Resilience Spotlight: Mark Armour the Adaptive Business Continuity Pioneer
I am a resilience professional on a mission. I intend to change how organizational readiness is practiced and perceived. I feel very strongly that there are ideas and methods that are not widely known or understood but which would greatly inform and improve our profession. I encourage anyone who may be struggling within this discipline to reach out to me directly. I am a self-professed continuity nerd and love discussing and sharing ideas on the subject. You can easily find me on LinkedIn or you can email me directly.
My Approach to Resilience
I have very strong and specific views of what resilience is. Let me start with a definition:
Resilience is a relative measure of an organization or community’s ability to deal with the unanticipated consequences of change.
What does this mean?
Resilience is not a state to be achieved. We cannot say an organization is or is not “resilient”.
There is no objective measure of resilience (and I don’t see one being developed and universally agreed-upon within my lifetime!).
Resilience is a relative measure. We can only say that an organization is more resilient or less resilient in relation to another organization in certain contexts.
The events we deal with are not always a surprise. Many are planned for and intentional such as mergers and acquisitions, new product or service releases, and even relatively routine IT system changes. All can result in unforeseen outcomes that require a creative response.
Events we traditionally prepare for, like fires, storms and civil unrest can result in issues we never expected when we planned for them. Prior to 2020, for example, business continuity professionals expected that the greatest impact from a pandemic would be loss of staff due to illness. What we experienced was significantly different. It involved performing and delivering work in different ways (remote for office workers, social distancing and protective measures for in-person activities, providing curb side and home delivery for restaurant staff, etc.). In many cases, entire industries were significantly curtailed (live entertainment, sporting events, travel and hospitality), not because of the event but due to decisions by governments and health authorities that were not anticipated.
Also very critical, though not within this definition, is that the work of improving resilience is complex. Complex situations are unpredictable and solutions to the problems encountered in complex environments do not lend themselves to processes that can be easily duplicated. Just because something worked in one instance does not mean it will work elsewhere. In these situations we must be willing to experiment more and engage with others to a much greater degree.
What does this mean in practice?
Build relationships, understanding that stronger relationships contribute to improved resilience.
Accept that the team, department, business or community that you support is already resilient. Your job is to improve that level of resilience.
Seek to understand the resilience capability that exists today. With that you can easily identify the steps that can be taken to improve tomorrow.
If you do these three things to start, you will be well on your way to adopting a new way of working and delivering greater value as a result!
Current Projects
I just returned to the Resilience domain after having managed Governance, Risk and Compliance for almost three years. My GRC role was extremely challenging and left me with little spare time or energy. Now that I can work at a more reasonable pace, I’m eager to get back to engaging with the resilience community.
For much of the past 8 or 9 years, I was a huge proponent of Adaptive Business Continuity. This is a great community of practitioners that share my mission of changing how resilience and organizational preparedness are perceived and practiced.
In years past, I’ve been a bit of a rabble-rouser and I fully intend to start stirring the pot before too long. I’m happy to engage with others, whether they agree or not, but only if they remain respectful. My mantra is the Michael Brooks quote “Be kind to people, be ruthless with systems”.