The day is finally here and the secret is out!….the Resilience Measurement Tool is available and you can take a sneaky peak at mini version of the tool by clicking here which will give you an idea of what the full version looks and feels like, and we’ll even send you some results!

So what is the Resilience Measurement Tool?

Ah good question…..it’s a web-based tool that enables us to measure and compare your organisation’s resilience. The idea behind the tool is very simple…

As business continuity, resilience, emergency and crisis managers we can often struggle to actually quantify how resilient our organisations are, and also to demonstrate progress or success towards becoming more resilient as a result of our efforts and investment. The Resilience Measurement Tool solves those problems for you.

The tool provides a quantitative measurement of your resilience and clearly identifies your organisation’s resilience strengths and weaknesses. We’re in the process of developing some case studies so that you can see how it works from start to finish (keep your eyes peeled for these in the near future), but you can also see an example of an organisation’s resilience results summary graph here.

In addition to measuring your organisation’s resilience, the tool can also compare it. So, say for example you decide you would like to compare resilience between your office or site in the UK, and another office or site in Switzerland – no problem, we can do that for you! You can also compare resilience between departments or business functions, parts of the organisation with different cultures (common in acquisitions and mergers) etc.

Once we have collected data on your organisation’s resilience we go away and analyse your data and present you with a full customised results report.

So how do you measure resilience then?

We asked ourselves the same thing back in 2007, and since then we have been working through the Resilient Organisations Research Programme at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand to find an answer! The Business Resilience Intelligence Tool is the result of over three years robust research, and we’re continuously working to tweak and improve it.

You can find a research report that summarises the development of the tool on our Publications page. For more information about resilience in general and to answer questions like What is resilience? click on this link.

How is this tool different?

There are a few tools around which measure business continuity or organisational preparedness to some degree, and many of them are very useful as audit tools for programme management. However the Resilience Measurement Tool provides actual data about how resilient your organisation is. Instead of focusing on whether senior managers and continuity professionals have the right intentions and documentation, it measures whether those cultural resilience values have actually been embedded across the organisation.

As many business continuity managers know, embedding plans and strategies into the organisations culture is a critical part of the business continuity lifecycle, but it is also the step which converts documents and plans into real resilience capabilities! The Resilience Measurement Tool enables you to measure, check and demonstrate that.

If you would like to discuss the tool in more detail, get to know us as a company, and find out how the tool might work at your organisation and what it could deliver, give us a ring on +44 1582 227872 or email amy@stephensonresilience.co.uk

Both academics and practitioners in the fields of resilience, continuity, emergency, crisis and disaster management write articles, posts and papers about topics important to their field. Some of the most interesting of these outputs share lessons from previous events, provide case studies, introduce new tools and technologies and share research findings and results.

But where does this important information get published and how can we find it?

I have increasingly seen requests for information from a variety of sources asking this very question…I’ve written, or would like to write, a paper about …. where could I publish it?

The social networks have also provided a simple and effective solution! I have started a list of the publications, websites and places in which we can all publish, search for and find information on resilience and related fields. It can be accessed through the following link, and if you know of any others, please feel free to add them!

http://tiny.cc/extmx

Ooooooo…..I can feel the anticipation and as we’re putting the last few touches to a new service which we will launch over the next few weeks.

You’ll have to keep your eyes and ears peeled for details, but it should be a good opportunity for businesses to take adavantage of a great marriage between business resilience and business intelligence!

Since evidence of the recent security breach at Sony was discovered on 20th April, Sony have hesitated and stumbled over their communications with the Police and their own customers. According to a BBC News report this morning (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13304551) there is no evidence of personal information or credit card data being misued but Sony has shut down a website displaying some data belonging to American customers. The Sony crisis has now been going on for 20 days, and many customers are still unsure of when the crisis might end!

How long can a crisis last?

Crises come in all shapes and sizes, some are sudden shocks and some seems to accumulate over time; they can be over quickly or can last for a very long time. In 2005 the Buncefield Oil Depot explosion and fire was a crisis which lasted different periods of time for each different party involved; this is quite common and provides a good example of the different perspectives.

For members of the public, the crisis lasted a few days as black smoke billowed out and closed a section of the M1 for a short time. For local residents in the Hemel Hempsted area, property damage, fear and anger lasted for weeks and months as they faced uncertainty about why the depot had exploded and whether it would be rebuilt. For the organisations based at the industrial estate alongside the oil depot, the crisis lasted months as some of them failed and they too faced uncertainty about the future security of the site. For the Hertfordshire Fire & Rescue Service and the Hertfordshire County Council the crisis lasted for many months as the irs continued to burn and the social and planning implications of the event became clearer. For the the fuel companies involved, BP and Total, the crises also continued for many months as hey struggled with the ongoing Government inquirey and restructured their resources. In many ways the crisis has yet to be fully resolved. Although a full report was released about the explosion and fire, when you drive up to the site on Cherry Tree Road it’s a desolate forgotten waste land, cordoned off by temporary fencing.

Other examples are provided by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year and the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, both of which will continue to affect communities and organisations for many years.

How do you know when a crisis is over?

If you talk to some people in the NHS hey would argue that the crisis is never over, they seem to be in constant crisis! However luckily for most organisations this is not the case and most people can distinctly remember the moment when they realised that business as usual rules no longer applied, that the situation has changed and that this was crisis….so how do you know when a crisis is over?

The end of a crisis is usually not as sudden as its beginning. The urgency of meetings and decisions seems to slowly fade, funding that was available is reallocated to more urgent projects, and the executive board don’t seem as interested in crisis updates or planning.

Perhaps the NHS staff in question are right, perhaps we are all always in a state of crisis. Some from smaller organisations have also commented that they are always in a state of crisis, either struggling because they are doing poorly or struggling because things are going so well that they need to keep up and are desperately trying to maintain momentum!

If this is the case then perhaps, as the business world continues to increase in complexity, we need to ask ourselves why our business as usual and crisis methods are different? and whether crisis tools and structures could help during business as usual?

We come across so many questions about resilience ranging from what is resilience to how can resilience protect my bottom line… So we thought it was about time we started an FAQ with frequently asked questions about business resilience and because we have both academic and practitioner experience, if we don’t know the answer, we’ll find it anyone else does! So feel free to have a read and pose any business resilience question you like by clicking on the comment bubble next to the title of the post.

We’ll Start with an Obvious One – What is Resilience?

It’s all about surviving and thriving! Business resilience is an organisation’s ability to identify, plan for and mitigate potential threats and respond adaptively to disruption, even creating opportunities and finding the silver lining from crises. IT disaster recovery alone is not enough!

Resilience is about more than ensuring continuity through disruption or recovering and bouncing back from disaster; resilience is about protecting your bottom line and thriving and bouncing forward to create advantage over less adaptive competitors.

A resilient organization effectively aligns its strategy, operations, management systems, governance structure, and decision-support capabilities so that it can uncover and adjust to continually changing risks, endure disruptions to its primary earnings drivers, and create advantages over less adaptive competitors.

Starr, R. Newfrock, J. and Delurey, M. (2003) Enterprise Resilience: Managing Risk in the Networked Economy, Strategy and Business (30), 2-10

You can think of resilience as un umbrella term which is used to describe the way your business survives and thrives, even when things go wrong. Resilience results from a combination of planning, innovating and training before a crisis, and adapting and innovating and learning during and after a crisis.

Steve Clarke – What constitutes business resilience?

Ok so we have our first question via a group on LinkedIn! Steve Clarke has asked – what constitutes business resilience? Well we have included an answer to the question ‘what is business resilience’ in the original post, but I feel perhaps what constitutes business resilience is a slightly different question, so here’s your answer Steve….

Business resilience is an organisational outcome; it’s a goal which organisations can aim for. Disciplines such as business continuity management, risk management, crisis management, security, IT disaster recovery and high reliability leadership are all tools which organisations can use to help them achieve resilience.

The Resilient Organisations Research Programme (www.resorgs.org.nz) model of organisational resilience suggests that resilience is made up of 2 dimensions (planning and adaptive capacity) which in turn can be measured using 13 indicators. A research report about the development of the model is included on our Publications page.

Sayed Harir Shah – How do you consider the role of risk, policy, safety, HR, disaster recovery and business continuity in business resilience?

 Another question from Sayed Harir Shah on a LinkedIn group who asks,

“I am a disaster risk management consultant and practitioner and for me Resilience is a very wide concept. Regarding Business Resilience, it is interconnect and interdependent mechanism based on legal reform of risk reduction, adaption and implementation of policies and plans, physical, social and economic safety of assets, availability of human and financial resources for developing and designing disaster recovery and business continuity planning. How you consider these aspects in your business resilience concept?”

Thanks for your question Sayed. We think of resilience in a similar way to yourself, business resilience is an organisational goal achieved through the art of integrating resilience disciplines such as business continuity and risk management (see our previous answer to Steve’s question. We consider these resilience disciplines as tools which, when balance in combination can build business resilience. The trick is knowing the strengths of each resilience discipline, being able to combine them successfully, and then continuously readdressing and realigning that balance as the organisation changes.

Sayed Harir Shah – How difficult it is to combine all of these multi-dimension and multi-sectoral functions together to make businesses resilient?

Combining all of the resilience disciplines together to actually build resilience is definitely one of the challenges that we face. It’s different for every business and even within organisations the approach needs to be continuously adjusted and tweaked in relation to changes in the business environment and its risk profile.

To do it we use all of the disciplines and their associated tools as a bit of a pick n’ mix, and then we choose the most appropriate tool for the job. In many ways BCM managers have been doing this for years, but we need to take it further. In practice it’s about integrating your approach right from the start with integrated holistic policies, governance, oversight, evaluation and measurement. After all if the purpose of disciplines such as BCM and risk management is to help build resilience, then their effectiveness can only be judged by the extent to which they achieve that.

We use tools from each discipline to improve organisations’ planning and make them more responsive, adaptive, agile and competitive during ‘business as usual’. Through training and awareness we then transfer the knowledge locked up in documents and management boards into actual capabilities.

What makes us think that in the heat of a crisis people will suddenly become more qualified, more experienced, better decision makers, or that they will use new technology, systems or processes? 

It makes perfect sense but I first heard it from Professor Scot Phelps at the Emergency Management Academy of New York. In a presentation at the World Conference on Disaster Management in 2009 he argued that crisis systems and processes should be as close as possible (or the same as) business as usual systems and processes. He gave the example where managers often claim that crisis systems and process such as crisis communication tools, are not effective or are completely ignored during crisis events. Of course his conclusion was that if people are not well practised in using a system or process during business as usual, they certainly will not use it effectively during a crisis.

You can’t suddenly expect people to work in new ways during a crisis!

Most recently this issue came up again in a conversation on a Crisis, Emergency and Disaster Recovery Professional discussion board where one member asked whether crisis management teams performed roles that were an extension of their day-to-day duties or whether they use a different unique structure. This highlights a wider hot topic of discussion within business resilience disciplines over the past few months, how much of business continuity, crisis management, risk management etc. contributes towards business as usual? Of course the answer is that the purpose of all resilience disciplines is to support, protect and enable the organisations objectives so it should all contribute to business as usual.

Feel free to comment by clicking on the speech bubble icon next to the title of this post.