Resilience Community of Interest

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What is resilience?

No organisation can anticipate exactly what challenges it might face. Organisations need to be flexible and able to adapt to changes in their operating context or environment, not only to survive but, potentially, to thrive.
The term ‘resilience’ is being used increasingly to describe organisations that can continue to meet their key organisational objectives when faced by major challenges of all types, including natural disasters, crime, equipment failures or even terrorist attack.
Resilience takes a holistic approach to help organisations survive turbulent times, by tearing down the silos of risk, emergency and business continuity management.
Resilience is a combination of culture and attitude, process and framework. There is no single blueprint for a resilient organisation. However, resilience is strongest in organisations that show all or some of the following traits:

  • a capacity to anticipate threats and the ability to understand their impact
  • an understanding of business impacts and the upstream and downstream dependencies
  • supportive partnerships with critical stakeholders in their supply chain, sector and community
  • an ability to respond to and recover from disruptions as a unified whole-of-organisation team
  • adaptation to the changing environment, and
  • leadership which articulates clear organisational objectives and establishes a strong sense of purpose in response to and recovery from a disruption.

Why resilience is important

Resilient organisations provide an important beacon of hope to communities disrupted by disaster through their ability both to minimise disruption to their services and to quickly return to normality. This in turn helps create a more resilient society.
Resilient organisations understand the need to participate in building resilient individuals and industry sectors as well as a resilient community, as the survival of one is dependent on the others.
While resilience is important for all types and sizes of business, it is especially important for the organisations that own and operate the systems and services that underpin the ability of all Australians to go about their day-to-day activities.

Resilience and critical infrastructure protection

For information about critical infrastructure protection visit the ‘about critical infrastructure’ area of this website.
Resilience is a crucial aspect of critical infrastructure protection. A strong culture of resilience among critical infrastructure owners and operators is essential to ensure that essential services, such as electricity, water and sewerage, communications and food supplies can be restored rapidly following a disaster.

The TISN Resilience Community of Interest

A small group of TISN members from a range of critical infrastructure sectors created the TISN Resilience Community of Interest. The group is interested in promoting the concept of organisational resilience within the business community generally, and critical infrastructure in particular, for the purposes of building a more resilient nation.
Some of the group’s activities involve developing resources such as the Executive Guide and maturity model quick assessment tool, aimed to assist organisations in building their resilience capability.

Resources

Outcomes of the National Organisational Resilience Framework Workshop

In 2007 the TISN Resilience Community of Interest ran an organisational resilience framework workshop to help critical infrastructure owners and operators better understand what is meant by ‘resilience’ and ‘resilient organisations’.
Workshop participants were fortunate to have been addressed by

  • Ken Senser (Wal-Mart)
  • David Simmon (Mississippi Power)
  • Tim Cousins (Tim Cousins & Associates)
  • Dr Erica Seville (University of Canterbury), and
  • Professor Paul t’Hart, (Australian National University).

These speakers freely gave their time to support this initiative.
The outcomes of the workshop and the concepts behind resilience were enthusiastically received at the All Sectors TISN Forum held in May 2008.

Executive Guide: Resilience

The Executive Guide: Resilience provides an overview of resilience and its benefits, suggestions to help establish an organisational culture of resilience and a list of resources.

The Resilience Maturity Model Quick Assessment Tool

The TISN Resilience Community of Interest believes that organisations need to be self-actuated and internally driven to achieve resilience effectively. To assist in this process the group has developed a Resilience Maturity Model Quick Assessment Tool to illustrate how the model might be represented.
The tool is currently at the conceptual stage and still needs to be tested and validated by the group. It is highly subjective and is not scientifically based; it is intended simply to raise awareness about resilience behaviours.
The tool comprises of 39 high- and low-level resilience maturity descriptors arranged under eight behaviour headings. Placing a value of between 1 (representing low resilience) and 5 (representing high resilience) in response to each descriptor on each row will produce a bar graph showing a rating for each behaviour. There is also a column to capture any comments or evidence.
The tool’s second sheet provides a sample illustrating how to complete the tool. The third sheet shows the results graph and the fourth provides some suggested strategies to achieve resilience for each of the eight behaviours.
The tool can be used by organisations as a vehicle to promote thinking about the resilience behaviours. Organisations can add to or modify the descriptors to more closely align with their processes or terminology.

Useful references

The following links are provided for reference only and inclusion does not necessarily indicate endorsement by the TISN.

Contact information