Resilience - What is it?

In simple terms, resilience can be said to be the ability to break down and come back. It is about how to manage to adapt after a revolutionary change, or crisis, survive and hopefully come out stronger from the ordeal, even better and more knowledgeable than you went into it.

A crisis is often defined as a situation that is disruptive but relatively unusual or abnormal. The revolutionary changes and crises can be very different in nature and they can also affect us in different ways. At the individual level, it may be a crisis if a loved one dies, but a death rarely constitutes a national crisis, but enough deaths at once can be considered a national crisis (Tsunami, Estonia, etc.). Some crises such as Covid 19 and the climate crisis are global and affect almost everyone, while others that are regional (the war in Ukraine, drought in the Panama Canal) can still affect the production system globally and cause problems for companies far from the event.

When we talk about resilience and resilience to crisis, we can do so at different levels and with different systems in focus. Planetary resilience is linked to ecological sustainability and refers to the ability of the important ecosystems to absorb and survive drastic changes, this is of course also important for the resilience of society, which is linked to social sustainability, which constitutes society's ability to manage, recover and, if necessary, rebuild in the event of cataclysmic changes, disasters and crises. The resilience of society affects and is affected by the resilience of organisations. Organisational resilience refers to a company's ability and internal culture to promote rapid recovery and adaptation to disruptive change and new situations through redundancy, flexible working methods and innovation. This is very much related to the financial sustainability of the organization.

For manufacturing companies, it is also important to maintain supply chain resilience, which means that they can manage disruptions such as raw material shortages, transport problems or supply chain disruptions. These can be due to regional or global crises, but sometimes they can be due to an individual steering a little crooked in the wrong place (can result in a blockage in the Suez Canal). Good resilience at one level supports resilience at other levels, and a failure of resilience at one system or system level can spread to others. Therefore, it is important for companies to not only ensure that they themselves have the ability to redundancy and flexibility and to cope with disruptions in the supply chain, they also need to contribute to the resilience of society and the planet in order to come out better after a crisis.

If you want to build your resilience, you can work with a decision model with different types of decisions/measures depending on whether you are in a Preparation phase, Emergency response phase or Recovery phase. In the RESPIRE project we have worked with this overall model (see figure).

Recovery means getting "back" to a new normal. In this new situation, the company must function, be sustainable in the long term and profitable. This requires that you have learned something from the crisis and have a capacity for change and adjustment to be able to build operations in a new sustainable way in a new normal.

Emergency response is when you are in the middle of a crisis, here it is important that you are flexible and can handle disruptions to the resources required for the company to be able to meet its delivery capacity in a sufficient way to survive. It is also about being adaptive to the new opportunities that appear with the resources that are currently available.

The preparation phase is where you who are reading this hopefully are right now. Here it is important to be prepared for when it hits. Know the vulnerabilities in processes and value chains, as well as know the capacities and capabilities for adaptivity. You also need to have external monitoring to see if something in the outside world happens that could mean a revolutionary change.

The sustainability assessment is carried out to ensure that the measures and solutions introduced are also sustainable in the long term, economically, socially and ecologically. Here it is important that you can make good enough assessments quickly enough, which often requires that you practice making such decisions and investigate what they would have led to.

Digitalisation and digitalised systems can both prevent and be part of the cause of a crisis for a company. Some parts of the supply chain rely on digital payment systems, payment systems, and reporting. If there is an attack against them, a crisis can arise due to the vulnerabilities in the system, examples of this have been retail chains that have had their cash register systems hijacked and then not been able to sell their goods. Here a good strategy can be to always have a functional plan B, if X stops working, I can use Y instead. In a crisis, you need to see which systems and functions are critical - need to have - during the crisis and what is nice - good to have - but can be saved depending on the disruption I have suffered.

In the preparation phase, digital systems can be a support both in getting early warnings and in assessing what is critical. Here it is an advantage to have good knowledge of your supply chains so that you can understand which events can lead to a stop. In the measures that are introduced, digital systems and their design can be important for achieving long-term sustainable and resilient systems.

It can be useful here to build up your knowledge in depth about the digital systems and automated technologies that you use or introduce. However, it can be at least as important to have good "analogue" systematics and strategies for managing your resource flows and logistics.

In a crisis situation, it is often about having the courage and confidence to make decisions even on incomplete information, while at the same time striving to get more information needed to be more prepared, which may place higher demands on the people than on the digital support systems.