In my review of the paper – Operational Framework for Resilience I mentioned a quote attributed to Adam Rose.
“resilience is in danger of becoming a vacuous buzzword from overuse and ambiguity”
That reference motivated me to find out a little more about this guy and what he has to say.
Rose is a Research Professor in the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. His area of interest is more related to resilience applied to the overall economy, rather than being focussed on a single economic participant. Some of his concepts can perhaps be applied in the field of organisational resilience.
Rose has a comprehensive body of work, and part of this work seeks to provide the required definitions and practical applicability around resilience. The rest of this post relates to arguments raised in a specific paper by Rose (citation at the end).
Economic Resilience is defined in much the same way resilience is defined in other areas. The ability to absorb impact and to recover to a desired state. Rose distinguishes two types of resilience;
- Inherent – the ability to absorb/recover under normal circumstances
- Adaptive – the ability demonstrated in a crisis situation, which is attributed to ingenuity or extra effort.
It is interesting that Rose excludes the pre-disaster mitigation activities from his definition of resilience. Resilience is therefore the way we respond/recover after the incident.
Rose offers detailed ways to measure resilience, using a number of econometric models and equations. These are available for us to use in the enterprise space by measuring such things as production output and/or profit (or changes in these items as a result of a disruption). This will not help those who are seeking to measure resilience before the event – but is similar to the thinking of the Resilient Organisations people (and others) who assert that resilience is an emergent property that can only be measured after the event.
Rose talks about how resilience differs between ordinary disasters and catastrophes. Again this is similar to the idea that we can only define resilience in a specific context. Rose looks at changes in resilience based on two dimensions – the duration and severity of the disaster.
The at the lower end, a disaster, there is scope for the inherent capabilities to be used to respond and return to the desired operating state. The argument gets a little confused here as he introduces the idea of “capacity building”. This idea asserts that we do some work to enhance our inherent resilience capabilities before a disaster occurs. While this may not technically be termed a mitigation activity, it is really not that far removed from common BC ideas around preparedness/readiness.
A catastrophe on the other hand is likely to impact more than a single firm, as a result it will tend to create multiple failures in infrastructure – and therefore reduce the ability to substitute inputs and resources that are at the core of inherent capabilities. The catastrophe is where the adaptive capacity comes to the fore.
The key to adaptive capacity is the ability to anticipate and learn. Again this is similar to many other approaches that promote the Adaptive Enterprise and sense/respond methods. To benefit from this aspect an organisation is going to have to develop the capability to learn from near misses and operational disruptions.
The paper I cite below finishes with this statement;
“Although the emphasis of most policy-makers since 9/11 has been on mitigation, we must realizethat we cannot always prevent catastrophes before they happen. In those cases where they do occur,resilience is a most valuable second line of defense.”
The concept of resilience is certainly one of the great buzzwords today. I have a Google Alert set up on the word ‘resilience’ . I am about to kill it as I get so many articles referenced every day – it is most often used in sports reporting!
The real lesson I take from Rose is that you need to nail this concept down to work with it. He does it specifically to economic resilience, while still describing concepts we can use in our work.
Can you define what resilience means to you or in your organisation?
Do you use it as a new word to simply alternate with BCM?
Citation : http://urbanpolicy.berkeley.edu/pdf/rose.pdf
Thank you for all the great posts from last year! I look forward to reading your blog, because they are always full of information that I can put to use. Thank you again, and God bless you in 2010.