ABGALIS Position Brief · Paper 05 · 2026

The Effect-Based
Resilience Approach

Moving from cause-based to effect-based resilience. Six universal effect categories that transform how insurers prepare for the unknowable.

ResilienceORSAScenarios

The cause register is incomplete by construction

Every firm's operational-resilience cause register has the same structural problem. It contains every cause anyone has thought to enumerate. It does not contain the causes no one has thought to enumerate. The gap is structural — the number of plausible causes of disruption to a modern insurer's operations is unbounded; the register grows by post-event addition, which means it reliably tells the firm how to defend against the last battle.

The effect register, by contrast, is bounded. The number of effects any disruption can produce is small, because all causes act on the firm through a small set of mechanisms.

Six universal effect categories

Physical-asset disruption — buildings, equipment, datacentre kit unavailable. Cause irrelevant.
Workforce impairment — people unavailable, unable to attend, or unable to perform at standard.
Data and decision integrity — information on which decisions rest becomes unreliable.
Capital-account drain — solvency, liquidity or capital position deteriorates beyond planned tolerances.
Regulatory-pressure cascade — supervisory action limits permitted activity beyond what capital alone constrains.
Reputational and trust cascade — commercial position narrows independently of capital.

Why six

Five would miss something — typically the regulatory-pressure category, the one most often left implicit. Seven would split a category that doesn't need splitting — typically separating physical-asset from workforce, when they share enough resilience design that splitting wastes effort.

Cause-based to effect-based — the conversion

A firm with an existing cause-based programme doesn't abandon it. The conversion is a structural overlay in four steps:

Tag every existing cause with the effects it produces. Most causes produce 2–3 effects, not all six.
Invert the matrix. Identify which effects have the most causes pointing at them — those are highest leverage.
Design effect-level resilience for the high-leverage effects, layered over existing cause-level plans.
Run the firm's standing severe-but-plausible scenarios against the effect-level resilience and identify gaps.

Why effect-based survives the unknowable

Three concrete categories where this matters in 2026: AI-driven operational disruption (failure modes added quarterly — cause-based can't keep up); compound climate events (specific compound combinations may not be on the register, but each effect is); geopolitical second-order disruption (when a sanctioned counterparty is the firm's data-feed provider, cause is hard to register but effect is straightforward).

Six standing ORSA scenarios

Effect	Standing scenario	Tolerance question
Physical-asset disruption	72h loss of primary operating site	Continue critical functions?
Workforce impairment	40% workforce unavailable, 14 days	Critical roles backed up to standard?
Data and decision integrity	72h loss of confidence in primary feed	Fallback decision rules?
Capital drain	20% adverse SCR move, 30 days	Revocable deployments identified?
Regulatory cascade	6-month restriction on a material permission	Strategy under narrower permissions?
Reputational cascade	4 weeks of sustained adverse press	Firm's stance and communications baseline?

Read the full paper (PDF)

Full paper covers each effect in depth, the cross-domain effect tracing, and three engagement routes for converting an existing cause-based programme.

Download Paper 05 (PDF) Book a walk-through

Abgalis Limited · London · [email protected]
Abgalis, Abgalis Engine, ICRIP and the seven-domain framework are trademarks of Abgalis Limited, with associated UK and PCT patent filings. This briefing is general thought leadership and does not constitute legal, regulatory, actuarial, investment or compliance advice.