Building an organisational resilience maturity framework

Abstract

This paper discusses the challenges faced by organisations as disruptive events increasingly impact across operational, tactical and strategic operating levels. Organisations maintain the foundation of society by building the economy; they provide employment, wealth generation, material, services and community spirit. Simultaneously, they are being forced to diversify and innovate to maintain their share of global or local markets, thus inviting risk into the daily operating model. Organisations with a higher level of internal resilience are better poised to mobilise resources, allocate personnel and prioritise key functions, with leadership teams unafraid to make difficult decisions based on intelligence and evidence-based analysis, although there is still a limited understanding of how a resilience framework can benefit the bottom line. Effective leadership, evidence-based decision-making and business intelligence collection and dissemination are critical to success; however, to truly build resilience capability, organisations need to develop a learning organisation mentality, and move the concept of organisational resilience away from technology to become a people-focused strategy. Organisations must change the mentality of using resilience to generate short-term financial gains and instead focus on long-term sustainability.