Many organisations want to survive the next ‘big thing’ that could impact them, and I am sure your organisation would love to emerge even stronger and more competitive than before. Knowing how well equipped your organisation is in areas such as business continuity, risk management, IT disaster recovery and emergency planning (resilience disciplines) helps to identify how your organisation’s resilience is performing. This blog post will look at how you can use the Resilience Measurement Tool to identify areas for improvement in your organisation’s resilience programme.
Knowing your organisation has achieved an excellent score with the Resilience Measurement Tool is great, but consider how useful it would be to know what your weaknesses are. Resilience is built through continuous change and improvement, through internal and external reflection. It is about being pro-active and adapting to the changing environment, not sitting comfortably knowing you are resilient. Your organisation’s environment is constantly changing, now more than ever – financially, environmentally, technologically, politically and the list goes on … being ready to flex and adapt is a key capability of a resilient organisation.
resilient -adjective
- (of a substance or object) able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed.
- (of a person or animal) able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions
Referring to the extract from the Oxford Dictionary above if you’re an organisation, are you a ‘substance or object’, or a ‘person or animal’. Well, you are probably neither or a combination of the both. If you are a person resilient to a disease, you probably have a good immune system, which is helped by strong cells working together in unison. If you are a man mad object, you have been designed to meet a certain specification or requirement and will demonstrate some resilience under the conditions of your design. Organisations are run and maintained by people where the goal and requirements can change over time. While we would all like to think that our organisation is akin to a fine tuned athlete, this is not always the case. We must continuously pursue the organisation’s health, otherwise we will no longer be as fit and dynamic as we once were. People in organisations do not always work naturally in unison like the cells of a human body. We must encourage the communication and processes within our organisations and ensure that resilience is not just procedural but cultural too.
Going back to the question “Do you want to know your organisation’s resilience weaknesses?” – Yes you do, even more than your strengths! Just like I mentioned above, to be an “athlete” organisation, you need to constantly check and test yourself. We recommend checking the balance of resilience in your organisation every 12-18 months by measuring your resilience, and running training and exercises across your organisation and across your supply chain, so that you can check that your resilience strategy is still aligned with your organisation’s objectives.
Discovering your organisation’s weaknesses can easily be done with the Resilience Measurement Tool. We can compare different departments and business units to identify whether they score high or low with against certain resilience capabilities. We can identify how well these capabilities have been embedded across departments and the whole organisation.
The Resilience Measurement Tool uses responses from staff across the organisation taking part in a survey, used as the ’intelligence’ for creating a custom report specific to your organisations needs. To find out more about measuring resilience click here.
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