Disaster risk is on the increase, burgeoning due to development drivers and barriers to effective risk management. There is an urgent need to understand and effectively tackle these drivers within the disaster-development system. Resilience is a concept with its roots in systems analysis, which if embraced can foster the transformative change needed to meet this challenge. This paper demonstrates how the Flood Resilience System (FLORES) conceptual framework has been operationalized and applied with practitioners in the field in four distinct ways.