Tourism Industry Council South Australia
Build your Resilience Muscle Workshop
Business and regional tourism resilience, and how to plan around high levels of uncertainty and disruption, is a focus area for us at The Tourism Collective. And in June 2026, we piloted our new, practical, hands-on Build Your Resilience Muscle Workshop at the Tourism Industry Council State Conference.
Disruption and uncertainty are no longer occasional events for the tourism industry - they characterise the operating environment we are now working within.
The tourism industry at large is living through more frequent disruptions and their flow-on impacts, from hotter, drier summers, extreme rain events, drought, biodiversity and environmental events, workforce shortages, changing visitor demand and rising costs squeezing flights, insurance and day-to-day operations, to name a few.
The Workshop
In 90 minutes, we helped regional tourism organisations and businesses build the habit of planning for disruption to build resilience.
Our goal for the workshop was for operators and regional tourism organisations to be able to walk away with the understanding, skills and confidence to be better prepared to navigate and also take advantage of uncertainty and disruption in their businesses and regions.
- We opened with our Disruption Audit, helping participants identify and rank the risks most relevant to their business and regions.
- Participants then undertook a live scenario-planning exercise in small groups using a bank of scenarios designed specifically for South Australian tourism landscape, covering environmental, market, digital, and economic disruptions, including Hotter Summers, Digital Booking System Outage, and No International Visitors.
- We then introduced our "Six Resilience Muscles" framework, which outlined 6 areas tourism businesses could focus on to build resilience against future disruption, grounded in real operator examples from hospitality, accommodation, and tour operators.
- Closed with our Four Choices Model, a framework for deciding how to respond when disruption hits.
Participant Results
Confidence in navigating disruption and planning for uncertainty nearly doubled during the 90-minute workshop.
We polled delegates on their confidence navigating disruption before and after the workshop.
- Before the session, no delegate felt completely confident, and 20% described themselves as only slightly confident.
- After the session, 86% of delegates felt fairly or completely confident in their ability to support their business or organisation through disruption, up from 43%.
What we learnt
As this workshop was a pilot, we were keen to learn as much from participants as they learnt from us.
The clearest insight came from regional stakeholders, for whom managing risk and disruption is a large part of their advocacy work. Most described this as one of their most important roles, yet much of it happens in silos. Many are unsure how to progress the issues or work proactively towards solutions, so the work often ends up being reactive.
This matters for two reasons.
Reactive work takes up time in the moment, which can cause other accountabilities to slip. It is also hard to show funding partners the impact of this work, because it sits outside the concrete deliverables they can see, such as marketing campaigns and funded projects.
The workshop gave regional stakeholders clarity on what they can proactively control within their remit and business as usual.
Participants told us they felt more empowered to name and scenario-plan the issues they deal with constantly, and more confident to turn them into proactive projects.