Developing a Resilient Organization

Lessons Learned from the World Trade Center Disaster

Facilitators:
Steve Freeman, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Center for Organizational Dynamics
Marc Maltz, MBA, TRIAD Consulting Group LLC and the William Alanson White Institute

Target audience: Those responsible for crisis preparedness and human resources in an organization, including senior Human Resource professionals, Chief Operating Officers and other senior leaders whose role it is to manage the health of the organization.

Length: 2 days

Key Learning:

• A Basic Understanding of Organizational Resilience
• A Model of Organizational Resilience
• The Application of the Resilience Model to One’s Organization
• An Understanding of an Organization’s Key Vulnerabilities
• The Development of a Preliminary Organizational Resilience Action Plan

Agenda: Day I:
General Preparedness – What does it take for an Organization to be resilient?

1. What is Organizational Resilience?
Participant Introductions and Critical Incidents
Participant’s definition of Organizational Resilience

2. Organizational Resilience Defined: A Model Preparedness: Reserves, depletion and replenishment
Measures of health and reserves: social and technical systems, finances, social and technical networks and human resources
Examples of resilience and its absence

3. Case Review
Analysis of the effects of disaster
Identifying the most critical factors of resilience
Key questions covered:

• What levels of reserves are desirable?
• How do you strengthen your organization’s health and reserves?
• What is critical to your organization’s continuance and necessary for its basic functioning?
• What are your organization’s vulnerable leverage points?
• Who cares that your organization continues and why?
• How can this strengthen it?

4. Application
Participants apply their learning about resilience to their own organizations as preparation for day II.

Day II: Developing an Organizational Resilience Action Plan

5. Organizational Diagnosis
Participant puts her/his organization through a diagnostic on key resilience factors:

• Financial Resources
• Human Resources
• Social and Technical Systems
• Social and Technical Networks
• The organization’s culture and values.

6. What is your organization’s diagnosis and what are its priorities?
The organization’s priorities are identified and compared/contrasted to the diagnosis.

7. Mobilization/rebuilding
Actions for developing organizational readiness are identified.