Aaron Gracey of Squared Apples has developed this Organizational Resilience Model, which is based on research into how the UK military developed and maintained its resilience. The tool can be used to review the current standing of an organization’s resilience, as well as provide guidance on activities that need to take place to enhance their current level. https://www.bcpbuilder.com/2018/12/31/organizational-resilience-model/

1. RESILIENCE THROUGH LEADERSHIP
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DEVELOPING ORGANISATIONAL
RESILIENCE - SYSTEMS APPROACH TO
ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE
FRMEWORK (SAORF)

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Please Note:
This research paper is a document written and published in order to stimulate reflection, consideration
and debate on the key themes of interest and concern within the UK industry on the topic of building
organisational resilience.
This is aimed at being one in a series of papers planned to be published by Squared Apples which
will be hosted on the Resilience Repository located on the Squared Apples website. The papers will
be freely accessible to practitioners and researchers.
It is important to note that the opinions and issues raised within this paper are those of the author,
based on academic research and personal experience within the UK Armed Forces and UK Industry.
This paper does not constitute any formal direction or doctrine and its contents are not to be regarded
as an expression of policy or guidance on behalf of Squared Apples.
For further information on this paper or to submit an article to be held within the Squared Apples
repository, please contact:
Aaron Gracey
Squared Apples
E: aaron.gracey@squaredapplesuk.co.uk

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DEVELOPING ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE - SYSTEMS
APPROACH TO ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE
FRMEWORK (SAORF)
INTRODUCTION
There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.
Rumsfeld 2002
i
The above statement was made by the then US Secretary for Defense Donald Rumsfeld, addressing
the issue of being able to identify the link between Iraq and the supplying of terrorists with weapons of
mass destruction. It reflects the situation that Business Resilience mitigates against, as well as the
current situation within several elements of business. Many strategic elements of the organisation are
unaware of what they do not know when it comes to Business Resilience and coping with a Black
Swan
ii
, or a “Wicked Problem”
iii
. The statement is a simplification of the statement made by Italian
economists Salvatore Modica and Aldo Rutichini:
“A subject is certain of something when he knows that thing; he is uncertain when he
does not know it, but he knows he does not: he is consciously uncertain. On the other
hand, he is unaware of something when he does not know it, and he does not know he
does not know and so on ad infinitum: he does not perceive, does not have in mind, the
object of knowledge. The opposite of unawareness is awareness.”
Modica & Rutichini 1994
iv
The aim of this short paper is to briefly introduce the Systems Approach to Organisational Resilience
Framework (SAORF), the outcome of five years of research conducted by personnel from Squared
Apples. The research aimed to understand how the UK military developed and maintained its
resilience, and subsequently developed the SAORF, a tool that is easy to apply and aligned to the UK

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standard. If used correctly, the tool can be used as a means to review the current standing of an
organisation's resilience, as well as provide guidance on activities that need to take place to enhance
their current level, enabling organisations to implement the UK standard through tactical activities.
Diagram 1 shows the strategic model developed within BS65000
v
, with the author being part of the
consultation team. The standard provides strategic guidance to organisations on how to put in place
an organisational resilience framework but fails to effectively lay out the requirements. The document
was designed as a guidance standard, rather than an enforceable document; to that avail
organisations are currently not compounded to develop organisational resilience frameworks, even
though it makes strong business sense to do so.
The BS:65000 model represents the strategic themes of an organisational resilience framework that is
recommended to exist within an organisation. These themes are adaptable, depending on the size
and market area that the organisation is
operating within, though an organisation
should have an element of each of the
key themes in place. At the core of the
model sits the key functions of the
leadership team; governance and
accountability, leadership and culture,
and the development of the strategic
vision and objectives. Aligned to these
core values are the six key themes which
aim to develop the resilience capability
within the organisation.
BUILDING THE FRAMEWORK
After reviewing BS65000, Stephenson
vi
and McManus
vii
, the author developed the tool, which places
three key elements at the strategic core of the framework, shown in diagram 2. These three core
elements are the maturity of the corporate culture, the clarity of the strategic vision, and the adaptive
style of the leadership framework that is in place. The more adaptive and transformational the
leadership style, the more agile the workforce and the decision-making process is, as demonstrated
within the observed events during the research phase. Critical to any organisation is the central
DIAGRAM 1: BS65000 ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE MODEL

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direction and framework that the senior management team delivers to the workforce. All organisations
are created to perform a function as efficient as possible
viii
; this may be to sell goods and services for
profit, the private sector, state owned enterprises which deliver national infrastructure and key civil
services, the public sector, or the not for profit enterprises, the voluntary sector
ix
. The understanding
of the long-term vision is critical by the senior management team, for they are the group that will build
the adaptive leadership framework to enable the organisation to move towards the end-state which
has been set to enable the business to achieve its vision.
Through the conducted research, 28 key factors were placed into six key themes (diagram 2).
Accepting the limitations of the various reviewed models, the SAORF model was designed to deliver a
holistic approach for an organisation to develop and audit its organisational resilience capability. This
provides the critical components that link the strategic direction from BS65000 to the tactical day-to-
day activities of an organisation.
Diagram 3 show the BS65000 model and has the various colour coded elements of the resilience
framework mapped to it, aligning the components to required business process needed to the
strategic framework. This displays how the twenty-eight components within the SAORF provide an
organisation with a physical co-ordinated mechanism to deliver the required framework that is
discussed within the British Standard. Both the BS:65000 model and the proposed framework
demonstrate the importance of building and maintaining situational awareness and information
management to inform and enable the organisation to react quickly to potential disruptive events.
DIAGRAM 2: SYSTEMS APPROACH TO ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK MODEL

6. RESILIENCE THROUGH LEADERSHIP
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Through the review of the previous work conducted by McManus, Stephenson, and others within the
areas of incident management, business continuity, Organisational Resilience and Corporate
Governance, the development of the framework was possible. The review and the analysis of the
research strands of this thesis has enabled the identification of the six domains and the twenty-eight
resilience factors which, if properly resourced, communicated and operated in a collaborative manner,
through an integrated operations framework, will provide a high level of resilience within an
organisation.
Organisational resilience, unlike business continuity or emergency planning, is not a single discipline
that an organisation can invest some resources in for a limited time to achieve a certain level of work.
Organisational resilience is an outcome of the collaboration of key organisational tactical activities;
while each activity can be conducted independently of each other, resilience can only be obtained
through the co-ordination of these activities in alignment to an over-arching strategy, which in turn has
been developed against a clearly defined corporate end-state. While the management of risks,
threats, vulnerabilities and assets are the tangible elements that businesses can focus on, this
framework has shown that the development and investment into staff, CSR and business intelligence
is just as vital, if not more so, in maintaining an active advantage against those competitors that seek
to gain a market share through unconventional means.
DIAGRAM 3: SYSTEMS APPROACH TO ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK MAPPED TO BS:65000

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SUMMARY
The review of how the UK Military utilised counter-insurgency tactics to destabilise the insurgent’s
campaign has identified potential methods and frameworks that can be adjusted to provide
organisations with a resilience toolkit. The integration of staff training, development and
empowerment, supported through a framework of adaptive leadership and collaborative working, can
assist in the creation and maintenance of a continuous improvement mentality, which drives
innovation and a desire to succeed. These activities are wrapped around the strategic core elements
of vision, culture and adaptive leadership. As identified in the conducted research, the failure to
provide effective leadership and an absence of cultural understanding in Iraq resulted in a strategic
failure for the UK during the 2003 – 2009 campaign; in comparison, the effective application of
adaptive leadership, evidence-based decision-making, cultural awareness and a clear end-state
provided the platform for success in the Oman and Northern Ireland campaigns. The SAORF provides
organisations with the capability to effectively apply the UK strategic Organisational Resilience
Standard through the integration of twenty-eight clearly defined elements, which are based on global
research that spans two decades of research into the area of organisational resilience.

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ENDNOTES
i
Department of Defense news briefing, February 12, 2002 from www.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript accessed 15 Aug 2013.
ii
The Black Swan Theory, developed by Nassim Taleb, is used to explain the disproportionate role of high-profile, hard to predict and
rare events that are beyond the normal expectation. It only refers to the unexpected events of large magnitude and the consequence
they had within history. A prime example for the Railway was the bombings of 7 Jul 2005, or the Hatfield train crash which resulted in
the demise of Railtrack 12 months.
iii
The phrase was originally used to describe a problem that provides great difficulty to solve because of dynamic situation it has
evolved in, leading to an incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise in the immediate
period. The term “Wicked” is used to describe the persistent nature of the problem and its refusal to be solved by standard planning
approaches and problem-solving techniques. Usually the efforts applied to solve one part of the problem causes problems in another
area due to the number of complex interdependencies that exist with the multitude of stakeholders and/or events that have led to the
problem being initially created.
iv
Modica, S. and Rustichini A., "Awareness and partitional information structures". Theory and Decision Journal, Vol 37, Issue 1,1994,
pp 107 - 124. Downloaded from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01079207 on 02 Nov 2013.
v
British Standards Institute, `BS65000:2014: Organisational Resilience`, BSI Standards Limited, London, 2014.
vi
Stephenson, A. `Benchmarking the Resilience of Organisations,’ PhD Thesis, Civil and Natural Resources Engineering Department,
Canterbury University, New Zealand, 2010. Available at www.resorgs.org.nz.
vii
McManus, S. T., `Organisational Resilience in New Zealand', PhD Research Thesis, Canterbury University, New Zealand, 2008.
viii
Mullins L J, Management and Organisational Behaviour, ninth edition, Pearson Education Limited, UK 2010, p.78; A McAslan,
`Organisational Resilience: Understanding the Concept and its Application', Torrens Resilience Institute, Flinders University,
Australia, 2010, p.1.
ix
Jewell B R, An Integrated Approach to Business Studies, 4th Edition, Pearson Education Limited, UK, 2007, p.6; Mullins L J,
Management and Organisational Behaviour, ninth edition, Pearson Education Limited, UK 2010, pp.78-79.