BC Awareness Week, at least in this part of the world, is past the halfway point and on the downslope.
For me personally it was certainly a mixed bag on Wednesday. Some very interesting conversation in the real world at the Canberra BCAW event, and interesting online chat with Amy Lee. Unfortunately the webcast I chose tonight was something of a fizzer – and it started ahead of the advertised time.
It is always a good conversation when you meet another advocate for the work of Aaron Wildavsky, good to meet Richard Agnew.
One thing people have not been doing is commenting on the “Managing for Resilience” discussion paper, only 3 commenters – Lyndon Bird doesnt count, he is on the BCI payroll. If you have not read the paper, then got onto that and please join the conversation.
- You download the paper from the BCAW Resources Page (Registration required)
- You can join the discussion at the BCAW LinkedIn site
Here is a sample of my contribution earlier tonight …
One of the key points is that the concept of resilience means different things in different contexts/disciplines.
There is a specific definition offered for use in our context – the paper suggests using the definition suggested by the Demos publication.
If you look beyond the specific words and think about the meanings, it is not that different from what you have suggested yourself. Resilience is about striking the appropriate balance between the proactive and reactive aspects. It is about building endurance so we can survive an increasing level of impact – and it is about recovering and being able to sustain our minimal level of operations – even after being impacted.
There are two other really important aspects of this paper.
It highlights the importance of culture and the different world views that come with culture. We have focussed too long and too much on the Science – time to think more about the Art of BCM.
Secondly, and this is long overdue, we have a paper that adopts academic disciplines, references academic work from related fields of expertise, and hopefully will stimulate a debate about ideas rather than process and procedure.
Come on people, if I can get up in the middle of the night to have teleconferences as part of the Working Group for this – you folks can at least take some time to read and comment at a reasonable hour of the day. It is only 15 pages and there are pictures.
Any academic BC folks out there?
Anybody who has any view on the subject?
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