Building Bridges Broadens Our Purpose.
Implementing Resilience
We need to broaden our purpose.
This is the third post of a series of six — the last one will be a conclusion based (hopefully) on your posted comments, insights, shared ideas and programs.
What is Resilience? The previous post, offered a working definition. Resilience is the ability to recover from crisis.
· Crisis is a core threat to the system that presents strategic and operational challenges because of uncertainty.
· Recover means a capacity to become functional or anew.
I unabashedly stated the framework was in disaster, risk, and emergency management, but the definition may be applicable to other areas. Most grave concerns are due to the lack of a proven, suitable model that is feasible and acceptable. The crisis is the event or state that is unexpected, overwhelms resources/system, or exceeds the current knowledge base and differs from emergencies or issues our present resources can handle. The uncertainty is the key to understanding the need and value for resiliency.
Our homeland security enterprise has transitioned from a counter-terrorist centric construct (9/11 attacks) to an all-hazards approach (Katrina catastrophe) and is now challenged by the uncertainty of emerging threats, cascading events, and other 21st century risks and vulnerabilities. The call for innovative solutions, collaboration, integrated resources, and coordinated strategy by a whole community approach is the call to enhance resilience. As popular literature seeks answers to times of increasing volatility and instability, the federal strategy documents promote a whole community approach in five mission areas for preparedness. The goal focuses on a national preparedness system for prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery (all-hazards approach). The importance of whole community inclusiveness for capabilities based planning creates a community integration of goal design and innovation. The appeal of strengthening our resilience is capacity building for collaboration and innovation.
This is a tremendous opportunity for many of us to broaden our purpose and value. The concept of an overarching network or culture to bridge our individual silos of excellence demonstrates critical potential, especially in long-term mitigation and recovery. Self-examination may prove your high reliable organization is a silo in need of bridging all five-mission areas (preparedness framework). How are you measuring your performance? Crime stats, response times or plans without partners? Is this a reflection that we are limiting ourselves (despite our comprehensive mission statements)? We need to promote a more proactive emergency management. Because emergency management is intertwined in the homeland security enterprise as public safety and public security share the challenges of globalization, marginalization, inadequate critical infrastructure, and hyper-connected technology. We need to broaden our purpose.
Implementing Resilience. The first post (Bouncing Back) introduced the 100 Resilient Cities program with the Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) as the focal point. Here is list of targets for the CRO from the site:
1. “Works across government departments to help a city improve internal communications, and to address its own complexities…
2. Brings together a wide array of stakeholders to learn about the city’s challenges and help build support for individual initiatives, and for resilience building in general…
3. Leads the resilience strategy, a six-to-nine-month process during which the CRO brings in a wide variety of stakeholders, to help identify the city’s resilience challenges, its capabilities and plans to address them, and then to identify the gaps between these two…
4. At the same time, the CRO acts as the “resilience point person,” ensuring that the city applies a resilience lens so that resources are leveraged holistically and projects planned for synergy.”
These are great goals, especially in a global environment with complex cultural, political, physical and social issues. But I would respectfully like to offer an additional approach; a boots on the ground, bottom-up means to implement the strategic concepts of resilience, collaboration and innovation.
The examination of various definitions for resilience provided a holistic vision, comprehensive valuation, and key strategic concepts. From a practitioner’s view, the ends (goals) and ways lacks means (resources). The 100RC Challenge is a smart and appropriate start. After discovering their efforts, I’m a big fan, and wish to contribute a roadmap for actions, standards, and building a collaborative and innovative capacity. The following organizational elements involve the provision of authority, slight modification to the Incident Command System (ICS) or establishing organizations to prioritize standards. The proposed implementation options are:
• Integration of the Resilience Officer position into NIMS,
• Create Resilience Officer position within your own agency,
• Establishing Regional or Local Collaborative Networks,
• Formation of functional Task Forces,
• Providing authority to a National Workgroup for a centralized comprehensive strategy.
Next posts will be a discussion of each suggested action. Please add your comments, your insight is welcomed!
