How social media can improve organisational resilience when disaster strikes

The devastating earthquakes that hit the South Island of New Zealand in 2010 and 2011 and over 4000 bigger aftershocks rattling Christchurch and Canterbury have caused an estimated $40 billion damage to the city, including wide parts of the CBD and around 100,000 homes. While there are parts of the city ‘red-zoned’ and will not be rebuilt, the rebuild of the rest is expected to take at least 15 years. The whole inner city is going to be re-arranged and while this is still undergoing, a lot of local businesses have moved out of the centre to somewhere else.

 

Christchurch, like New Zealand as a whole, has first-world ICT infrastructure and high rates of technology uptake across all sectors of society. This technology uptake and the rising importance of social media in society made the earthquakes one of the first natural disasters, where social media played a major role in direct response but also the long-term recovery. In the immediate aftermath of the major quakes in September 2010 and February 2011, social media services including Twitter provided crucial communication channels for individuals, communities and organizations. With a disrupted electricity supply, and unreliable SMS services, Twitter was an up to date and reliable source for eyewitness accounts and crucial public information.

During the recovery phase social media stayed an important part of people’s lives. While the CBD was corded and totally locked down, people didn’t know if businesses moved somewhere else, what the opening hours under these special circumstances were or which alternatives there were to purchase a certain product, service or simply going out for dinner. Social media enabled people to connect with each other for emotional support, information, calls to action or organizational purposes.

Various online communities developed around the central problems of the earthquakes, from neighbourhood groups helping with insurance claims, to forums and message boards where people posted pictures of lost and found pets or pages where people discussed, how the city should look like after the rebuild, to the Facebook page of the Student Volunteer Army, a student group who organised and coordinated volunteers through a Facebook page.

Apart from the examples mentioned above, I also encountered a couple of business uses in my research. With an online social media platform an organisation or group gains a channel to interact with the community, but also with customers and staff, enhancing business resilience as well.

In the case of Mainland Press, a Christchurch based newspaper business, print production was not possible immediately after the earthquakes. Through a newly found social media site, the Mainland Press reporters were still able to communicate their local news and information until the newspaper went back to normal production. But even after that, their Facebook page ‘Rise Up Christchurch’ remained an important platform for information exchange and discussion with a huge amount of followers.

For other businesses, social media became important a bit later on. To bring life back into the city centre, a transitional mall with shops in shipping containers was build up and re-opened. To spread the news about what was happening there and to keep people up to date about special offers in this new mall, a Facebook page was created and a community was built.

I could go on describing different examples of businesses and other people using social media in the aftermath of the earthquake for different purposes but you probably get what I am aiming for already. All communities are very different and tailored specifically for and through the people engaging, who are interested in the issue, be it earthquake updates, help or the latest news about what is happening in the inner city. Anyway, social media is a great way to keep in touch with your customers, serving as a two-way channel, which enables communication and can help a business or community to reach out and make it more resilient. In most cases, social media was not something organisations or businesses had used before the earthquakes, nor was there a strategy in place for how to deal with the new tool. Even though your social media presence isn’t a core feature in your marketing strategy, it doesn’t hurt to learn these skills and build up a community before a crisis happens.

Martina Wengenmeir is a PhD candidate at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her research interests lie in cross-medial information flow and online communities and publics.

Improving organisational resilience – the real justification for business continuity

Although the term resiliency is widely used in setting corporate goals, it is rarely defined in a way in which it can be meaningfully assessed. Traditionally business continuity has provided a proven means of reducing the severity of disruptive interruptions by understanding the operational priorities of the business, the infrastructure that supports them and the acceptable timescales for response and recovery. Business continuity practitioners have always argued that by taking a holistic approach to an organisation, critical dependencies and single points of failure can be better identified and mitigated, thus leading to improved reliability and customer satisfaction. This might seem a reasonable assumption but it is hard to really prove.

This lack of objective proof has perhaps contributed to the often reported difficulties in achieving more substantial stakeholder buy-in for business continuity at the most senior levels in an organisation. Perhaps this partly explains why the change in business terminology from business continuity management (BCM) to organisational resilience is happening so rapidly in many companies. Certainly key individuals promoting the resilience agenda see the opportunity to bring a new discipline into play at the strategic level as a game changer. Adaptability (rather than response) is becoming the new buzzword and traditional business continuity practitioners need to adapt to this new reality.

The construction of more and more detailed plans has failed to achieve the corporate goals for security and resilience that we as practitioners might have expected. The speed of business change makes the need for a more dynamic way of responding to crises ever more important, but as BCM professionals we need to change the way we work – developing organisational resilience capability and the people skills needed to take control of unexpected events should be our primary goals. Good planning is still essential but not writing more compliance based procedural plans.

So what are the obstacles to implementing a successful business resilience plan? Firstly, getting support from the top of the organisation and by this I mean not just budget, but rather the way the message needs to be enthusiastically and positively communicated from the top. Secondly, getting buy-in from the people who have to deliver the plans; this is predominantly the middle managers who are often already over committed and under resourced. Thirdly, making the risk look and feel real because if it is seen as just compliance then you will create a tick-box mentality.

To successfully address these obstacles, it is essential to properly understand how the business actually works and who the really influential players are, those whose opinions are sought and listened to. Find out what the real drivers of success are and what top management really worry about. Do not talk to senior management until you know what is important, any lack of company knowledge will ruin your credibility immediately so prepare well before you talk to them. Build awareness programmes and get your message right when you give presentations as the people who you need on your side are not interested in technical solutions, they want to know about what you can do to help them eliminate or reduce future business problems.

Business resilience is much more than recovery from disaster or serious incidents. It is the ability to identify and monitor risks to prevent them from happening in the first place, or at least minimise the impact. It is about the capability of the organisation to deal with incidents that cannot possibly be predicted or adapt itself to changes in its external circumstances such as civil war in a key supplier country. In some ways it is difficult to highlight companies who are good at resilience because by definition they will be the ones that handle problems, major incidents and even crises almost seamlessly.

The top challenge on the horizon for BCM professionals is changing the mind-set of people both inside the profession and outside it. We have many excellent programme managers but there is not enough really innovative thinking going on. The enthusiasm for the idea of resiliency does give us a chance to articulate a wider strategic vision for our discipline. Thinking up relevant approaches to deal with issues that do not fit the old BCM model of physical disruption to assets is a real challenge – cyber resiliency must be high on our agenda as is mitigating reputational damage using social media. It might be difficult but if we don’t do it, who will?

Lyndon Bird
Technical Director at The Business Continuity Institute

The development of organisational resilience

With the search for the comprehension and understanding of the meaning of organisational resilience gathering pace with each passing month, the Business Continuity Institute is now well embedded, perhaps even pivotal, in this latest quest to push forward the boundaries of the thinking and theories that relate to protecting and maintaining the value of organisations. The debate about what organisational resilience means in practical terms to organisations and industry practitioners is ongoing, but the recent publication of the BS 65000 – Guidance on Organisational Resilience – as a draft standard for public comment by the British Standards Institute is clearly another step forward in this search for the 'Holy Grail' in enterprise risk management.

The debate about organisational resilience is fascinating because it has been led by a number of academics and academic institutions, which is slightly counterintuitive in the field of social science research and organisational management studies. The usual methodology in the field is for phenomena to occur, the academics then research the phenomena and attempt to understand the causation, context, applicability and the whole myriad of considerations that underpin a theory in the social sciences arena.

With organisational resilience however, this has not been the case. Academics have postulated on the theory of organisational resilience without having the case studies to investigate and sense check their theories against. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that organisational resilience can be a point in time phenomena, so no evidence of the measurement of an organisation’s resilience over a protracted period of time has been published to date. To the contrary, one recently published study stated that an organisation was resilient in its operations, despite the fact that the organisation under consideration no longer exists and its demise was well documented and planned in advance. This situation seems to be counterintuitive to the theory, especially when there is some measure of consensus amongst academics and practitioners that capacity to adapt to change and evolve and thrive in a structured and strategic manner is a key part of what may constitute the state of resilience for any particular organisation.

The BCI has worked to address the gap in the understanding and meaning of organisational resilience by leveraging the wealth of experience and expertise that can be found in the ranks of its members and actively worked to support the development of BS 65000. The BCI also actively participated in the development committee’s deliberations, inputting member’s views and thoughts throughout the development cycle, exactly as it did with BS 25999 Parts 1 and 2, BS PD25666 on Testing and Exercising, ISO 22301, ISO 22313, BS 11200 on Crisis Management and the many other relevant industry standards that have been published nationally and internationally over the past six years.

So back to BS 65000 on organisational resilience and what is happening now, the comments that were submitted from the public consultation phase have now all been collated and the standard’s development committee is now considering those comments and amending the text of the draft standard where that is necessary. After completing the development process and gaining all the necessary approvals required for its final publication, and then the real challenge will commence, as organisations will hopefully take the guidance in BS 65000 and use it to either enhance the resilience of their organisation or sense check or benchmark their current arrangements against the guidance in the standard and then feedback and share their experiences.

It is important to remember that standards and the thinking contained in standards evolves all the time to mirror advances in the relevant industry or activity sector. The new BS 65000 standard not only represents the next big step in our understanding of organisational resilience, but it is also the next phase in the quest for that understanding and the meaning of organisational resilience and it seems quite clear that the quest is still far from complete.

Kevin Brear is a ‘Strategy and Business Systems’ PhD Candidate at the University of Portsmouth and played an important role the development of BS 65000 through his position as a member of the BSI Standards Committee.