The past week has been highly disrupted by the demand of paid work – which I have discovered is the curse of the blogger. The work I had planned to do on describing a personal position on resilience is still not complete. This week will also be disrupted, but for a much anticipated reason – I am attending a 3 day seminar on Organisational Resilience at the Australian Emergency Management Institute at Mt Macedon, Victoria.
This is my first time visiting the Institute, and hopefully will not be the last.
Day 1 of the seminar has set very high expectations for the rest of the program – quickly the eliminating the annoyance of flight delays and the stress of not being able to find the bus!
An entertaining first session by David Parsons set the tone – this would be a seminar that challenged people to think – not one that laid out narrow definitions and prescriptive “how to” guides. In keeping with the philosophy behind the Australian Government position paper on Org Resilience – a single definition is not offered. The view being that resilience is a wicked problem, and therefore there will be as many different views of what it means and how to solve the problem as there people present.
Peter Brouggy presented the tool that has been developed by the Resilience Community of Interest to assess ‘enablers of resilience’. I have seen Peter present this tool before, this is a good concept to help people who are being pressured to develop metrics and to measure progress towards resilience. The great value is that you can tailor the specifics of how you define and measure resilience within your organisation.
Like most seminars and conferences a lot the value is derived from conversations with the other attendees. That has already proved true here with a very good group assembled, offering different perspectives and challenging each others thinking. Thanks to the facilities available at the Institute this is a residential seminar which enhances the opportunities to interact with others over meals and the inevitable evening drinks.
The day finished with an after dinner session by Mike Tarrant on the historic development of the risk and the role of perception in setting risk levels. This was followed by a lively discussion about the concept of risk and the value of building too heavily on the pseudo-science of Risk Management.
Excellent stuff – looking forward to Day 2, despite having a home work assignment to read first!
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