Improving Societal Resilience

I was listening to the radio the other day, or more accurately I was listening to the podcast of the radio programme, when a startling fact was given. So startling that I had to listen again to make sure that I had heard this correctly, but I had.  There are 100,000 people in the UK receiving regular food aid. Yes, that’s right – in the UK in 2011 there are people being regularly fed by charities.

More startling still is that these figures probably understate the case.  Yet more surprises followed. So where would these people be and who could they be? These must be the down outs seen in most big cities, and the poverty stricken of Glasgow, London and other urban centres, right? Well, no.  One of the largest charities feeding people started in Salisbury.

You may not know Salisbury. Its a small town made famous by a marvellous cathedral who’s spire reaches to the heavens and is marvellously captured by a famous Constable painting.  It is quintessential small town England, more Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple than Trainspotting.  But the people in Salisbury recognised a need and thought much the same, if it can happen here then it must be worse elsewhere and the charity has extended its operations to Banbury (just outside Oxford), Cambridge and other similar towns.

Many of those needing food have simply run out of money, and often through the incompetence of the Government department charged with providing the benefits that should prevent people from going hungry. Payments arrive late, are wrong, are in dispute. Small glitches in the system but terrifically disruptive to those who have fallen on hard times. Like the couple raising two children who both have jobs, only to find that the man was so good at his job they promoted him.  A total disaster, as this meant larger earnings and less benefits so he was £30 per week worse off, just enough to tip them from marginal surplus into deficits.  Food aid keeps them going.

More startling still was the figure from the USA, the richest country in the world. 1 in 7 people in the US depend on food aid in some form.  I think this just confirms my view that the USA is simply a dysfunctional society and no model for anyone.

As it happens, I was also reading “One illness away”, a marvellous book about the nature of poverty.  “The poor are always with us” school of thought could never be more wrong as the book explains how detailed research reveals that who is in poverty is forever changing, those in poverty may gradually climb out through gradually accumulating positive improvements whilst others fall into poverty through a similar accumulation of negative events.

This is such an excellent book that I think it should be compulsory reading for those studying development, economics and societal resilience.  The striking stories of those who were reasonably well off – running their own businesses, owning their own house, land and assets – but through a series of unfortunate events are reduced to poverty.  The illness of the head of the house which reduced earnings and required large outgoings for health care, the subsequent death and funeral costs.  Suddenly assets had been sold, earnings and savings vanished.  Equally striking are those who climb out of poverty.  These are not sudden transformations but gradual, a slight improvement in crops, a marginal job in an urban fringe, an investment in further resources such as animals for milking or meat that pays off. Rarely though do these people climb out of all vulnerability, they remain poor and just as liable to fall into poverty again if those small events turn against them again.

If one thinks of one’s own family history you can see evidence of exactly these stories playing out in the recent history of England.  In our family we have plenty who were in the Workhouse, the Victorian institution for the poor that survived into the 1970s.  Others who did marginally better holding down skilled jobs in the chaos of 19th century London, in my case as basket makers and wood workers. Anyone who has watched “Who do you think you are?” will recognise these stories too, the poor and desperate of Europe making their way to England in search of a better life but often leaving behind relative wealth perhaps lost through religious, political or other circumstances.  For most people, the great events of history toss our families around and we cope as best we can; we do not dictate them.

And so by good fortune I end up in a society with a good educational system which is free, and a health service that is free too.  The latter in particular is one of the key reasons why people fall into poverty, it is the cost of health care that ruins many.

The implications of the book are that we need to understand what is causing the flow of people who are becoming poor and to devise policies to help stem this flow, and to understand what keeps people in poverty once there and to devise policies to enable people to lift themselves out of poverty.

What is also striking is how much we all lose through poverty as talented people struggle to eek out an existence in the hope of something better for them in the future, or more often for their children’s future.  A talented 15 year old with a remarkable gift for Mathematics but whose father could not begin to think how his son might become an engineer.  The paths are available but he, and indeed nobody in his region, had no idea how one would become an engineer and so could not even encourage his son in the right direction.

Whilst macro-economic development certainly helps, it often leaves the poorest untouched through lack of information, and because it does not address the more immediate issues of their lives.  Understanding these and helping the poor to be more resilient can therefore alleviate poverty and ultimately, we will all be the richer for it.

Standards News

The progression of the business continuity standard at ISO has stalled over a discussion about the inter-relationship with Organizational Resilience, a work in progress in the same ISO committee.  It is hoped that this will be resolved in Beijing during the early part of November and that the current document will therefore progress to FDIS (Final Draft International Standard) and subsequent full publication in the new year.

In the meantime, the UK has published PD25666 on Exercising and Testing.  Originally conceived as providing further guidance for business continuity, its remit widened slightly and it is now applicable for emergency management too.  It outlines an overall approach and since publication has proven highly popular, with sales far out-stripping expectations and becoming the largest selling PD ever.  A “PD” is a “Published Document” and as such is not a standard and is in a sense an even softer set of guidance than might be expected from a PAS (Publically Available Specification).

A forthcoming attraction from the same committee is PD25222 which relates to business continuity and the supply chain, a complex area.  The draft is being reviewed by the committee now and it looks like a very high quality piece of work.

It is also worth noting that PAS200 on Crisis Management has finally been published.  This is the first attempt to describe Crisis Management as a discrete discipline and it is therefore worthy of interest on that count alone.  Reception has been largely positive but not entirely so, it would be interesting to know how favourably it is being received.  Feedback is certainly needed as it may one day progress to a standard, as PAS56 laid the ground work for BS25999.

Pandemics and Societal Resilience

Emerging news that a new variant of H5N1 has emerged in SE Asia has prompted a resurgence in media coverage and business continuity managers to start dusting off their pandemic flu plans (see for instance http://goo.gl/SdsQz).  This new variant has so far killed all 8 people in Cambodia that it has infected.

Whilst I would not want to trivialise this threat, I often wonder about the context of such stories.  Cholera is a disease that receives very little coverage in the UK and yet this infects 3-5 million people every year and leads to 100-120,000 deaths per year, it is extremely virulent and affects both children and adults and can kill within hours.  Like flu, many people who are infected do not exhibit any symptoms but they will be infectious to others, for cholera this is 75% of those infected.  Of the remainder only 20% develop acute symptoms which may lead to death if untreated.  Those with low immunity, such as those compromised by HIV or malnourished, are at greater risk.  In many respects, one could be writing about flu.

The major difference for many of us living in the UK and other “developed” economies is that Cholera is seen as a thing of the past.  C19th London often suffered outbreaks but John Snow was able to show that it was related to pollution of drinking water by sewage.  Few realize that one of London’s outstanding features, the Victoria Embankment alongside the Thames, was part of a huge sewerage scheme to send London’s polluted waste downstream.  The development of the flushing toilet and the major engineering schemes for sewage treatment led to a huge public health benefit which we now largely take granted.

However, in 56 countries across the world, Cholera continues to infect and to kill.  This is largely because sanitation is poor or non-existent.  In some places this is because it has never existed – such as the rapidly developing shanty towns and slums that surround many of the world’s cities.  In others the systems have broken down though conflict, neglect or lack of resources.

Perhaps more surprisingly for those in developed countries, simple actions such as washing hands with soap are not common place.  Whilst we have seen benefits from the campaigns in the UK to wash your hands as part of the response to pandemic flu, the idea that some countries never do this would never have occurred to many of us.  Of course, if water is at a premium and is often the source of infections and there are no industrial processes making soaps, then it becomes obvious that hand washing would not be a natural thing to do.  One of the simple initiatives to address Cholera and other similar diseases is the promotion of hand washing across the world, and October 15th is Global Hand Washing day (see http://www.globalhandwashingday.org/) and let me recommend that you check this out and see if there are ways for you to promote this, perhaps through the Corporate Responsibility programme.

An interesting development is that the source of all Cholera outbreaks has been identified.  It seems that Cholera originates from the Bay of Bengal, modern day Bangladesh and historically India.  Analysis published in Nature shows that there have been several waves of Cholera and that we are currently in the seventh cholera pandemic.  Each wave starts from the same region and evolves over time and according to local conditions before gradually dying out, to then be replaced by the next wave.  Again, this is remarkably similar to flu.

Bangladesh is particularly susceptible to flooding and largely uses “hanging toilets”, that is to say that people defecate into a water course such as a river, and this is used as drinking water by people downstream.  Identifying the problem is only one part of the issue of course.  There are cultural and economic issues in introducing hand washing, and 40% of the world do not have toilets.  The scale of the problem is huge but the knowledge and tools to resolve the issues are available.  The same issues apply to other diarrhoeal diseases which kill 1.5 million children per annum.

So the next time you dust off your pandemic flu plan, just give a thought to the millions for whom pandemic flu is the least of their worries, and consider that greater societal resilience should also include consideration of how to address mass diseases for which we already know most of the answers.

BRISC–Business Resilience in the Supply Chain

I was prompted by an email flyer advertising the forthcoming business resilience in the supply chain conference (see www.brisc2011.com) to ponder the true meaning of resilience in this context.  Many people would automatically think about the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the widespread dislocation this caused.  Others might consider the financial stability of their suppliers and take steps to mitigate the risk of key suppliers going bust.  Until recently I doubt whether many business managers considered that their Banks might be a key supplier who suddenly stopped offering key services, such as extended overdraft facilities,with a consequent impact on their own viability but it certainly ought to be on the radar of everyone now.  But how about a new and disruptive technology that can both impact the supply chain and offers real opportunities for improvement to the resilience of that supply chain, namely 3D printing?

Now 3D printing is a short hand term for something that has been around for a while but has started to become an affordable and proven technology with mass application.  More correctly known as “additive manufacturing”, it started 30 years ago as a means of rapid prototyping, using scanning and printing techniques to produce trial parts drawn up on CAD (Computer Aided Design) systems. Formula 1 teams have been using this technology for a little while to make high value components when needed, where only small numbers are needed and subtle refinements are necessary.  What is this technology and what does it mean from a resilience perspective?

Simply put, 3D printing enables complex components to be built up through the use of a laser print head to fuse layers of powder into a plastic object. The car industry has been using this technique to “send parts” around the world but now the technology is beginning to move into the space traditionally occupied by mass production.  Henry Ford made cars using standardized components to make them affordable, but additive manufacturing means that every product can be customised.  What is more, components that currently have to be made in several parts or to have holes drilled into them, can now be made in a single component.  Take for instance, a jet engine component that is currently made in seven parts and assembled.  An expensive part and requiring tooling to make, but this can now be made in a single printing process.  EADS are already using exactly this technique in making aircraft components, albeit on a small scale at present.  Furthermore, a car door handle in 11 parts and several materials can now be “printed” in one material – saving on sub-assembly operations in manufacture but also saving in cost at the end of the life of the component as it does not need to be dis-assembled for recycling.

A key point from the resilience perspective is that the data to produce these components is held in electronic formats that can be sent around the world to enable printing to take place wherever it is needed.  This does not require specialist tooling and a manufacturing plant to produce, but a standard and affordable (if expensive) piece of kit.  This means that if you are desperate for a particular component to get you working again, you can get the data and have it “printed” locally, you don’t need to wait for a shipment from China in 3 months.  Furthermore, components that are no longer available can also be reproduced extending the life of equipment that may otherwise have needed replacement – a hedge against the failure of a key supplier or simple redundancy of old equipment.

Of course, there is then a consequence for inventory stocking.  If you can store spare parts as virtualised data and only produce the component when needed, then there is no need to maintain large inventories for “just in case” delivery, saving on costs and increasing resilience at the same time.

This technology is gaining momentum and offers several obvious opportunities.  However, it is early days in the transition to the mainstream technology and there are liable to be many developments that are disruptive to existing businesses that we have not yet imagined; a Google or Facebook moment for manufacturing perhaps.

The technology at present is still in transition from the leading edge to a widely available and widely used one.  At present printing some components may take several days and whilst this is quicker than a slow boat, it is still a long wait.  But this is changing and affordable “home” printers are coming, such that domestic scale components will be realised within a few years.  So, as you ponder about BRISC, think about the technological and social changes that will also have a fundamental impact on the supply chain in the next few years.

Resilience

There is a great deal of debate at present about what we mean by resilience when we consider applying this term to an organisation.  We have started to use the term as a loose umbrella to cover matters such as security and business continuity but trying to define it more precisely is not easy, not least because many definitions seem to end up describing either business continuity or operational risk management.

 It is therefore worth considering how other subject areas consider the topic of resilience.  It is a term used in ecology and in relation to social systems and here we can see some useful definitions which may help us in considering its application to organizations.  Hence a resilient system is:

1. Able to withstand a shock without losing its basic functions;
2. Able to adapt to changing circumstances;
3. Able to transform to a different way of life when the status quo is no longer feasible.

 A variation on these definitions suggests that resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance without shifting to other regimes, to undergo change but to retain essentially the same functions.

 These views are developed from the work of Buzz Holling, a Canadian ecologist described as the "Father of Resilience".  He stresses that resilience is not about equilibrium but about adaptation, that crises are opportunities.  In Resilience theory a system can withstand shocks and renew and re-build itself, and whilst the origin is ecology this has been extended to social systems.  It is argued that the same characteristics of complexity and how small changes can lead to sudden very large dislocations is the same in both, and we all seem surprised when the inevitable crisis occurs.  If we apply this to the Financial Crisis, many small issues and indicators could be seen and slow underlying changes were occurring that led to the crossing of a threshold where disruptive changes suddenly occur leading to abrupt change.  Holling summarized his view as "Life is full of surprises, be prepared for that and embrace change".

If we are to apply this to organizations, then how different is this to conventional business continuity management? Certainly the ability to withstand a shock without losing basic functions is recognizable as part of the BCM discipline.  What about "Adapting to changing circumstances"?  This is implied in business continuity and we often talk about moving to a "new normality" but the majority of the focus is really on returning to normal operations as quickly as possible rather than adaptation.  Resilience seems particularly to distinguish itself from BCM when it talks about "transformation to a different way of life".  In business, an organisation recognises this imperative - adapt and survive or be consigned to history through competition. 

 Some companies do adapt and change - IBM for instance.  Originally making business machines they took to the new technology of computing and have transformed themselves again into a services organization.  Others cannot or will not change, large scale ship building in the UK for instance, swept away by competition from new entrants in their market who could adopt new techniques and working practices, whilst taking advantage of cheaper labour and materials.

 To transition from business continuity to resilience we therefore need a slightly different perspective, one that prepares us for the inevitable shocks and surprises through conventional business continuity and crisis management, but also encourages a greater ability to absorb those shocks and to adapt through adopting a new reality. Thus, you might decide that a major fire at your manufacturing plant will lead to recovery of some operations, but that others will simply cease.  This may not be conventional business continuity, but it would be a rational resilience strategy for the organization as a whole.

 Reference: Stockholm Resilience Centre - see http://goo.gl/vyf3I