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Traditionally, organisations have invested in continuity and redundancy measures purely for reasons of process assurance. However, in a world of diminished tolerances for disruption or reputational damage, and where every organisation is in a constant state of change, these redundancies can be critical to daily operations.
As these heightened expectations become increasingly difficult to manage, we must take advantage of every opportunity to convert adversity into benefit. This means:
- Identifying opportunities in volatile markets and contexts, particularly in the face of changes and challenges like disruptive market participants;
- Identifying opportunities in volatile markets and contexts, particularly in the face of changes and challenges like disruptive market participants;
- Favourably redefining customer and partner expectations in the face of uncertainty by remaining a step ahead;
- Reducing complexity to align business activities with opportunities for growth and advantage when market conditions rapidly change; and
- Accessing richer and more timely insights to make better-informed decisions in the face of ambiguity during fast-moving crises.
Business Considerations
The resilience of organisations is comprised of factors affecting people, assets, processes and stakeholder networks (including third party providers). It is therefore essential that businesses consider:
Organisation
- Do we understand how our resources, customers, processes and third parties are linked, so that we can accurately assess risk impacts?
- Do we know how critical new systems and assets will be to properly resource acquisitions for the resilience they need?
- Could our organisation effectively manage a major incident or crisis – like a protracted outage, asset loss, cyber-attack or disruptive market player?
- How do we monitor and manage threats to our operations and strategy?
- Do we know our plan to respond to a crisis, and how we would integrate with third parties (such as suppliers and industry bodies) to manage a shared issue?
- Do we consistently monitor incidents to identify trends in root causes, and the effectiveness of our overall responses?
People
- How prepared are our people to deal with a major incident, in terms of leadership, mental toughness, tolerance of additional demands and community support?
- Do we know who our most critical people are, and what we will do if they are unavailable?
- What would we do if we lost access to a large volume of our staff at once?
Assets
- What kind of tolerances and redundancies are built into our key assets, like IT systems and buildings?
- What would we do if we lost access to a critical asset – like our customer database, investment records or our building?
Processes
- What assurances do we have that we are prepared to manage rapid surges and troughs in demand?
- Do we understand what our critical processes are, and what they depend on to function?
- Do we have a plan in place to restore critical processes in the event they are stopped?
Stakeholder networks
- Do we ensure that we have assurance our suppliers can maintain their business through major shocks?
- Do we have a clear view of what we depend on our suppliers for, and which of our resources they control?
- Do we know how our customers typically respond to problems such as a loss of supply? Will they wait for us to resume service, or are our goods and services easily replaced?
- Do we understand what it would take to regain our market position and/or reputation following a loss?
In times of crisis, we need to remain calm, and provide impartial, rational advice so that we as a business, and our clients do not get overloaded by the hype, and propaganda content. We need a unified approach both globally and regionally to ensure consistent messaging.
Richard Branson once said, “if you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers” This is true in the current environment we now find ourselves in. The potential economic fallout is critical. Staff looking for new opportunities in diversified markets and or areas to maintain the status quo.
It will take months, perhaps years, if ever, before we can assess the wider implications of COVID-19 in particular the increase in mental health problems not just for our staff but the wider community.
In the short-term businesses must continue to look critically and dispassionately at the effects of COVID-19. Above all else, they must keep an open mind — and look for what is, not for what we fear might be.
How Elementary Consulting (LMNTRY) can help?
Resilience for LMNTRY is to adapt to the changing environment in order to preserve or existing client base and or secure advantage for new and emerging clients. To assist our clients to better identify and manage their resilience we need to consider a network of interdependent factors that come together to absorb shocks and adapt to new circumstances.
By doing so we can assist our clients in providing pragmatic and flexible outcomes by helping them identify their critical priorities and work with them to develop strategies and action plans to assist in resuming operations (whatever that new normal may look like).
Our team can assist with:
Resilience Assessments
Providing independent assessments of continuity risks, organisational preparedness for crises and disruptions, technology resilience, and organisational performance in incident response.
Analysis
Through workshops we are able to ascertain an organisations business processes, systems and resources for business impact, this includes their criticality, resilience and supply chain dependencies and interdependencies.
Outcomes
Work to develop pragmatic, measurable resilience strategies to optimise business processes and limit impacts to assist in the resumption of services.
Implementation
Support for the implementation of resilience programs, including but not limited to executive crisis leadership, infrastructure hardening, and, people resilience.
