Resilient Thinking: Protecting organisations in the twenty-first century (for True Epub) by Phillip Wood

Author:Phillip Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787784215
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Challenges and silos

Naturally, although resilience should be all-encompassing for a business, specialists, in particular, have a crucial role to play in limiting the effects of risk upon their organisations. A considered and forward-looking resilience management process, with realistic and flexible mitigation planning, will provide an organisation with the ability to evaluate risks and to put in place effective countermeasures and associated processes and procedures. However, in a results-oriented environment where the focus rests on maintaining profitability, this can be a challenging process. If managers are overly focused on pure response processes and in putting in place measures that are localised and reactive, they may miss what lies over the horizon. And, although it is understandable to deal with local losses in the ‘here and now’, if managers fail to engage with, or to consider the effects of, current or forthcoming threats, because they consider them to be outside their area of concern, then there is a risk of vulnerability to partially self-inflicted failures.

The difficulty is first of all in getting the attention of those who are able to assist us in developing resilience within organisations. (Not enough time, not enough resource, not enough interest.) It is also important to be able to put across the idea that they are not assisting ‘us’ in our resilience work but that we are working collaboratively with them and within the organisation to ensure that they survive and thrive rather than simply going through yet another pointless distraction from their main focus in their daily work. The fact of the matter is that for most of the mainstream employees within an organisation they will expect you to do the planning, they will expect you to tell them what to do and they will want to blame you when it all fails to work effectively.

If, however, you have been able to put together a planning and implementation process that is based upon collaborative and consultative thinking, then it is a fair consideration and assumption that your joint planning is a chance to be much more effective. In our results-orientated organisation, it is an essential requirement for the organisation itself to understand that all of its results may be in jeopardy if it does not contribute to the ability of the organisation to protect itself against the impacts of adverse events. The manifestation of human behaviours, which we will talk about later, is something to consider when seeking to overcome and penetrate the internal borders within organisations that will get in the way of effective resilient thinking. Overcoming the challenges that these behaviours are set in our way is, in my view, just as important as having in place any number of written plans that will not stand in the face of their first test.

Within any planning ‘suite’ or set of components (resilience-related or not) there will be various elements that have traditionally been the responsibility of separate departments or managers. Silo management has managed to keep apart activities that should perhaps be merged or, at least, complement one another.

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