Author Archive
… resilience as a balancing act
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I read a post on John Adams’ blog which I wanted to draw to people’s attention.
Let me start where Adams’ finishes;
“Resilience is not calculable. Unquantifiable, disputable, and disputed judgement will remain central to its pursuit.”
It is becoming rare to find people thinking and writing about resilience who recognise that it is not a candidate for standardisation and process-driven approaches. In the article Adams asserts there are no units by which resilience can be measured.
Adams has some really interesting ideas about the nature of risk management and the way we practice these things. I have posted on this subject before, and there is a link to both my earlier post and Adams blog at the end of this post. The pursuit of resilience involves risk management, hence his views on risk management provide the starting point.
Adams presents a model that he refers to as a risk thermostat – it is about balancing behaviours as a result of perceptual filters through which we view the risk and reward (the up and down sides of risk taking behaviour). However he notes that most institutional risk management is devoted to the prevention of bad things happening – which is only the bottom loop in his model.
People, organisations and entire societies are becoming risk averse, but this does not mean they are becoming resilient. In fact, he argues, accident avoidance actually constrains the extent of reward that can be achieved, and therefore the extent of resilience that could be achieved. Building resilience requires that we have the resources to invest in becoming more robust and in building and maintaining an adaptive capacity.
Resilience, especially the adaptive capacity, is a skill or attribute we acquire through experience. To learn, and therefore have the scope to become more resilient, we need to take a risk.
The Board and the CEO are positioned as the key folks to ensure that both the risk and reward loops are being adequately addressed. CRO – if it is Chief Resilience Officer – is really the role of the CEO. When it is used to indicate a Chief Risk Officer, and they focus on only the ‘bad things’ loop (by viewing risk as an equation : Risk = Consequence x Probability), then the role is less relevant to resilience.
As Adams puts it – “Achieving resilience is a balancing act.” It requires people apply their judgement, learn from experience (which will normally involve a mistake or two) and address both the potential rewards and the potential losses.
Do you manage the reward (or upside) of risk?
Is it an occupational hazard in BC that we see the glass as always “half empty” – just the ‘bad’ side of risk?
References
- John Adams – “The Pursuit of Resilience”
- Photo Credit
- My earlier post on Adam’s work – “perception and CRAP in risk management”
… synergy rather than convergence
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I have recently been included in a Working Party initiated by the Busines Continuity Institute in the UK. This Working Party has the label ‘Discipline Mapping’ – it will focus on how a range of different disciplines can contribute to the building and maintaining resilience.
A lot of the talk in this area has been around how various disciplines may/should converge going forward. In many of these discussions the idea seems to be that there will be a new ‘resilience’ discipline formed from this convergence of disciplines like BCM, Risk Management, Emergency Management, Crisis Management and others.
There is a link at the bottom of this post to some other articles of mine on the subject.
Resilience is a concept and something to aspire to – it is not a new discipline to be formalised, standardised and eventually bastardised (like many of these other areas have been). One of the aspects of this ‘Discipline Mapping’ initiative was that it sought to explore how resilience could be achieved by various disciplines working together, collaboration and synergy rather than the need for the streams to formally converge.
The Working Party started with a given definition of resilience and completing a survey to quickly capture the groups thoughts. The starting definition was;
“the ability to mitigate and recover faster from disruptive events”
Personally I did not like this definition, I find it too narrow. So did a number of others, so the definition is being reviewed. I will post more on this when the discussion paper comes out.
The initiative will explore the concepts of Corporate and Community Resilience and how a range of disciplines many contribute to this outcome. The aim is deliver some documented “Points of View” that may assist others to understand the skills, behaviours and challenges required to integrate these various disciplines to build resilience.
Looking forward to some great opportunities to discuss and debate these issues with the other folks in the Working Party. In particular I will be interested to see if the concepts are understood differently in other parts of the world. This interaction is the real value we can derive from membership of these professional organisations, not the certification and weighty tomes of standards/good practice guides.
I will just have to find some extra time for reading and responding to the material.
How do you see the way forward? Synergy and Collaboration or Convergence of disciplines?
References
