Roads to Resilience

Section 6: Resilience Principle No 5: ‘Review and Adapt’

Overview of the ‘Review and Adapt’ principle

a constant improvement in performance. Every opportunity, adverse event and near-miss incident is reported and analysed, so that the organisation can decide what actions should be taken to learn and benefit from the experience. This approach is not limited to operational risks and resilient organisations seek to review changes that indicate that strategy and/or tactics should be adapted to achieve greater success.

Review and adapt is the resilience principle that indicates that an organisation is willing to learn from adverse events, circumstances or near-misses and adapt processes and structures accordingly. Learning from experience is a core value of the resilient organisation and can equally apply to learning from success to achieve greater success next time. To support the achievement of this principle, resilient organisations have a strong desire to achieve

Introduction to ‘Review and Adapt’

Learning is a crucial part of resilience and it was found that the case study organisations have a strong focus on reviewing every risk-related incident, including not only serious issues but also relatively minor ones. The aim is to identify where current approaches to risk management and resilience can be enhanced to make them more robust when dealing with predicted events and suitably flexible to deal with the unexpected, including unexpected business opportunities. Every incident is therefore treated as representing the chance to learn and improve. Resilient organisations take the time to review incidents and adapt the approach, risk attitude and processes to improve the future handling of incidents, as well as enhance strategy and tactics. Resilient organisations review and adapt to changes and adverse events and there are four components associated with this principle: 1.  Structured Learning: the philosophy of resilient organisations is that risk management and resilience can always be improved. The emphasis on learning means that employees are trained in risk management and processes are regularly enhanced, going beyond simply achieving compliance. For example, IHG has a comprehensive training programme for all employees, with e-learning modules defined for many job functions and translated into several languages. Resilient organisations place considerable emphasis on learning and continuous improvement, so that they become core values 1 . 1 Resilient companies find ways to capture and disseminate learning, so that the ability to deal with risk is not totally dependent on the experience of a few key people. Understanding ‘Review and Adapt’

2.  Near-Miss Reporting: every event or issue that is identified by the risk radar of the organisation is reported and reviewed. Drax takes photographs of safety near-misses and uses these to communicate the types of issues that employees and contractors must be aware of. Although AIG works in a completely different sector, it also places strong emphasis on reporting situations where no financial losses occurred, but where valuable learning can be extracted from the near-miss. Resilient organisations will constantly be looking for ‘weak signals’ that circumstances are changing and should be reviewed to decide if behaviours should be adapted. performance. For example, scenario planning is a key method for driving learning and panels of experts independently review scenarios and the actions that teams recommend for dealing with them. Non-executive directors are also involved in reviewing all aspects of risk management and resilience in most of the case study organisations. For example, IHG “reviews itself annually, a third party comes in and does their research with each of us” (Regional President the Americas and IHG Board Member). 3.  Independent Reviewing: the case study organisations value independent reviews of

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Section 6: Resilience Principle No 5: ‘Review and Adapt’