Resilience as a subject is getting wider coverage nowadays. For example, Resilient Australia is an example of an organisation promoting the concept and holding competitions to award prizes to entities judged to have done outstanding work in the area of resilience. Resilient Organisations (ResOrgs) is a public research programme based in New Zealand as a collaboration between research and industry. What then is resilience? While there is always the dictionary definition of the word “resilience” to fall back on, it may also be helpful to use a resilience management model, in the same way that business continuity models exist. Yet is there actually anyone out there using a resilience management model?
If you look at search results in Google for example on the phrase “resilience management model”, the first three pages (you’d have to be stubborn to want to look at more) refer exclusively to the CERT model. You can find a brief discussion of the model elsewhere in this blog. Possible conclusions are: CERT has done an exceptionally effective job in marketing its model; or CERT is the only organization that has made such a model. But could it also be that while the CERT model exists and has been publicised, no significant application of the model exists?
Typing in “Resilience management case studies” gived more varied results, suggesting that model or no model, some people are simply getting on with the job of improving resilience – however you want to define it. However, in the same way that business continuity models help to establish reference points and benchmarks, resilience management models should do the same thing. That would allow for meaningful comparisons of risk and projected futures for different organisations, communities or even countries. And in the same way that BC management models have now become accessible in terms of a simplified vocabulary and framework, the same could usefully be done for resilience management models as well, wherever they are.