Managing Operational Resilience in a Pandemic

It is really difficult for an organisation to demonstrate sound governance in these straitened times but that's what it must do.

Leadership must implement sound financial controls and proper oversight to counterbalance and mitigate risks.

The executive members should deliver the strategic vision of the organisation but at all times they must consult and agree this with their non executive colleagues or else the organisation will become lop sided and ineffective in delivering its mission and objectives.

There should be a process of maintaining and refreshing the knowledge,skills and experience of both the executive and non executive directors of the organisation which involves the analysis of risks which the organisation faces.

There should be key milestones agreed with the executive and non executive parts of the organisation covering performance, targets and outcomes which the organisation aspires to.

This will involve assessing the risks the organisation faces and how it intends to manage, mitigate or transfer these risks to other key players, if the latter is possible.

The organisation needs to have an effective horizon scanning mechanism which feeds into the budgetary and reserve setting processes. Such processes must be integrated with the output of local resilience forums.

What risks have been identified and have we allocated a probability for the occurrence and impact of such a risk event occurring?

This should form the base information for our risk register, it is important to view such a document as a live issue and not something that is done for show. We need to know how this plays in real life for the organisation.

I must also bring up the subject of uncertainty here. It is possible to assign certain probabilities to certain risks and manage them accordingly but there will always be events that you cannot predict and to which you cannot assign a probability to. These are the Unknown unknowns the events we never expected and therefore we have never assigned any probability to them in terms of their occurrence or impact. They probably don't appear in your risk register so what can you do about them?

The covid crisis we are living through is regarded by some people as an Unknown Unknown although there is some argument about that.

What can we do about predicting the impact of an uncertain event? Well we can plan as if there will be a failure of our present system of service delivery, from whatever cause.

We then need to have a plan to cope with uncertainty. How could we restart our service in its present or modified form if it where to fail from whatever cause?

Such an option of how to deal with general service failure can be identified as an additional risk option and a way of dealing with uncertainty.

In my next blog I will try to identify the main risk areas facing organisations. The covid crisis may have been very difficult to predict but dealing with a service failure is easier for an organisation to contemplate and whatever is in your plans for a general service failure could be applied in perhaps a modified form, to the covid crisis.

We should all try to do this!!!

😁