Resilience isn’t just a technical attribute, it’s psychological. This article explores how perception, mindset, and emotional readiness play a central role in an organisation’s ability to recover from a cyber incident. Drawing on behavioural science and frontline insights, it argues that confidence, clarity, and calm under pressure matter as much as infrastructure, and that resilience starts in the mind long before it shows in the metrics.
This article was inspired by the recent cyber attacks across UK retail, specifically Marks & Spencer’s and the Cooperative, plus the Harris Federation (of Schools), as reported on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme (01/05/2025). This interview will be unavailable after a month, but you can still read excerpts at “Inside the Breach: What M&S and the Harris Federation Reveal About UK Cyber Vulnerabilities“.
Cyber resilience is often defined in technical terms: how quickly systems can detect, respond to, and recover from a cyber attack. But beneath the dashboards, frameworks, and recovery playbooks lies something more fundamental, and often overlooked: perception.
At Psyber Inc., we believe resilience isn’t just a matter of infrastructure or incident response time. It’s a state of mind. Resilience is a feeling long before it’s a fact.
The Illusion of Resilience
Many organisations feel resilient right up until the moment they’re breached. Why? Because confidence is often based on untested assumptions:
- “We have backups.” (But have they been tested recently?)
- “Our staff know what to do.” (But under real pressure?)
- “We’ve passed compliance checks.” (But are we prepared for chaos?)
Psychologically, this is a known bias: the optimism of preparedness without exposure to actual adversity. In psychology, we call it the “illusion of invulnerability.” In cyber terms, it’s when your systems look strong—but your people and processes have never been stress-tested.
The Feeling That Fuels Recovery
In our work with organisations across public and private sectors, we see a pattern: the teams that recover faster don’t just have technical capability. They have psychological readiness:
- Confidence born of rehearsed failure
- Calm under pressure, driven by clear roles and expectations
- Clarity in communication—internally and externally
- A culture that doesn’t freeze or fragment when things go wrong
This is what we call affective resilience—a feeling of control and competence in the midst of uncertainty. It’s what enables decision-makers to act swiftly and teams to execute recovery plans without spiralling into blame or panic.
What Shapes Cyber Resilience Perception?
Through behavioural studies and field interviews, we’ve identified three core psychological drivers of perceived resilience:
- Clarity – Do people know what the plan is—and what their role is in it?
- Trust – Do staff believe leadership will support them during a crisis, not scapegoat them?
- Control – Do teams feel empowered to act, or paralysed by approval chains and fear of mistakes?
These aren’t abstract concepts—they’re measurable. Psyber’s research and assessment tools help organisations baseline their resilience as experienced by their people, not just as reported by their systems.
Feeling First, Recovery Second
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: when a breach happens, your organisation won’t rise to the level of its policy—it will fall to the level of its preparation and belief. People who feel prepared act faster. People who feel trusted make better decisions. People who feel calm recover faster.
And that’s why at Psyber Inc., we don’t just assess technical risk. We map behavioural readiness—how people think, feel, and act in the face of cyber disruption.
Conclusion: Build the Feeling, Then the Fact
If your teams don’t feel resilient, they aren’t. If your culture doesn’t practice failure, it won’t recover well from it. Resilience is built in the in-between: the workshops, the conversations, the quiet confidence that comes from knowing you’ve prepared not just your systems—but your people.
Resilience is a feeling before it’s a fact. Let’s start there.