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The Importance of Organizational Resilience
Today, each organization is exposed to their own threats and vulnerabilities; to survive they need to safeguard their economy from different disruptions such as global hazards, cyber-attacks, and natural disasters. For instance, these sudden disruptions in organizations can cause the breakdown of a key supplier, impurity on the production line, or unsatisfied employees that instigate chaos. Therefore, enhancing organizational resilience should be an important goal of any business to control or prevent abrupt disruptions.
What does resilience stand for?
Resilience is the ability to forestall disruptions, and to efficiently and effectively bounce back from inconvenient situations. Resilience helps to recover control rapidly in times of unexpected change and maintain a general sense of comfort when managing several changes simultaneously without being affected.
What is organizational resilience?
It is a capability of an organization to anticipate crises, react to short-term shocks and adjust to the unexpected disruption. Furthermore, organizational resilience is an essential strategy for an organization to flourish in today’s dynamic world and can be achieved throughout time, set up for the long-term.
The resilience of an organization is a sequence interconnection that depends on the resilience of other organizations, individual resilience, industry, societies and at the ultimate level countries. Meaning, the resilience of an organization is directly related to the resilience of the other organizations which also depends on its customers, suppliers, neighborhoods, governments and competitors. However, organizations are also dependent on and contribute to the individual resilience of its staff and communities (or societies) that they live in. Lastly, organizations resilience is linked to the resilience of its industry and consecutively the industry’s resilience is connected to the resilience of the country.
On that note, resilient organizations build strong internal and external cooperation. So, through these strong internal and external alliances and cooperation, all shareholders can communicate accordingly to swiftly adjust to change when disruption hits the organization. Also, within a resilient organization, the risk is not managed only inside organizational boundaries; they continually manage threat throughout their network of contractors. Organizations are capable of responding rapidly to major occurrences, assuring that they do not expand into crises, and re-establishing the organization as quick as possible. Furthermore, such organizations use emergency response teams that can be promptly mobilized, so that senior leaders do not have to cope with each situation at once while managing other operations.
Mainly, the core focus of resilience is in assuring security, efficiency, effectiveness and rapid adjustment. Assuring safety is critical and necessary for an organization’s operations and systems that are linked to highly distributed and limitless network environments.
Why organizational resilience matters?
- In a world that is continually changing, the sustainability and viability of organizations continues to be tested
- Many organizations came up with the idea that the traditional business strategies are not protecting them from sudden occasions
- Organizations must be able to manage an event that requires change, fast adjustment, and persistence in dominating their competitive approach and profitability
The benefits of resilience will allow organization to:
- Upgraded capacity for anticipating and responding to opportunities and threats
- Acquire the ability to recognize and address vulnerabilities before having a material influence
- Coordinate techniques to integrate current management disciplines that back up organizational resilience
- Have a better comprehension of the concerned parties and dependencies that support strategic objectives
- Promote a culture of joint aims and values
Three principles of Organizational Resilience that are worth mentioning:
1. Leadership:
- More successful results from operational and tactical planning
- Improved leadership capacity
2. Organizational performance:
- Reduced disruption expenses, including decreased insurance payments, decreased vulnerability to uninsured losses
- Improved reputation with shareholders
- Enhanced ability to entice quality staff
- Enlarged market share
3. Change ready:
- Enhanced foresight of emerging external hazards
- Higher ability of creating advanced thinking, and
- Higher ability using calamity for change and development
These qualities can be used to any aspect of organizational capability improvement, and if supported and established within an organization the success will be ensured.
Organizational resilience is a PDCA cultural learning process. Therefore, an organization will not be ready to properly reply to a major incident if the organization did not learn how to deal with the minor incidents happening daily.
How can the new ISO 22316 standard help you?
ISO 22316 provides guidance on accomplishing boosted organizational resilience for any size or type of organization and is not precise to any industry or area. It can help by explaining the nature and scope of resilience. This new ISO standard identifies the attributes and activities which support an organization in enhancing its resilience in a world where change is happening rapidly. This international standard drives organizational resilience to identify the key elements of resilience, and assists in the implementing and measuring of improvements.
PECB is a certification body for persons, management systems, and products on a wide range of international standards. As a global provider of training, examination, audit, and certification services, PECB offers its expertise on multiple fields, and soon ISO 22316 courses as well.
Author:
Erita Rexhepi is a Portfolio Marketing Manager for Continuity Resilience and Service Management at PECB. She is in charge of conducting market research while developing and providing information related to CRSM standards. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact her: marketing.crsm@pecb.com
Contributor:
Sidney R. Modenesi has more than 30 years’ experience in Business Continuity and a strong background in ICT; also he is a PECB partner and trainer. He is forum leader at Business Continuity Institute and has been involved as a technical expert for ISO 22301 and BS 25999 and an active MBCI by The Business Continuity Institute in 2006. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact him: sidney_modenesi@strohlbrasil.com.br
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