Three Capabilities for Assessing Crisis Resilience

Begin with the service the organization needs to maintain

Better processes, more stable systems and higher dikes can strengthen protection against disruption. Assessing crisis resilience also requires examining how an organization responds when that protection is exceeded and whether it needs resources or decisions held by other actors.

For this discussion, I use crisis resilience to mean the ability of an organization and its components to withstand planned, unexpected and novel events. I distinguish three capabilities for preparation: resistance, coping capability and cooperation capability. They concern different requirements, so evidence about one cannot settle whether the others are adequately prepared.

Resistance: strengthening protection

Resistance concerns the ability to withstand disruptive events and limit their effects. Reliable processes, suitable systems and protective measures contribute where they address the conditions that could interrupt the organization’s work.

The contribution needs to be assessed against a specified service and scenario. A protective measure can reduce exposure without establishing how the organization would operate if the measure failed. Investment in everyday reliability therefore needs to be connected with a separate examination of response requirements.

Coping capability: organizing a response

Coping capability concerns dealing with disruption that exceeds existing resistance. Management needs to establish which services must continue, which restrictions are acceptable and who can decide when priorities conflict.

Prepared roles, authority and information routes provide a basis for that work. Their practical suitability requires examination through joint application, because a documented allocation of responsibility does not establish that the relevant people can coordinate under the conditions considered.

Improving normal operations and preparing a response can reinforce one another. They address different questions, however: reducing the chance of interruption does not resolve the allocation of scarce resources once it occurs.

Cooperation capability: examining external contributions

An organization may need expertise, premises, supplies or decisions that it cannot provide itself. Cooperation capability begins by identifying suitable actors and examining whether their resources could meet that need under the anticipated conditions.

A potential partner has its own operating requirements and priorities. Before relying on assistance, both organizations need to examine availability, authority, access and the effects on the partner’s work. A known contact can support this examination but does not establish a commitment or guarantee capacity during a shared disruption.

Where a workable arrangement is possible, designated liaison roles can prepare information exchange and coordination. Management remains responsible for deciding which external contributions the preparedness plan can rely on and which remain assumptions.

Assess how the capabilities interact

For one critical service, I recommend examining the protection available, the response needed if it is exceeded and any external contribution on which that response depends. This connects the three capabilities without assuming that strength in one compensates for an unresolved requirement in another.

The result is a service-specific account of preparedness, including the dependencies that still need clarification. It provides a basis for selecting improvements rather than treating resilience as the presence of a plan or the strength of a single protective measure.

Quotable statements

“Crisis resilience is an organization’s ability to withstand planned, unexpected and novel events.”

“Know the right people before the crisis, not during it: cooperation capability is preventive network-building for an emergency.”

“Coping capability prepares the response to events whose effects exceed the intended protective measures.”

→ How Rico Kerstan develops resilience capabilities: Services → The conceptual model: Approach