Every so often I find something that sparks me out of the intellectual wasteland that so much of the debate around risk, BC and resilience seems to have become. One example is the book I recently finished reading – Addicted to Performance
I would recommend this to those interested in risk and resilience thinking.
If your primary approach to risk, BC and resilience is standardised, templated and adhering to conventional wisdom – rather than application of critical thinking – this book is for you. But you may not fully appreciate that.
John’s name will be familiar to regular attendees of the World Conference on Disaster Management (Toronto) and to those who have been part of the Organisational Resilience seminars at the Australian Emergency Management Institute (Mt Macedon). I had the good fortune to attend John and Heather’s workshop on “Hidden Risks” in Toronto a few years ago and it is interesting to see how the themes from this workshop (and a number of John’s subsequent papers) have been woven together in this book.
The book looks at organisations, and their interactions with society, as Complex Adaptive Systems. The authors set out to conduct scientific research based on”system pressure” as an independent variable, and to examine the impact on “organisational performance”.
The nature of system pressure can be political, economic or cultural. It can come from shareholders, stakeholders or management. In context, these things bring pressure to bear on the work and performance of an organisation.
The authors argue that the end-result of these pressures creates “unrecognised or hidden risk that arise inside the organisation’s structures, processes and cultures.”
Their research method is to study the historical accounts and official enquiry reports of organisations that experienced a major failure. The case studies in this book include;
- NASA, space shuttle Colombia accident
- BP, Deepwater Horizon
- BA, Flight 5390 accident
- UK Dept Defebse, Nimrod XV230 explosion
- NAB, currency trading options crisis
- UK FSA and the GFC
- Pike River Mine disaster (New Zealand)
I was, of course, very accepting of this book as it embraces some of the conceptual frameworks I have been writing and speaking about recently. In particular the concepts of Espoused Theory vs Theory in Use and Complexity/Complex Adaptive Systems (see Fork in the Road and Australasian BC Summit), the nature of Culture (see Embedding Culture into BCM) and Wilful Blindness (see Vision Therapy webinar).
Fortunately for the reading audience they do a much better job at addressing these issues than me!
To summarise their arguement – we (society, consumers, Executives) have become addicted to performance. In this context getting more output for less input – continuous increases in productivity. One of the consequences of squeezing surplus capacity out of an organisation is that the staff (and managers) defer non-essential tasks in preference to doing the things that directly impact delivery of products and services. The lesson for us here is that often these non-essential activities relate to the management of risk and BC.
The short-cuts and non-procedural work become the accepted norms of that culture – the way we do things around here – and often get overlooked, ignored or tacitly accepted by senior levels. Until, of course, something goes wrong and the vulnerability (lack of resilience) of the organisation or operation is exposed.
To some extent you could refer to this as the “herd mentality” to management – of the organisation and to Risk/BC management. Fortunately there are still some in this industry who are also addicted to critical thinking and breaking away from the herd.
Such a brief summary does not do this, or any, book justice – so will come back to this subject another day.
In the interim, I would love to hear comments from others who have read this book.
What did you think?
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