WHAT RESILIENCE DO WE HAVE?

What do we currently do to:

• Prevent disruption occurring, as far as possible?
• Respond to a disruptive incident to mitgate the impact?
• Recover quickly and effecively from the disruption?
• Learn and improve from both incidents and near misses?

Organisations can identify and document the necessary resources (i.e. people, processes, technology, facilities, suppliers or third parties, and information) required to deliver each of their essential outcomes.  A critical element of resilience is understanding how each essential service is provided from end-to-end and from surface-to-core. The objective is to know how the system is expected to work and what makes it work in practice.

We often think of resilience as the absence of disruptions (or as an acceptable level of risk).  In this perspective, resilience is defined as a state, where as few things as possible go wrong.  An alternative to the conventional approach of trying to make ‘as few things as possible go wrong’ is to try to make ‘as many things as possible go right’.  Thus, the mapping approach should start with looking at what you usually do well.