economies, organizations and markets. Where relevant, additional system pressures — including political stability, governance quality, regulatory effectiveness, security, rule of law and institutional trust — are incorporated to reflect real-world operating conditions.

Data Architecture

The Resilience Quotient integrates three complementary data streams:

Aon proprietary data, capturing operational risk exposure, risk-management maturity and sector-specific dynamics
Gallup data, measuring workforce and population-level sentiment such as engagement, confidence, trust and perceived stability. This sentiment layer recognizes that volatility is transmitted not only through systems and markets, but through people’s expectations and behavior — which increasingly influence economic and organizational outcomes
Third-party datasets, providing structural context on climate exposure, economic conditions, governance, conflict and technological capacity, including sources such as the World Bank, IMF and OECD

Together, these inputs allow the model to reflect both objective conditions and perceived reality and to capture where sentiment amplifies or dampens structural risk.

Indicator Design and Organization

Every indicator included in Aon’s Resilience Quotient is:

Mapped to one of the four megatrends
Classified as either a risk or resilience indicator
Linked to one of the three resilience capacities (mitigating, adapting, transforming)
Aligned to a core resilience principle such as redundancy, diversity, or adaptability

This structure ensures transparency and traceability from headline results to underlying drivers.

Harmonizations and Comparability

Given the diversity of sources, units and timeframes, all indicators undergo a rigorous harmonization process. Data is temporally aligned to consistent frequencies, spatially aligned to enable cross-country and cross-sector comparison and normalized against appropriate exposure measures such as population or GDP. All indicators are then converted to a common scale, enabling fair comparison and clear interpretation over time.

Scoring, Validation and Index Construction

Indicators are organized into three analytical layers — risk, resilience and performance. Within each megatrend, indicators are combined using equal weighting by default, with dimensionality-reduction techniques applied to identify underlying constructs and minimize redundancy.

Separate Risk and Resilience scores are produced and aggregated into a Risk Index and a Resilience Index. These are validated through expert review, sensitivity testing, temporal stability analysis and correlation with real-world outcomes such as disruption severity and recovery speed.

Calculating the Resilience Quotient

Aon’s Resilience Quotient is calculated as: Resilience Index ÷ Risk Index

Values above one indicate that resilience outweighs risk; values around one suggest a finely balanced system; values below one indicate that risk may be rising faster than resilience. Aon’s Resilience Quotient is best interpreted as a pressure gauge – not a ranking — highlighting trade-offs and decision-relevant dynamics rather than prescribing outcomes.

Interpreting Results in Practice

Differences in scores reflect distinct resilience pathways, not judgments of strength or weakness. A higher score may reflect stronger adaptive capacity offsetting greater volatility, while a similar score elsewhere may reflect lower volatility supported by stronger institutional or absorptive resilience. The purpose is to clarify how resilience is achieved — and where it can be strengthened — rather than to identify a single optimal profile.