… another framework for resilience (Part 1)

Today I am reviewing a new paper I discovered on the subject of resilience. “An Operational Framework for Resilience” – the full citation is at the end of this post. Resilience for many is still just a concept, and being able to operationalize that concept is the first step to building and maintaining Organisational Resilience.

If you are looking for a quick and easy formula  to implement resilience – keep looking, it is on the shelf next to the Holy Grail. The authors state very early in the paper that “operationalizing the resilience framework presented in this article will not be easy”.

This is an American model, that has been developed from the perspective of Homeland Security and is the product of a US federally funded research program. The Obama Administration created a Resilience Directorate withing the National Security Council.

This is a long paper and a model that thankfully does not pretend that this is a simple concept. So I am splitting the review over two posts in order to do it justice.

This framework is composed of 5 elements;

• Adversary Attack Path
  • this is a Homeland Security thing and has to address resilience in the context of terrorist acts
• Objectives
  • or the End-State
• Principles
  • “conceptual lenses” for understanding resilience, which double as
  • planning criteria to help design ways and means
• Ways and Means
  • Policies, Program and activities that build capabilities
• Homeland Security Missions
  • These missions are a slight derivation from the standard phases/missions used in Emergency Management and often adopted in BCM.
    • Prevent
    • Protect
    • Respond and
    • Recover

The framework essentially starts at the end – with the objectives or end-states of resilience – and shapes the approach to achieve these outcomes. A fairly standard approach based on gap analysis. These objectives are intended to be used as the end-state applicable to “critical systems” – note that the term system is NOT used in the IT sense, but in the wider meaning of a range of socio-technical systems. In particular the authors divide systems into “Hard” (e.g computer systems, national infrastructure) )and “Soft” (e.g individuals and communities)

The model describes three mutually reinforcing objectives;

• Resistance
  • This is similar to a number of other models I have explored, the objective here is to put in place measures to reduce the damage from a threat or hazard.
  • In other models this may have been labelled robust. In this model robustness is a principle not an end-state.
  • The model explores both Active (e.g Intelligence and Evacuation) and Passive (e.g physical barriers) resistance measures
  • The higher the resistance level the less burden that the Absorption and Restoration objectives have to achieve
• Absorption
  • This end-state is more aligned to reduction of consequences before, during and after a disruptive event occurs.
  • Again both Active and Passive measures are outlined
  • Where absorption has been successful at reducing consequences the resources required to achieve restoration are reduced.
• Restoration
  • The system has been “to the extent feasible and warranted, rapidly reconstituted and reset to their pre-event state”
  • Active restoration includes the full repair, reconstruction or replacement of any damaged elements
  • Passive restoration can include indirect measures, e.g. facilitating delivery of resources to support active restoration measures

The authors neatly link these three objectives back to the “missions” as follows;

• Resistance is generally serviced by the Prevent and Protect capabilities
• Absorption is serviced by Protection capabilities and is supported by Response capabilities
• Restoration end-state is serviced by the Response and then further serviced by Recover capabilities

These objectives are intended to be viewed through the lenses of their 8 Principles of Resilience. These principles are meant to capture the essential features of resilience and provide planners with a set of criteria that can apply to designing resilient systems.

• Threat and Hazard Limitation
• Robustness
• Consequence Mitigation
• Adaptability
• Risk-Informed Planning
• Risk-Informed Investments
• Harmonization of Purposes
• Comprehensiveness of Scope

Will pick it up from here tomorrow …

How do you translate this concept of resilience to a set of operational practices?

Is the lack of a coherent operational framework a major limitation on building resilience in organisations?

Citation

Kahan, Jerome H.; Allen, Andrew C.; and George, Justin K. (2009) “An Operational Framework for Resilience,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management: Vol. 6 : Iss. 1, Article 83.
DOI: 10.2202/1547-7355.1675
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/jhsem/vol6/iss1/83

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