Archive for BCI
… 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
… WCDM is over
Posted by: | CommentsActually it has been over for a couple of days, but I have just gotten around to writing about it.
This was by first visit to the World Conference on Disaster Management. It is probably the best event in this field that I have been to – I would certainly want to go again next year, finances permitting.
The blend of Emergency Management, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery and general thought leadership in the field is something I have not seen at another conference. These guys have been going for 20 years for a reason, and that is quality.
Day 3 had no concurrent sessions, only plenary sessions. Two sessions on Crisis Management, one on the threat of Terrorism and a Panel Discussion on emerging trends. This format is by nature less interactive, but the panel session certainly tried to achieve some degree of dialogue with the audience.
I came away with a renewed conviction that this concept of resilience needs to be pursued. It has also re-enforced by own ideas and direction of thinking on this subject.
The idea of a new discipline of Resilience or Resiliency Management is misguided. To a large extent it is the various frameworks, standards, certifications and systems of compliance associated to “X” Management that create the need for the new thinking in the first place
Building and maintaining resilience in our organisations will require the application of both Art and Science – in the appropriate balance. You cannot produce a standard or a prescriptive approach to this Art.
Being resilient is also only likely to have meaning in context – and that context may be different for each organisation. To this end building and maintaining resilience is not a repeatable process. It is perhaps a wicked problem, and not in the scope of the discipline of management to solve.
WCDM is coming to Sydney on 11&12 October 2010.
Hope to see you there, or perhaps next year in Toronto.
Are you interested in the concept of resilience if it not a simple and easy to implement package?
Are modern organisation only interested in standardisation and ‘KISS”?
References
World Conference on Disaster Management, Australia
My BCI Presentation that first talks about the Art/Science balance
