Archive for Benchmarking
… benchmarking resilience
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With all the air traffic disruption in Europe at the moment, perhaps it is timely to have a new tool we can use to benchmark our levels of resilience.
The Resilient Organisations Research Program at the University of Canterbury have just released a report on the use of their Benchmarking tool in the Auckland Region of New Zealand. The report is free to download from their website.
Perhaps the first thing that struck me about this research was that this group continue to refine their thinking on the subject of resilience and the attempt to measure or predict this attribute has led to a significant shift in the dimensions and indicators they use to define resilience.
- An earlier publication (2007, based on the thesis work of Sonia McManus) identified 3 Dimensions and within each Dimension there are 5 indicators of organisational resilience.
- The three dimensions were Situation Awareness, Management of Keystone Vulnerabilities and Adaptive Capacity
- Following a workshop in January 2008 another Dimension – Resilience Ethos – was added. Plus another 8 indicators
- The current benchmarking report (which will be the thesis work of Amy Stephenson) has field tested the model and adapted it to define resilience in terms of 2 Dimensions and 13 Indicators.
- These elements are;
- Adaptive Capacity (Dimension)
- Lack of silo mentality
- Capability & Capacity of Internal Resources
- Staff Engagement & Involvement
- Information & Knowledge
- Leadership, Management & Governance Structures
- Innovation & Creativity
- Devolved & Responsive Decision Making
- Intern & External Situation Monitoring & Reporting
- Planning (Dimension)
- Planning Strategies
- Participation in Exercises
- Proactive Posture
- Capability & Capacity of External Resources
- Recovery Priorities
- Adaptive Capacity (Dimension)
I like this new split, the dimensions simply align with developing the planning ‘science’ and the adaptive ‘art’ of resilience. There is greater details about each indicator in the paper.
It is interesting that the Auckland benchmark found that the majority of responders are reliant on their Adaptive Capacity. That is to say that they ranked higher on that dimension than the planning dimension. This may reflect a lack of investment in planning approaches rather than the innate adaptability of New Zealand managers.
The benchmark research was undertaken in 2009, so it represents very current data. The report has a breakdown by sector and highlights some areas for improvement. The most resilient sector was “Health and Community” (which being government dominated was also the only sector that scored higher on planning than adaptive capacity). The least resilient sector was “Wholesale Trade” who tended to rate very low on planning and have a significant exposure to supply chain disruptions.
I would recommend reading the report for those interested – 48 pages including 10 pages of graphs. I look forward to seeing the presentation on this subject at the World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto.
Having to measure on only 2 dimensions makes things easier. Will you be trying to benchmark your resilience?
- If not, why not?
- If yes, then how will you be doing it?
… organisational resilience workshop
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I wrapped up the BCI Summit in Sydney last week by attending the Organisational Resilience Workshop. I guess it is an indication of the interest in the concept of resilience, this workshop was booked out weeks in advance.
The Workshop Leaders, Peter Brouggy and David Parsons, have different leadership roles within the wider Australian Critical Infrastructure and Resilience communities. Here is a link to some information about the ‘Trusted Information Sharing Networks‘ associated with this government initiative.
The material being presented in the workshop was developed over the past couple of years from a variety of seminars and discussions hosted by Emergency Management Australia and the ‘Resilience Community of Interest.
The primary focus of the workshop was introducing and working with a diagnostic tool that had been developed. The tool uses eight ‘enablers’ of resilience to provide an indicator of a level of resilience for an entity. The tool is not proffered as a definitive statement about resilience – but as a simply tool, based on review of a range of materials and thinking in the field, that people can take away, use and modify as they see fit.
The eight attributes or enablers, and some descriptions of what they include, are;
- Agility
- includes Adaptive Capacity
- embrace and learn from near misses (as per HRO)
- does not enforce Top Down decision making
- Integration
- not silo’ed
- takes end-to-end view of processes
- Interdependence
- Again not strong silo focus
- Good Supply Chain visibility
- Good level of trust with stakeholders and network
- Leadership
- Encourages decentralised decision making
- Goal clarity
- Oriented to partnering rather than going it alone
- Awareness
- Anticipate emerging threats
- Understand community vulnerabilities
- Extensive network to share information
- Change
- Embrace change
- ‘Change Ready’
- Communication
- Silos don’t stifle communication
- Open and collaborative communication, internal and with partners
- Culture and Values
- Shared vlaues
- Do not fear disruption
- Enthusiastic about challenges
The tool includes a number of statements that describe High and Low dimensions of various behaviors within each enabler heading. Each behaviour is rated on a 5 point Likert scale (1=Low), and the scores are totalled.
There is no weighting, but there are different numbers of behaviors included within each enabler – so some enablers have different maximum scores.
If enough organisation assess against the same set of criteria, regardless of what you may think about the set of attributes chosen, you do get a valid benchmark and point of comparison.
Nice tool, and a simple concept effectively executed.
Later this year the Resilient Organisation project at University of Canterbury (NZ) will be releasing their own benchmark tool. It will be interesting to compare the two.
Do you have some specific attributes or enablers you use to indicate resilience?
