… Australian Government position on resilience

Recently the Australian Government, through it’s Resilience Expert Advisory Group (REAG), published a position paper about Organisational Resilience with particular reference to critical infrastructure.

The membership of the REAG is drawn from academics, government and private enterprise. The group grew out of the Trusted Information Sharing Network for Critical Infrastructure Protection, when the group was known as the Resilience Community of Interest. Two resilience workshops were held at the Australian Emergency Management Institute (Mount Macedon), and these workshops contributed to the final position paper.

Some key messages;

• Resilience is a concept not a program or management system.
  • It cannot be developed and reviewed annually – it requires an approach that takes time to mature and is not ‘one size fits all’
• We need to learn how to consistently apply the concept, which the paper is focussed on – rather than seeking to generate dictionary definitions.
• The concept of resilience is becoming popular because of the need to manage uncertainty in a world that is “complex and vastly interconnected.”
• Resilience can be applied in numerous contexts, with different interpretations.
  • The paper addresses organisational resilience, which results from a mix of Art and Science (the technical/hard areas and the behavioural/soft areas).
  • It is an outcome that achieved by the contribution of a wide range of disciplines
• Three focus areas for resilience are suggested as;
  • Protection
  • Performance
  • Adaptation

The paper outlines five generic principles that can be used as a guide in applying the concept of resilience – these go along with three behavioural attributes. These behavioural attributes are;

• Leadership and Culture
• Networks, and
• Change Ready

There is also a four level ‘maturity model’ that could be adapted for general use – although the case studies used to support this part are a a little weak. I doubt that Ericson actually planned to fail after a disruption.

At the end there are seven case studies with real world examples and learnings.

It will probably not be everybody’s cup of tea – but it does continue to promote the essential idea of resilience as a concept. It also promotes two aspects that are being often overlooked in the zealous pursuit of standards and procedural models of resilience;

• the central nature of culture and behavioural aspects – something I have been promoting extensively over recent months
• the importance of Adaptive Capacity as an element that must be considered
  • this is essential to embrace uncertainty and the ‘plausible’ threats we rarely plan for

If you are interested in this area of thinking, I suggest you read the paper yourself.

I would welcome your thoughts.