Next: How climate disruption reaches your critical processes.
Operational resilience and climate disruption — part 2 of 3.
A business can deliver quickly, keep costs low and still struggle when its normal arrangements change. An operation that depends on every person, supplier and system being available may perform well in ordinary conditions while having little room to respond to disruption.
That creates an important question for growing businesses: which efficiencies remove waste, and which remove the options needed to keep essential work going?
The answer requires more than a general commitment to resilience. It requires decisions about particular processes, the consequences of their interruption and the cost of maintaining practical alternatives.
Efficiency and resilience can support each other
Clear instructions, accurate information and fewer avoidable errors can improve everyday performance and make disruption easier to manage. A team that understands the work is better placed to recognise when something has changed.
Other decisions involve a trade-off. Additional stock ties up cash. Training a second person takes time. Maintaining an alternative supplier may involve qualification costs and smaller purchasing discounts. Those costs need to be weighed against the consequences of losing the primary arrangement.
Our suggestion is to examine these choices process by process. Some resources can be reduced safely. Others provide valuable time or alternatives when a critical dependency is unavailable.
Resilience includes anticipation, response and learning
Stephanie Duchek’s research framework describes organisational resilience through three stages: anticipation, coping and adaptation. It provides a useful way to consider how organisations prepare for unexpected events, deal with them and learn afterwards. This is a conceptual framework, rather than a guarantee that a particular management system will produce a measured result. Read Duchek, Organisational resilience: a capability-based conceptualisation (2020).
Applied to critical work, that suggests three practical questions. What could interrupt the activity? What can people do when it happens? What changes after the organisation has learnt from the experience?
A procedure describing normal work answers only part of that enquiry. People also need usable alternatives, clear authority and a way to improve the process when circumstances expose a weakness.
When a backup is only a name on a list
Consider an illustrative business that has recorded a second supplier for an essential material. The supplier has never been tested, its current capacity is unknown and the customer has not approved its material. When the main supplier stops delivering, the alternative cannot be used immediately.
The business has identified a possible option. It has yet to establish a workable response. The important measure is how long it would take to restore acceptable delivery, including checks, approvals, transport and payment arrangements.
The UK Climate Change Committee identifies geographic concentration and vulnerable production or logistics as factors that can increase supply-chain climate risk. Its briefing discusses actions businesses can take to manage those dependencies. Read the CCC briefing, Resilient supply chains.
For an individual business, this raises a further question: do two suppliers genuinely provide alternatives if both depend on the same location, transport route or upstream producer?
Test the work, including the decisions
A short discussion exercise can uncover gaps before a live disruption. Choose one essential activity, describe a plausible interruption and ask the people involved to explain their response in sequence.
- What would alert us, and who would check the information?
- Which commitments and safety considerations take priority?
- Who can authorise spending or a change to normal working?
- What alternative can we use, and what evidence shows it is ready?
- How will we tell employees, customers and suppliers what has changed?
- How will we restore normal work and incorporate lessons afterwards?
Record the gaps rather than rewarding confident answers. A missing approval, inaccessible document or unclear responsibility is a useful finding. Where practical, follow the discussion with a controlled test of the arrangement. A conversation can identify weaknesses; it cannot by itself prove that recovery will work.
Make process control flexible enough to help
A critical process management system can provide a place to connect responsibilities, instructions, controls and operational knowledge. Its contribution to resilience depends on whether people can use that information under pressure and whether the organisation maintains it.
Good control should clarify which requirements must be preserved and where people have authority to adapt. If every exception waits for one senior individual, the decision process itself may be a constraint.
For a growing organisation, the aim is to build dependable everyday work alongside the ability to respond when conditions change. That may mean reducing rework in one area while deliberately retaining spare capacity in another.
Where would you retain an alternative?
What looks like spare capacity in your business but would be difficult to do without during disruption? We would welcome examples of how leaders make that judgement. Join the discussion with E-Squared about the relationship between operational control, resilience and growth.
Also in this series: What makes work critical to a growing business?
