Lessons from disaster: Creating a business continuity plan that really works

Author's Biography

Tracy Hatton is a senior research fellow with Resilient Organisations, a research and consulting group focused on helping organisations, industries and economies to thrive in any disruptive environment. As a social enterprise, the group applies business principles to maximising the positive social impact of its work. It conducts robust, original research to advance the ability of organisations to foresee, proactively respond to, and effectively and efficiently recover from disruptions of all kinds. Resilient Organisations also offers services directly to organisations including organisational and employee resilience benchmarking and resilience enhancement strategy development.

Eleanor Grimshaw joined Resilient Organisations in 2013 after graduating from the University of Canterbury with a Bachelor of Science and Commerce with First Class Honours majoring in Human Resource Management. Understanding how individuals and organisations dealt with crises was of particular interest and she enjoyed helping the ResOrgs team commence research on the subject.

John Vargo is a senior researcher and co-leader of the Resilient Organisations Research Programme based at the University of Canterbury. His interests focus on building organisational resilience in the face of systemic insecurity in a complex and interconnected world. The ResOrgs group (www.resorgs.org.nz) has been researching Organisational Resilience since 2004 and has been heavily involved in related research following the series of devastating earthquakes that hit Christchurch, New Zealand in 2010–11. This research has looked at the impacts of the earthquakes on organisations and economic sectors and the application of the ResOrgs 13 indicator resilience model to systemic recovery. Other recent research projects have focused on the resilience of critical infrastructure organisations in Australia and New Zealand and the key role they play in the resilience of a community and a nation. His research interests are in organisational resilience, information security, risk management and strategic planning.

Erica Seville co-leads the Resilient Organisations Research Programme in New Zealand, a synthesis of engineering, science and business leadership aimed at transforming organisations into those that survive disruption and thrive in the aftermath. She has written more than 100 articles on resilience and is regularly invited to speak at conferences around the world. Her interest in the subject began when she was working in the banking sector in London at the time of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Since then, she has been a member of the NZ reconnaissance to Thailand following the Boxing Day tsunami, has researched earthquake recovery in China and the Black Saturday bushfires in Australia, and is at the forefront of research on Christchurch’s recovery following the 2010–11 earthquakes in New Zealand.