… a US view on resilience

In two previous posts I have reviewed some New Zealand schools of thought on resilience – New Zealand Resilience Trust and Resilient Organisations.

Today I am looking at some US thinking, the Centre For Resilience at Ohio State University.

These guys cover a wide range of thinking in the area of resilience, from its early location in the fields of ecology and eco-systems into the areas that interest me more, such as resilience in Supply Chains and in the enterprise.

Their definition of resilience is fairly normal – “capacity of a system to survive, adapt and grow in the face of unforeseen changes, even catastrophic incidents.” When translated to enterprise resilience this includes both overcoming disruption and continual transformation to meet change.

The table presented on this page attempts to position elements of enterprise resilience on Strategic/Tactical and Functional/Structural dimensions. Unfortunately there is a typo in the table, the right side column should read Structural.

The strategic purpose being to build robustness into the enterprise. Being robust, seems to imply that the Tactical/Operational level can actually demonstrate functional agility (to change what they are doing) while the structural aspects of the enterprise have an appropriate level of redundancy and the flexibility for resources to be re-allocated as needed.

They observe that resilience therefore requires both;

• an INTERNAL focus – to ensure processes are robust and agile
• an EXTERNAL awareness of interdependence of the enterprise

They also introduce the concepts of Sense & Respond as part of the management capability. More on this later.

Do you think you could adapt a model such as this to define/build resilience in your enterprise?

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