Today I am looking at another US school of thought on resilience.
The 4R Resilience Framework, and the work of Michel Bruneau. These folks are coming to the discussion from the perspective of earthquake engineering, but the model can have applicability in other areas.
Essentially they define resilience according to three outcomes;
- reduced probability of failure
- reduced consequences of failure, and
- reduced time to restoration.
That would seem to be a set out of outcomes and measure we could apply to most enterprises.
The 4R’s, are the “Characteristics of Resilience” and they are;
- Robustness
- the strength/ability to resist impact
- not all impacts, but a specific defined level of impact
- Redundancy
- given that we have suffered some impact, the ability to substitute resources or undertake alternative processes
- Resourcefulness
- this is an interesting one, in one article I read this was described as the characteristic of “tenacious response to and creative solutions for a disaster”.
- in other writings it is likened to the models of being adaptive (sense, respond) or agile
- Rapidity
- the ability to quickly restore operations
- rapidity is a function of the other factors, obviously a lower level of investment in robustness, no redundancy designed into the systems/processes, no development of the skills that support resourcefulness – then you take a lot longer to get going again.
The model also includes “Dimensions of Resilience” – giving us a two dimension matrix model to work with. The dimensions are;
- Technical
- Organizational
- Social
- Economic
Too much detail already I suspect, so will leave this for another day. If you are interested the links are there to read further.
Your thoughts – does this work help you to define/build/measure resilience in the enterprise?
Leave a Reply