I wrapped up the BCI Summit in Sydney last week by attending the Organisational Resilience Workshop. I guess it is an indication of the interest in the concept of resilience, this workshop was booked out weeks in advance.
The Workshop Leaders, Peter Brouggy and David Parsons, have different leadership roles within the wider Australian Critical Infrastructure and Resilience communities. Here is a link to some information about the ‘Trusted Information Sharing Networks‘ associated with this government initiative.
The material being presented in the workshop was developed over the past couple of years from a variety of seminars and discussions hosted by Emergency Management Australia and the ‘Resilience Community of Interest.
The primary focus of the workshop was introducing and working with a diagnostic tool that had been developed. The tool uses eight ‘enablers’ of resilience to provide an indicator of a level of resilience for an entity. The tool is not proffered as a definitive statement about resilience – but as a simply tool, based on review of a range of materials and thinking in the field, that people can take away, use and modify as they see fit.
The eight attributes or enablers, and some descriptions of what they include, are;
- Agility
- includes Adaptive Capacity
- embrace and learn from near misses (as per HRO)
- does not enforce Top Down decision making
- Integration
- not silo’ed
- takes end-to-end view of processes
- Interdependence
- Again not strong silo focus
- Good Supply Chain visibility
- Good level of trust with stakeholders and network
- Leadership
- Encourages decentralised decision making
- Goal clarity
- Oriented to partnering rather than going it alone
- Awareness
- Anticipate emerging threats
- Understand community vulnerabilities
- Extensive network to share information
- Change
- Embrace change
- ‘Change Ready’
- Communication
- Silos don’t stifle communication
- Open and collaborative communication, internal and with partners
- Culture and Values
- Shared vlaues
- Do not fear disruption
- Enthusiastic about challenges
The tool includes a number of statements that describe High and Low dimensions of various behaviors within each enabler heading. Each behaviour is rated on a 5 point Likert scale (1=Low), and the scores are totalled.
There is no weighting, but there are different numbers of behaviors included within each enabler – so some enablers have different maximum scores.
If enough organisation assess against the same set of criteria, regardless of what you may think about the set of attributes chosen, you do get a valid benchmark and point of comparison.
Nice tool, and a simple concept effectively executed.
Later this year the Resilient Organisation project at University of Canterbury (NZ) will be releasing their own benchmark tool. It will be interesting to compare the two.
Do you have some specific attributes or enablers you use to indicate resilience?
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