Defining resilience principles to facilitate business to incorporate resilience theory into strategy, management and reporting such that they build a resilient business able to adapt to global change risks and uncertainties.
Background to project
All businesses want to be resilient. Being resilient means that an organisation is able to effectively adapt and respond to challenges and continue to create value both in the short and long term. This is even more true in a time of global uncertainty and instability where the unprecedented pace of global change is bring to the forefront new and emerging risks leaving business in a constant state of flux.
As such business is faced with greater difficulty and uncertainty associated with understanding their risks and maintaining sustainability. It is no longer enough for business to be addressing global social and ecological challenges by being less unsustainable there is a need for a transformational change; one that firmly refocuses business within the limits of the system in which they operate.
Businesses need to find new avenues and additional opportunities to withstand, mitigate, and adapt to global risks and threats. It is in this light system resilience is an imperative to enable business to become adaptive and responsive to global change.
A Resilience Imperative
Systems resilience shifts the corporate sustainability concept away from focussing on how to achieve and maintain stability, reducing resource use, pursuing economic grow and increased human wellbeing, toward how to deal with change, disturbance and uncertainties so as to always create opportunities.
Embracing systems resilience is not new but because it application is around building and maintaining adaptive capacity in the light of change more and more businesses are taking aspects of the theory into their business practices and value creation. By resilience we mean social-ecological resilience, which integrates systems of people and the natural environment, as opposed to engineering or psychological resilience.
Systems resilience is an attractive state in which to position and maintain business sustainability especially since it significantly contributes towards building a resilient business. A system that is able to maintain its resilience and supports resilient business implies one that they have the capability to
1) adapt to changing contexts,
2) withstand sudden shocks, and
3) recover to a desired equilibrium, either the previous one or a new one, while preserving the continuity of its economic security.
Research Objective
Through a collaborative research project with PwC, it was the intention of this project to answer the following research questions:
- What is the transformational change needed within business so that organisations contribute optimally through their approach and activities for sustainability?
- What is the current state of business contributions towards this transformational state?
- What area/gap between transformational and current state can we assist in closing through development of a tool / guide? What will this tool / guide look like?
Principles for Systems Resilience
We developed a set of seven principles in a series of workshops with a multi-disciplinary team tasked with development, testing and refinement. These principles represent the transformational change needed to move business from being less unsustainable towards building and maintaining systems resilience for adaptation and mitigation in the light of global change.
Current state of business towards embracing systems resilience
Through a mixed methods data collection approach, namely that of semi structured interviews and through content analysis of integrated reports, with 10 JSE listed organisations we defined a preliminary state of the adaptation of resilience within business.
It is clear from the research that aspects of systems resilience in terms of resilience theory are incorporated into business strategy, management and reporting currently. In fact there are some very progressive forward thinking organisations that already apply the majority of the principles. On the other extreme, even though certain organisations have sustainability and integrated reports, resilience hardly features. From this research we determined that we needed to develop a guidance that would enable a business to understand the extent that they currently embrace resilience and then what they would need to do to progress towards being fully inclusive of all the principles.
Journeying towards Resilience: A maturity toolkit
We recognise that embedding resilience into a business will take time. As a starting point, this research designed a guidance with a set of worksheets for each principle. These worksheets allow a business to assess the extent to which they are currently addressing resilience. The worksheets expand on each principle, providing indicators that will enable the business to define their state as well as decide what future state they would like to achieve.
Maturity Guideline: Building Resilience into Business Strategy, Management and Reporting
