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.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions below.

A few of our clients have asked about the questions in our Resilience Measurement Tool and have remarked on how it appears to measure cultural resilience very well, but may not seem to cover more operational areas.

Yes and no

Yes the Resilience Measurement Tool does measure the more cultural aspects of resilience. That is what enables us to get right to the capabilities that actually make organisations resilient, rather than just measuring the extent to which they have the right paperwork.

At the same time, each question in our tool is specifically designed to measure resilience using common every day language. While our questions appear cultural or ‘soft’ we are in fact measuring more operational areas by asking about peoples’ actual experience of these areas. It’s the difference between having a policy in place, and that policy actually being embedded into the organisation’s way of working – it’s culture.

If you’d like to understand this in more detail, feel free to contact us.

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