A little over 12 months ago I got really interested in this idea of resilience, as a result I started this blog. As I enter the second year it seemed appropriate to ask myself the question.
After all that reading, thinking and writing – what have I learned?
- Resilience is a concept, it is not a process
- Many will try to make it a process and several will try to codify into standards.
- Too many more will attempt to blindly follow these processes and procedures
- Essentially they will all fail
- To make an organisation more resilient we need to address People, Process and Technology
- People first!
- There is no technology solution to this problem, you cannot buy a ‘resilience silver bullet’.
- Many vendors sell ‘resilience silver bullets’
- It is about making the entity stronger (more resistant to impact) AND being able to bounce back from an impact
- simply being resistant is not enough, you cannot anticipate everything that can happen
- This is the failure of traditional Risk Management thinking that assumes it can forsee all possible risks
- What you might call the ‘Titanic‘ approach to resilience
- simply being resistant is not enough, you cannot anticipate everything that can happen
- The ability to bounce back is the capacity to adapt to changes in the environment
- If you have to choose what to invest in (and you will) – build Adaptive Capacity first
- Becoming resilient is a strategic objective for an organisation
- It requires top level support, top down approaches and the appropriate investment of resources
- It is an ongoing Program, not a Project
- This program will need to exploit the skills of many disciplines, not create a new one
- The contribution required of the various disciplines is synergy, not convergence
- Resilience requires the application of both Art and Science
- There will be elements of professional practice and known management disciplines.
- There will also be the new need for craft and improvisation.
Measuring your progress on this journey will certainly be an art – resilience is truly an emergent property. You will never really know if you have it until you need to display it.
What have you learned about resilience?
Is the meaning still vague?
Excellent summary. I have found your blogging very interesting over the past year.
I would like to explore the tools and techniques to measure resilience without acutually having to suffer a disaster. It goes back to the need to show a return on investment I suppose.
Thanks Lee, I think that measurement problem will be an issue for many people – we only get to invest in what we can measure.
Following the balance of Art and Science we are going to have to build metrics composed of hard and soft data.
The question is if the “soft” data will be acceptable to accountants and auditors as evidence of ROI.
Hence my comment about the need for top level leadership. Often they can accept the soft data, it is the next level down that often cannot.