Since my post a few days back about the vague understanding of the concept of resilience, I have been engaged in an email conversation with one of my colleagues on this subject.
This conversation has been interesting as this particular colleague had not really been challenged to describe the concept of resilience and how it might relate to BCM.
The conversation established that many people see these as two different – and often competing disciplines. It appears that some see Resilience as a new discipline that will supercede or replace BCM.
A variation on this view is that Resilience and BCM will both continue but occupy different positions within the Enterprise.Both of these are ideas that serve to create tension between the BC practitioners and those who are promoting Resilience. Both create a conflict within the enterprise, and more often than not this becomes a battle for control of the scarce resources available to this function.
It is not surprising that people see these as competing disciplines. In addition to the vendors offering to sell you a solution for Resilience – many feel they have to choose sides between the various professional bodies offering certification in these disciplines.
When you delve into the detail you will often find that they are complementary rather than purely competing, I belong to the BCI and the International Consortium for Organizational Resilience (I also belong to the International Association of Emergency Managers and the ISACA – but those are stories for another day).
The problems arise when we treat these as religions or sects rather than professional bodies.
- The current obsession with gaining “certifications” simply makes the religious aspect worse.
Another view that emerged from this conversation was that resilience is about building a wide array of safeguards to pre-empt or manage disruptions so they do not become a crisis. This would be achieved by “Risk Management on steroids” – a super extensive understanding of the risk universe.
This, so the theory goes, provides much greater certainty that we have addressed all potential risks. Those few things that we were not able to guard against will be handled by traditional BC.
- Simply not possible, we cannot even attempt to identify all the threats that may exist. No enterprise can afford to build this level of protection.
Part of the logic behind this thinking is also to position Resilience as the proactive component, and traditional BC as the reactive part. A strong message seems to be that there would be less “Crisis Management” in the Resilience model. Executives are less inclined to invest in the “recovery only” model – it is essential to label yourself as the progressive (read proactive) party.
If you are paying attention, and read my previous post, you will have picked up that I have talked about Resilience (capital R, the noun, the buzz word) and resilience (lower case, the adjective, something worth aspiring too).
Personally, I would argue that being resilient means that you are actually doing BC Management, not just BC Planning – and you are actually doing it right. You are addressing both the Yin (Proactive) and the Yang (Reactive) of BC/Resilience.
- You are investing in hardening your enterprise so it takes a little more impact to disrupt it.
- You are developing more robust processes and infrastructure
- You are have designed and invested in appropriate levels of redundancy.
- You have some excess capacity and the ability to utilise your alternate arrangements, they have been rigourously tested
- This goes for People, Process and Technology
- You are not constrained by silos, nor blinkered by the boundary of your own organisation
- Supply chain and inter-depence are being continually assessed
- You recognise that there is uncertainty – you have not anticipated everything that may happen to you, but you have developed an adaptive capacity
- You have embedded some of this adaptive capability into your BAU processes
- You have agile and adaptive management processes to recognise, react and respond to a disruption.
Maybe that means you will have less Crisis Management – it should ensure that when you do have a crisis to manage you are better prepared to cope with it.
What is your take on Resilience Management, BC Management, Heritage BC and where being resilient fits with all of those?
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