… benchmarking resilience

With all the air traffic disruption in Europe at the moment, perhaps it is timely to have a new tool we can use to benchmark our levels of resilience.

The Resilient Organisations Research Program at the University of Canterbury have just released a report on the use of their Benchmarking tool in the Auckland Region of New Zealand. The report is free to download from their website.

Perhaps the first thing that struck me about this research was that this group continue to refine their thinking on the subject of resilience and the attempt to measure or predict this attribute has led to a significant shift in the dimensions and indicators they use to define resilience.

• An earlier publication (2007, based on the thesis work of Sonia McManus) identified 3 Dimensions and within each Dimension there are 5 indicators of organisational resilience.
  • The three dimensions were Situation Awareness, Management of Keystone Vulnerabilities and Adaptive Capacity
• Following a workshop in January 2008 another Dimension – Resilience Ethos – was added. Plus another 8 indicators
• The current benchmarking report (which will be the thesis work of Amy Stephenson) has field tested the model and adapted it to define resilience in terms of 2 Dimensions and 13 Indicators.
• These elements are;
  • Adaptive Capacity (Dimension)
    • Lack of silo mentality
    • Capability & Capacity of Internal Resources
    • Staff Engagement & Involvement
    • Information & Knowledge
    • Leadership, Management & Governance Structures
    • Innovation & Creativity
    • Devolved & Responsive Decision Making
    • Intern & External Situation Monitoring & Reporting
  • Planning (Dimension)
    • Planning Strategies
    • Participation in Exercises
    • Proactive Posture
    • Capability & Capacity of External Resources
    • Recovery Priorities

I like this new split, the dimensions simply align with developing the planning ‘science’ and the adaptive ‘art’ of resilience. There is greater details about each indicator in the paper.

It is interesting that the Auckland benchmark found that the majority of responders are reliant on their Adaptive Capacity. That is to say that they ranked higher on that dimension than the planning dimension. This may reflect a lack of investment in planning approaches rather than the innate adaptability of New Zealand managers.

The benchmark research was undertaken in 2009, so it represents very current data. The report has a breakdown by sector and highlights some areas for improvement. The most resilient sector was “Health and Community” (which being government dominated was also the only sector that scored higher on planning than adaptive capacity). The least resilient sector was “Wholesale Trade” who tended to rate very low on planning and have a significant exposure to supply chain disruptions.

I would recommend reading the report for those interested – 48 pages including 10 pages of graphs. I look forward to seeing the presentation on this subject at the World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto.

Having to measure on only 2 dimensions makes things easier. Will you be trying to benchmark your resilience?

• If not, why not?
• If yes, then how will you be doing it?

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