Facilitated Process for Improving Organizational Resilience
Sonia McManus, Erica Seville, John Vargo, David Brunsdon
Natural Hazards Review, Volume 9, Issue 1, pp81-90 2008.
Abstract
Resilient organizations contribute significantly to resilient communities. However, the task of building more resilient organizations
is complicated by an inability to translate the concept of resilience into tangible working constructs for organizations. In addition,
resilience is often considered to be a crisis or emergency management issue. The link between creating resilient day-to-day operations and
having a resilient crisis response and recovery is typically not well understood by organizations. Resilience for organizations is found to
have three principal attributes. Situation awareness, management of keystone vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity. A facilitated process
is introduced that assists organizations to enhance their performance in relation to these attributes. This process is called resilience
management and was developed and tested with 10 case study organizations selected specifically to represent a wide range of industry
sectors, business types, and sizes in New Zealand. Some of the preliminary resilience issues to arise from this study are also briefly
discussed