Facilitated process for improving organizational resilience

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. © 2008 ASCE.