Facilitated Process for Improving Organizational Resilience

Abstract

Resilient organizations contribute significantly to resilient communities. However, the task of building more resilient organizations is complicated by an inability to translate the concept of resilience into tangible working constructs for organizations. In addition, resilience is often considered to be a crisis or emergency management issue. The link between creating resilient day-today operations and having a resilient crisis response and recovery is typically not well understood by organizations. Resilience for organizations is found to have three principal attributes. Situation awareness, management of keystone vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity. A facilitated process is introduced that assists organizations to enhance their performance in relation to these attributes. This process is called resilience management and was developed and tested with 10 case study organizations selected specifically to represent a wide range of industry sectors, business types, and sizes in New Zealand. Some of the preliminary resilience issues to arise from this study are also briefly discussed.

What we know and do not know about organizational resilience

“…Horne III & Orr (1998) understand resilience as a quality to respond to significant change. Some authors (Erol et al, 2009;Gunasekaran, Rai, Griffin, 2011;McManus, Seville, Vargo, Brunsdon, 2008) (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003;Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007). A resilient organization can return to its performance level at any key performance metric (Sheffi, 2007).…”

Promoting Resilience Using an Asset-Based Approach to Business Continuity Planning

“…In a disaster context, resilience refers to the ability of an individual, organization, or community to resist, absorb, adapt, and recover toward a better state (Kahan et al, 2009;McManus et al, 2008). Increasingly, it is recognized as an important strategy to promote community resilience, and organizational success following a disaster (Bhamra, Dani, & Burnard, 2011;Lee, Vargo, & Seville, 2013).…”

“…Organizational resilience is the ability of an organization to resist, absorb, recover, and adapt to the altered environment following a disaster (Kahan, Allen, George, & Thompson, 2009;McManus, Seville, Vargo, & Brunsdon, 2008). Business continuity planning (BCP) is a strategy used to promote organizational resilience, by enhancing the capacity of an organization to persist and maintain business operations during a crisis (Speight, 2011).…”

The Systemic and Global Dimension of Business Resilience in a Socio-Technical Perspective

“…Several meanings can be assigned to resilience and are discussed in the literature [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. The approach taken here is they represent legitimate concerns prompted by the increasing depth and vulnerability of STSs.…”