A great start to the Australasian BCI Summit in Sydney today. If you are reading this at the Summit please come and find me to say hello. If you are not able to attend the event you can still interact with attendees and the ideas being presented via the Twitter tag
The theme for the conference is intriguing, “Looking to the future, learning from the past” and it will be interesting to see if this realises the potential. Good start thus far!
Erica Seville from the ResOrgs group in New Zealand got things underway, with a presentation that discussed the key points of difference between BC and resilience – and how BC might evolve towards the goal of resilience. Some key points that resonated with me include;
- Is BCM focussing on the right things?
- For example, an incident/event that causes a massive slump in the share price, compared with an incident/event that might disrupt Payroll operations.
- This also goes to our often cited issues with Executive engagement
- Are we building both Planned and Adaptive capabilities?
- BC tends to focus more on the plans, but the real nature of resilience comes from being able to adapt and respond to unplanned events – those pesky Black Swans.
The 10-years of research that the ResOrgs group have undertaken has led them to define 13 indicators of resilience. Erica argues that traditional BCM tends to focus on the group they define as “Change Ready” indicators – and explicitly indicators around “Planning Strategies” and “Stress Testing of Plans”
Those indicators contribute to resilience, but they are nowhere near the full picture. What do you think?
Here are 4 things that we can take away and explicitly look at for our BC practices,
- Develop a strategy to collaborate with a range of other organisational disciplines.
- BC and the BC Manager will not build resilience on their won, it is not achievable within the confines of a single discipline.
- Further it is not about how we can influence other disciplines to work with us on resilience, but how we might work with them to jointly facilitate resilience.
- Use the ResOrgs 13 indicators to identify what other disciplines you need to collabroate with.
- Subscribe to the Resilience Ninja newsletter to learn about tools and techniques for Collaboration.
- Review how you market and sell BCM
- BC is not a green fields issue, the discipline (and its practitioners) have a legacy and baggage related to how the discipline has operated and what it has focussed on the past 20+ years.
- This legacy may not align with how CEO’s view building resilience, and what disciplines need to take the lead.
- Rebranding BC as resilience is not the solution – it actually introduces a new risk.
- Make BC fun!
- Instead of being about documenting plans and procedures make the practice more about the conversations
- This starts engagement and is central to any means to embed BC into the culture.
- Make best practice common practice.
- When you have implemented innovative resilience practices, promote your practices.
- Get out an coach or mentor others in these new practices
- Subscribe to the Resilience Ninja newsletter to learn about tools and techniques for Coaching.
What would stop you doing these 4 things?
Are the 13 indicators a useful method in your mind to define resilience?
What others paths do you see for BC to evolve towards resilience?
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