Friday was the final day of the Organisational Resilience program at the Australian Emergency Management Institute. Just like Days 1 and 2 it did not disappoint.
Day 3 started with a presentation by Dr Robert Kay from Incept Labs. His presentation addressed the theme of innovation and some early research insights on how CEO’s view the subject.
Again the session is rendered so much more useful when you also have the opportunity to discuss these ideas with the presenter at leisure, rather than being limited to the Q&A part of the presentation.
Rob makes a number of points that need to be understood by those who are actively seeking to implement resilience in organisations;
If done properly, otherwise you just need a black marker to change the title on your business cards. Resilience is a new approach, with potentially new ways of thinking about issues. It is an innovation in enterprise management – and therefore can benefit from learning about the obstacles to innovation in general.
Rob uses March’s Explore/Exploit model as a basis to highlight the problem of any innovation program, it challenges the focus and resources applied to the BAU process that generates profit and bonuses.
Important to understand this aspect if you want to get line management commitment for your initiative.
Most Senior Executives have a number of big picture problems to wrestle with, if we want their attention on our initiative it must address one of their needs. To often we are pitching issues to Executives that address our needs, not theirs. Hardly surprising that many risk/BC people perceive that Executives are not interested in these subjects.
They are not interested at the same level we are – and to change that we need to innovate our programs to address their issues.
The 3 day program closed out with a session that reviewed the “resilience attributes” model, presented earlier, and workshopped ways to enhance these attributes in the workplace. A useful session of practices that people can take back and seek to apply in their own workplace.
There is still work to be done with this attribute model, nothing stays the same, especially in this new and emerging space. I look forward to seeing the result of the collaboration with the ResOrgs folks from New Zealand and their Resilience Benchmarking program.
A great three days, just like resilience this program is all about context. The speakers, the venue, the participants – all come together and interact and a great experience emerges. The diversity of the experience and industry represented included; Utilities, Emergency Services, a museum, venue operations/management, transport/logistics, consulting, government and academia.
I am looking forward to continuing the networking with these people and to the establishment of the next level of the resilience development program.
Can anybody point me to similar programs being developed and/or running in other countries? I would be interested in comparing the models and approaches being adopted.
Please jump into the comments and tell us about what is happening in this area in your country.
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