Waleed Aldakheel: Shaping the Future of Resilience Leadership in the GCC

As the famous Jimmy Dean quote reminds us, “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”

Resilience is the key to keep going, both in personal and professional lives. Handling a crisis in business is the ultimate test of leading an entrepreneurial life.

There are guiding angels like Waleed Aldakheel, Founder and CEO of Continuity Consultancy firm. His professional prowess spans more than three decades, encompassing aspects like IT service management, risk assessment, business continuity, and crisis leadership.

Coming from a technical school and IT operations background, he grew acutely aware of how profoundly modern life and organizational performance rely on technology. That awareness naturally led him to confront a critical concern: what happens when technology fails, whether partially or completely?

Through first-hand involvement in emergencies and crises, he learned that rapid judgment and strategic decision-making are essential to restoring operations, enabling organizations to respond decisively and sustain continuity under pressure.

Execution-Driven Leadership

Waleed’s early career managing large-scale technology projects at SAMBA gave him end-to-end exposure to complex project lifecycles from concept and design through execution, testing, and delivery, laying the groundwork for his long-term leadership philosophy.

This hands-on experience fostered a strong systems-thinking mindset, enabling him to understand how technology works. In later continuity and resilience roles, this perspective helped him anticipate cascading impacts, identify single points of failure, and design more integrated resilience strategies. These included:

• Managing complex initiatives also instilled a disciplined, structured approach centered on clear scope definition, stakeholder alignment, progress tracking, and proactive risk identification. These fundamentals translated naturally into crisis and continuity leadership, where clarity and structure are critical under uncertainty.
• Early exposure to cross-functional collaboration proved equally formative. Working with IT teams, business leaders, vendors, and executives shaped him into a connector who aligns diverse stakeholders and builds consensus, an essential capability for enterprise-wide resilience programs.
• Vendor and partner management sharpened his judgment around accountability, service quality, and contractual clarity. This experience later informed his ability to assess third-party risk, negotiate service-level expectations, and ensure external partners meet continuity requirements.
• Navigating tight deadlines, shifting scopes, and technical challenges taught him how to lead under pressure. Staying composed and decisive in complex project environments became a direct foundation for effective crisis and emergency management.
• Most importantly, delivering measurable outcomes early in his career helped Waleed build credibility through execution. This results-driven mindset continues to define his leadership style, ensuring resilience and continuity programs move beyond design to successful, organization-wide implementation.

Leveraging Experience

At NCB, he gained critical insights from managing the large-scale integration of treasury and finance systems across both conventional and Islamic banking, where alignment across dual banking models proved essential. The insights he gained were:

• He learned that early coordination between Shariah governance, finance, operations, and IT was a decisive success factor, ensuring that shared infrastructure accurately reflected distinct structural and compliance requirements.

• The transformation reinforced a core principle: business ownership must drive technology. Progress accelerated when treasury, finance, and risk leaders actively shaped process design, data definitions, and controls rather than deferring to technical teams.
• End-to-end process clarity emerged as another key lesson. Tracing transaction flows from front office to general ledger helped surface hidden dependencies, reconciliation gaps, and integration risks before they became systemic issues.

Waleed adds, “End-to-end process clarity prevents downstream failures.”

• Strong vendor governance was non-negotiable. Clear expectations, escalation paths, and quality controls across multiple platforms and partners were critical to maintaining consistency and momentum.
• Data quality proved to be the backbone of transformation. Early investment in data cleansing, mapping, and governance delivered long-term stability and reliable reporting across both banking models.
• Finally, his resilience background underscored the importance of embedding operational resilience into system design from the outset, ensuring continuity, monitoring, and recovery capabilities were integral to the transformation rather than retrofitted later.

Operational Cohesion

Then at Saudi Hollandi Bank, Waleed ensured cohesion across IT services, PMO, change management, procurement, and incident response by aligning structure, culture, and communication around a shared objective: delivering stable, secure, and compliant banking operations. He approached these mission-critical functions as a single ecosystem, where each team clearly understood its role in service reliability, operational resilience, and customer impact.

He asserts, “True cohesion comes from creating an ecosystem where every function understands its role in delivering stable, secure, and compliant banking operations.”

A unified governance framework formed the backbone of this cohesion. Clear policies, defined decision-making structures, standardized reporting, aligned KPIs, shared risk and control requirements, and common approval workflows ensured consistency across all domains. This was reinforced by a strong “service-first” mindset, helping teams move beyond functional silos and evaluate decisions based on business impact rather than departmental priorities.

Integrated planning and cross-functional forums played a central role in maintaining alignment. Regular collaboration across IT operations, PMO, procurement, and change management created transparency around project timelines, release cycles, vendor performance, incident trends, and resource constraints. Shared tools and centralized dashboards further strengthened coordination by consolidating project tracking, change approvals, procurement pipelines, and incident reporting into a single operational view.

Risk and continuity principles were embedded across every function, creating a common risk lens. Procurement assessed vendor resilience, the PMO incorporated business impact and risk assessments, change management aligned with operational resilience standards, and IT services worked in close coordination with incident response teams to protect critical services. Alongside these structural elements, Waleed emphasized communication and cultural alignment through transparency from leadership, shared objectives, cross-training opportunities, and an environment where teams escalated early and collaborated naturally.

Clear ownership and accountability were equally essential. Each function was led by empowered leaders who understood how their decisions affected upstream and downstream activities across the organization. Finally, a continuous improvement loop drawing on post-incident reviews, change retrospectives, vendor evaluations, and project lessons learned ensured that all functions evolved together, reinforcing maturity and long-term operational cohesion.

Headship Principles

At Riyadh Bank, Waleed led an ambitious resilience effort that included developing more than 137 business and IT recovery plans and delivering a fully operational HOT disaster recovery data center. Achieving this level of organizational preparedness required a leadership style grounded in strategic vision, execution discipline, and influence across the enterprise.

He approached resilience with strong systems thinking, viewing business processes, IT infrastructure, and risk dependencies as a single operational ecosystem. This enabled him to translate enterprise risk into a clear, long-term recovery strategy and prioritize initiatives based on impact and business value. Success also depended on deep cross-functional collaboration, as coordinating recovery planning across numerous business units and technology teams required alignment at both executive and operational levels.

He combined technical and operational expertise with rigorous program leadership, ensuring consistent governance, quality assurance, and documentation across all recovery plans. He demonstrated decisive leadership under uncertainty, balancing data-driven decisions with the realities of incomplete information inherent in disaster scenarios. Just as critical was his ability to drive change, building stakeholder understanding, overcoming resistance, and embedding a culture of preparedness. Clear communication, regulatory discipline, and repeated testing through simulations and exercises reinforced confidence that the organization could respond effectively when disruptions occurred.

Deployments

Waleed served as Business Continuity Services Manager at Al Rajhi Bank, where he founded the Business Continuity Services Department. He developed BCM policies, procedures, and frameworks; conducted technical and business impact analyses; defined enterprise recovery strategies; and delivered comprehensive business and IT recovery plans, including the bank’s crisis management framework. His tenure also included managing the implementation of BCM tools, establishing a 500-seat business recovery site and an IT disaster recovery center with PPRS, executing all testing programs, ensuring regulatory compliance, managing departmental budgets, and coordinating closely with third-party vendors.

Maturity

As a Head of Business Continuity and Crisis Management at Saudi Fransi Bank, Waleed leads an enterprise-wide operational resilience, business continuity, disaster recovery, and crisis management programs aligned with ISO 22301, the SAMA BCM Framework, and National Risk Council requirements. His work has focused on strengthening organizational resilience by embedding best practices that safeguard service availability, regulatory compliance, and operational stability.

In this role, Waleed has driven comprehensive business impact analyses, risk and gap assessments, and the institutionalization of standardized resilience, BCM, and disaster recovery frameworks. He established strong governance and control structures, implemented organization-wide awareness and training programs, and served as the central point of engagement for audit, compliance, and regulatory bodies. His leadership includes the design and management of a Tier III–certified IT disaster recovery center and the development of a business recovery site supporting 270 concurrent workstations. He also led the implementation of the bank’s crisis command center and crisis management plan, elevated organizational standards to meet SAMA maturity requirements, and prepared the institution for enterprise operational resilience in line with National Risk Council expectations. In parallel, he has overseen all resilience testing and contributed at the highest levels as a member of senior management, internal control, and SAMA BCM committees.

Seismic Shifts

Having worked with several of the region’s most prominent banks, he has observed a clear evolution in how the GCC financial sector approaches business continuity, disaster recovery, and operational resilience. Over the past decade, resilience has shifted from being largely compliance-driven, focused on meeting regulatory checklists, to becoming a strategic priority actively sponsored by boards and executive committees to protect reputation, customer trust, and long-term competitiveness.

He has seen resilience expand from an IT-centric responsibility to an enterprise-wide discipline. Risk, operations, cybersecurity, HR, facilities, and business units now share accountability, reflecting a deeper understanding that operational resilience depends on the integration of people, processes, technology, and third-party dependencies. This shift has been reinforced by significantly stronger regulatory expectations, particularly from central banks in Saudi Arabia and across the GCC, with frameworks increasingly aligned to international standards such as ISO 22301 and broader operational and cyber resilience guidance.

He adds, “This raised the bar for scenario testing, impact analysis, third-party risk management, and crisis management maturity.”

Another major change has been the sector’s investment in real-time monitoring and automation. Banks now expect continuous visibility through automated failover, disaster recovery orchestration, real-time service monitoring, cyber threat intelligence, and predictive risk analytics, marking a move away from periodic testing toward continuous readiness. At the same time, resilience scenarios have expanded well beyond traditional physical incidents and system outages to include ransomware, cloud service failures, geopolitical disruptions, supply-chain risks, and regional infrastructure dependencies.

Testing practices have also become far more rigorous and realistic. Cross-functional crisis simulations, unannounced failovers, and end-to-end service resilience exercises often involving regulators and third parties are now standard. Underpinning all of this is a cultural shift, where resilience is increasingly viewed as a shared organizational mindset. Through awareness programs, targeted training, and improved crisis communication, employees at all levels better understand their role in maintaining continuity across both physical and digital banking services.

Trusted Alignment

In navigating business continuity discussions involving senior stakeholders, regulators, and audit committees, Waleed builds trust by anchoring conversations in transparency, evidence, and a shared understanding of risk, disruption, and organizational vulnerability.

He asserts, “My goal is to align everyone around a shared resilience vision—grounded in facts, collaboration, and pragmatic decision-making.”

Furthermore, he shares aspects that he aligns seamlessly. Those are:

• Technical risks are consistently translated into business language, focusing on financial impact, customer outcomes, regulatory exposure, and reputational risk, positioning resilience investments as business enablers rather than compliance costs.

• Scenario-based narratives play a key role in alignment, grounding abstract risks in realistic situations such as payment system outages, data center failovers, or cyber incidents that resonate with executive decision-makers.
• Early and proactive engagement with regulators and audit teams helps align expectations, with clear roadmaps, risk acceptance thresholds, and open solicitation of feedback before issues escalate.
• Cross-functional coalitions further strengthen alignment, bringing together business, IT, cybersecurity, operations, and compliance leaders to co-own resilience decisions through structured forums and workshops.
• Consistent, predictable communication through regular updates, testing outcomes, readiness metrics, and remediation progress reinforces confidence and avoids surprises.
• Waleed maintains a calm, balanced tone, presenting realistic options and trade-offs between cost, risk, and regulatory expectations rather than adopting an alarmist stance.
• Trust is ultimately reinforced through execution, demonstrated by successful disaster recovery tests, effective continuity exercises, and sustained improvement in system resilience.
• By positioning himself as a strategic advisor who brings solutions alongside risks, he enables leaders to make informed, defensible decisions that strengthen continuity, customer trust, and regulatory confidence.

Experience Inherits Sanity

Having played a central role in establishing enterprise-wide BCM, DR, and crisis management frameworks across major banks, he draws a clear distinction between merely compliant programs and those that are truly mature. In his view, compliance focuses on meeting regulatory requirements through documentation, while maturity is defined by real operational capability, integration, and continuous validation embedded into day-to-day operations.

A mature continuity program moves beyond policies, plans, and annual reviews to deliver proven readiness through tested end-to-end failover, validated recovery objectives, real-time situational awareness, and teams trained to respond effectively under pressure. Unlike compliance-driven efforts that exist in silos, mature programs operate as an integrated ecosystem, aligning BCM, disaster recovery, cyber incident response, crisis management, third-party risk, and operational risk into a single resilience discipline.

Waleed also emphasizes that maturity is reflected in how resilience supports business strategy. Rather than being treated as a regulatory obligation or cost center, continuity is aligned with digital transformation, cloud adoption, and customer experience goals, positioning resilience as a competitive advantage. Testing practices further distinguish maturity, with realistic, sometimes unannounced exercises, full workload failovers, and scenario testing that spans cyber, operational, and physical disruptions.

Ultimately, mature programs shift the focus from institutional survival to customer trust and service continuity. They anticipate risk through forward-looking analysis, identify emerging vulnerabilities early, and build mitigation strategies before disruptions occur, demonstrating resilience as an active, strategic capability rather than a reactive response to audits.

Systemic Resilience Insights

Through his involvement in national resilience initiatives, including support for the UAE NCEMA standards and the Saudi National Risk Council Framework, he gained a broader perspective on how organizational resilience connects to national preparedness.

• Operating at both levels reinforced that resilience is a system-wide capability, not a siloed function. While organizations can optimize BCM, DR, and crisis management internally, national frameworks reveal how failures in telecom, cloud services, payments, or emergency response can quickly cascade across sectors.
• He observed that effective policy must balance rigor with practical adoption. Strong national standards establish a clear baseline while allowing flexibility for sector-specific needs and organizational maturity, providing direction rather than rigid checklists.
• A key insight was that leadership maturity matters more than documentation. National resilience depends less on the framework itself and more on whether institutional leaders treat resilience as a strategic asset rather than a compliance obligation.
• Real-world crises highlighted that behavior is shaped by culture before procedure. Communication styles, empowerment, and escalation norms often determine outcomes more than written plans, making cultural alignment essential for resilience frameworks to work in practice.
• His experience also underscored the importance of public–private collaboration. National resilience is sustained when banks, telecoms, energy providers, and government entities operate as partners through shared exercises, common language, and transparent information flow.
• Working at the national level forced a longer-term view of risk, shifting focus toward systemic threats, geopolitical change, climate scenarios, and cyber-physical convergence, strengthening foresight over reactive planning.
• Finally, Waleed recognized that standards alone do not create resilience. Capability building through training, certification, and professional development and aligning organizational continuity strategies with national priorities ultimately determines societal readiness and crisis interoperability.

Resilience Evolution

As Chairman of DRI GCC and a certified instructor and auditor, he envisions the region moving decisively from resilience as a compliance exercise to resilience as a performance expectation aligned with global best practice. Regional standards are expected to mature through stronger alignment with international frameworks such as ISO 22301, while being adapted to local regulatory, cultural, and risk contexts. Programs will increasingly be assessed on effectiveness and outcomes, not documentation alone. Here is how he described it further:

• Professional competencies will become more specialized and multidimensional, reflecting the convergence of business continuity, cyber resilience, crisis management, third-party risk, and enterprise resilience. This evolution will raise the baseline for senior resilience roles and create clearer career pathways.
• Awareness across the GCC is shifting from tactical preparedness to strategic risk leadership. Boards, executives, regulators, and audit functions are increasingly treating BCM and DR as core elements of enterprise risk strategy rather than supporting functions.
• Regional forums, conferences, and institutional engagement are accelerating this shift by elevating discussions around emerging risks, AI, smart technologies, and proactive resilience planning.
• Waleed also anticipates the emergence of stronger regional resilience ecosystems, with deeper public-private collaboration across critical sectors such as finance, energy, healthcare, and digital infrastructure.
• This convergence will drive shared exercises, harmonized standards tailored to GCC risk profiles, and closer alignment with national resilience and risk council requirements.
• Finally, education and certification will continue to evolve toward strategic value, emphasizing leadership, governance, risk foresight, and measurable resilience outcomes, reinforcing resilience as a core organizational capability rather than a compliance checkbox.

Readiness Gaps

Based on extensive experience conducting BIAs, GAP assessments, and crisis management planning, Waleed consistently observes that organizations struggle less with the absence of frameworks and more with misplaced confidence in their readiness. Resilience is often treated as a compliance requirement rather than an operational capability, allowing critical gaps to remain hidden until real disruption occurs.

He adds, “Leaders can address these issues by deliberately shifting focus from documentation to decision-making, testing, and accountability.”

• Documentation mistaken for preparedness – Move beyond plan completion metrics toward operational readiness, realistic exercises, and active leadership participation.
• Static BIAs that quickly become outdated – Treat the BIA as a living management tool tied to business change, technology evolution, and executive validation.
• Unrealistic RTOs and RPOs – Enforce clear cost–risk–recoverability trade-offs and require formal risk acceptance when targets are not achievable.
• Assuming IT recovery equals business recovery – Focus on end-to-end critical services, including people, data integrity, manual workarounds, and third-party dependencies.
• Overreliance on crisis manuals – Design crisis frameworks around decision authority, escalation triggers, and leadership behavior, reinforced through simulations.
• Underestimating third-party and concentration risk – Embed resilience into vendor governance and include key suppliers in testing and exercises.
• Ownership without authority – Assign accountability to senior leaders with real decision rights, resources, and performance objectives linked to resilience outcomes.

Human-Centered Resilience

Having led the implementation of large recovery sites supporting up to 400 employees he approaches crisis planning by balancing technical robustness with human-centered considerations. He recognizes that while technology enables recovery, people sustain it under pressure, making usability, endurance, and decision support critical in high-stress environments.

• Design for people before systems – Prioritize ergonomics, lighting, air quality, rest areas, and basic welfare needs so teams can operate effectively for extended periods.
• Simplify technology for crisis use – Reduce tool complexity, pre-configure access, and rely on a single source of truth to limit cognitive overload.
• Prioritize role clarity over procedural detail – Clearly define decision authority, escalation paths, and deputies to maintain momentum if key individuals are unavailable.
• Plan for endurance, not just activation – Build staffing rotations, structured handovers, and redundancy to prevent fatigue and single-point dependency.
• Train for behavior under stress – Use realistic simulations to test leadership judgment, communication, and coordination, not only technical recovery steps.
• Embed well-being into crisis operations – Foster a speak-up culture, structured briefings and debriefings, and calm leadership to protect psychological safety and decision quality.

Contextual Guidance

As Founder and CEO of Continuity Consultancy, Waleed approaches advising organizations with a strong appreciation for where they are in their resilience journey. He understands that organizations just beginning their BCM or DR efforts often need reassurance and clarity, while those with established frameworks need to be thoughtfully challenged. While the underlying principles remain consistent, practicality, realism, and clear leadership ownership set the tone, pace, and focus change based on the organization’s maturity.

For organizations at the start of their business continuity or disaster recovery journey, Waleed focuses on building confidence before complexity. He helps leaders make sense of BCM and DR by translating standards and regulatory expectations into straightforward business language that connects directly to protecting customers and critical services. Rather than overwhelming teams with exhaustive frameworks, he encourages prioritization, focusing first on the risks and services that truly matter. Governance and accountability are established early, recovery objectives are set realistically, and early, practical actions are used to build trust and momentum. The aim is simple: move the organization from awareness to a credible, workable level of readiness.

For organizations with long-standing frameworks in place, he shifts the conversation. Here, the work is less about structure and more about how the organization actually performs under pressure. He challenges assumptions that may have gone unquestioned for years, tests whether recovery strategies still reflect today’s operating reality, and looks beyond documentation to how decisions are made in real situations. By integrating siloed resilience functions and introducing more realistic, demanding simulations, he helps leadership see where true strengths and weaknesses lie. Accountability is elevated to the executive level, with clear ownership of risk and outcomes.

He asserts, “The Objective is to move the organization from compliance and structure to adaptive, demonstrable resilience.”

The Future

Looking ahead, he believes the future of business continuity, disaster recovery, and crisis management in the GCC will be shaped less by individual threats and more by how risk itself is changing. As the region becomes more digital, interconnected, and strategically important, disruptions are likely to be broader, faster-moving, and more interconnected than in the past. In this environment, organizations that continue to treat BCM as a compliance exercise will struggle, while those that invest early in adaptive, people-driven resilience aligned with national frameworks and ecosystem realities will be far better positioned.

From his experience, cyber incidents will no longer be isolated technology events. As systems, platforms, and services become tightly interwoven, a single cyber issue can quickly escalate into enterprise-wide or even national disruption. This means organizations must move beyond traditional cyber response plans and focus on how critical services can continue and recover when digital foundations are compromised. He also sees a growing risk in the concentration of cloud and third-party providers. While these platforms enable speed and scale, heavy dependence on a small number of global providers introduces shared vulnerabilities, making it essential for organizations to think in terms of ecosystem resilience rather than simple vendor assurance.

From his experience, cyber incidents will no longer be isolated technology events. As systems, platforms, and services become tightly interwoven, a single cyber issue can quickly escalate into enterprise-wide or even national disruption.

Waleed also notes a clear shift at the government level. Across the GCC, resilience is increasingly viewed as a national priority, with higher expectations placed on boards and senior leaders. Organizations are no longer seen as operating in isolation; their ability to withstand disruption directly affects economic stability and public confidence. At the same time, climate and environmental pressures, particularly extreme heat, are likely to drive longer and more complex disruptions that test both infrastructure and human endurance.

In his view, the next decade will not reward organizations with the most polished documentation. It will favor those who can adapt in real time, where leadership, technology, and partners work seamlessly together under prolonged uncertainty.

Lastly, he adds, “Resilience in the GCC will increasingly be measured by how well leaders, systems, and partners function together under sustained uncertainty.”