How can you define resilience?
Can a diligently implemented Business Continuity Management System lead to Organizational Resilience?
Yes – when properly implemented, I believe this is a key element of resilience. A robust Business Continuity Management System can promote collaboration between all departments and redefine the organizational culture.
Feedback on how to define resilience
Here is some feedback on the above question from BCP Builder Community on LinkedIn:
Culture
- Organizational Resilience is inside the organization in a pure state. Directors and employees feel this without any training. They just they want to keep working.
- The more resilience is added/built in/grows/adopted into an organization the more it becomes part of the day to day activities and there are fewer Business Continuity events. Having a Business Continuity Plan is not the same as being resilient.
Diligence
- During the implementation of Business Continuity Plans, most people follow the procedures outlined minus due diligence. Exercising due diligence is a moral duty of every employee.
Management
- If Management wants to be rewarded for a ‘job well done’ shouldn’t they also suffer if the ‘job isn’t well done’? Having a Business Continuity Plan is nice. However, it must be developed by people that understand how it should be executed and disseminated, understood and practiced. If the Plan is written by people who do not truly understand the business it will have no substance, no matter how many meters thick it may be.
Collaboration
- I think it may be down to a matter of scale. In the truest sense Business Continuity Management alone is focused on resurrecting the business from the near death experience it has just had. “Resilience” is more about a proactive set of controls and frameworks which act together to improve the odds your company will avoid, hopefully, or recover quickly from a bad day. In a Small Business this may be down to one person, in large enterprises the specialist teams of Crisis Management, Business Continuity and IT Service Continuity may be brought together under a Resilience flag. Like so much in this area the answer is always preceded with the phrase, “It Depends”.
If you want to increase your Organizational Resilience, start with preparing a Business Continuity Plan and check out BCP Builder’s Business Continuity Planning Templates.
