ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE
Providing assurance to key stakeholders
Our Capabilities
in Organisational Resilience
Janellis is a leader in supporting large and complex organisations and government agencies to build their resilience and uplift their capability, to respond to a range of potential threats and opportunities.
Many of our clients operate in high-risk industries with large numbers of external stakeholders, regulators and significant community expectations.
Organisational Resilience Framework
Uplifting and embedding resilience across the enterprise
A better practice approach to organisational resilience is holistic and underpinned by a framework that evaluates all risk, including strategic, operational, people, financial, cyber, political, environmental and reputation.
A fully integrated resilience model is achieved by intelligently fusing the disciplines of RISK; READINESS; RESPONSE and ASSURANCE.
A mature Resilience Capability includes:
- An enterprise-wide risk framework that integrates all risks including strategic, operational, people, financial, cyber, political, environmental and reputation.
- High levels of confidence to respond to emerging threats through scenario-based planning activities.
- A consistent framework and response capability for all types of risks throughout the organisation.
- Embedded team-based critical thinking across the enterprise in areas including risk, technology, cyber security for teams at the ‘coal face’ of decision-making and those at the Executive and Board level.
- Aligned resilience capability with key third-party providers.
- Regular assurance to the board and other key stakeholders.
RISK: Enterprise-wide risk management strategies for all risks across the organisation and the identification, management and reporting of ‘catastrophic risks’ and emerging threats. Understanding the dependencies and vulnerabilities related to critical suppliers and other third parties and using scenario-based planning to build situational awareness and agility.
READINESS: A more strategic approach to pre-planning for disruptions and ‘shocks’ through the development and alignment of plans; training and awareness, implementing appropriate technology and having alternate site arrangements. The alignment of plans with critical suppliers or external agencies and pre-developed stakeholder engagement strategies.
RESPONSE: The capability to respond to strategic, operational or financial ‘catastrophic’ risks or emerging threats. A robust exercising and testing process that builds and maintains capability, highlights vulnerabilities and identify strengths within the organisation. Addressing the human elements of resilience by ensuring high-quality decision making is occurring that is transparent, discoverable and defendable, particularly where there may be incomplete for conflicting information.
ASSURANCE: The governance framework, reporting and audit processes that provide confidence to the Board, Executive Leadership Team and external stakeholders that the organisation has the resilience capability to anticipate and manage any market conditions and can respond effectively to any stress, threat, or crisis, prioritising the safety of people, the environment and the ability to continue to operate critical services.
© Janellis Australia Pty Ltd 2023
1
Enterprise Risk Management
Catastrophic Risk Management
Emerging Threats
Critical Dependencies
Scenario based Modelling
Catastrophic Risk Management
Emerging Threats
Critical Dependencies
Scenario based Modelling
2
Readiness Strategy
Stakeholder Management
Plans and Procedures
Equipment, Facilities and Tools
Training and Awareness
Stakeholder Management
Plans and Procedures
Equipment, Facilities and Tools
Training and Awareness
3
Response Strategy
Exercise Development
Communications
CM Leadership and Critical Thinking
Learning and Development
Exercise Development
Communications
CM Leadership and Critical Thinking
Learning and Development
4
Governance Structure
Resilience Reporting
Surveys
Benchmarking and Scorecards
Audits
Resilience Reporting
Surveys
Benchmarking and Scorecards
Audits
Scenario Planning
Uplifting and embedding resilience across the enterprise
Scenario-based planning
Scenarios help a broad range of stakeholders understand their operating environment, share information, challenge assumptions, consider the future and assess strategic options. Information is better evaluated within a scenario framework as it provides a context for making decisions and reaching consensus on key issues or opportunities and developing a plan of action.
Leading organisations use scenario-based planning and associated tools to help develop their leaders and improve their overall level of business resilience.
Westpac Banking Corporation has an ongoing program of scenario-based training and exercising that occurs at various levels across the organisation, including the Executive Leadership Team. All scenarios follow a standard development process that involves collaboration and input from subject matter experts within the business.
The scenarios are focused on the particular threats and opportunities the business is facing in relation to market, political and regional challenges. The development of the scenarios allows a diverse group of stakeholders to gain insight into the challenges and opportunities prior to an event being held; and then on the day.
Paul from Westpac who is responsible for the enterprise-wide exercising program says:
” Westpac executives come together in a closed loop learning environment―that may include business partners―in a way that allows engaging, open and robust discussions. Using a series of scenarios they can challenge preconceptions and uncover blind spots. The outcome of these activities is always a deeper understanding by our business of the challenges and opportunities we face from a broad group of stakeholders.
The Westpac tools provided to the teams are used across the organisation internationally at all levels―and aim to enhance critical thinking capabilities as an ongoing investment into building the organisation’s resilience.
Convergence–National Emergency Summit
Uplifting and embedding resilience across industries.
Responding to previous significant risks
The current cyber security threats are described as the biggest crisis facing Australian organisations in recent times. In late 2000, Australian organisations were facing several high impact threats targeted at our business community. To help leaders understand the challenges and find ways to work together to solve them, Janellis designed and explored a Hypothetical Scenario of an explosion in the Sydney CBD, which included the IAG Crisis Management Team sharing their response, on a panel, in front of a live audience.
Sharing the panel with IAG were response agency representatives and the media, and the landmark day was facilitated by former Chief of the Australian Defence Force, Sir Peter Cosgrove. Peter said at the time:
“Australia has some of the best men and women leaders of any country in the world who can deal with business shocks standing on their feet and they have already demonstrated this. However, the new set of challenges needs more work. Some organisations are very advanced and responsible—and there are a lot who are not. In running through the hypothetical today, we can start to imagine the dimensions to the problem.”
Since then, critical infrastructure organisations operating in high-risk industries have been working with the Federal Government to build their resilience capability to withstand threats of this magnitude.
Peter Sutherland –IAG, Jeff Smith – IAG, Murray Hall – IAG, Andrew Starr – IAG, Marcus Burbhadt- SNP for IAG, Peter Mihaly – JPMorgan, Denis Clifford – NSW Police/SEOCON, Phil Rogerson- NSW Police, John Anderson – SEMC, Greg Mullins – Fire Brigades, Greg Nott – Ministry of Transport, Tony Cannard – Alinta, David Parsons – Water Services – IAAG, James Mann – Telstra, Garry Harding – City of Sydney, Michael Usher – Channel 9, Natalie O’Brien – The Australian.
Critical Thinking Framework
Uplifting and embedding resilience across the enterprise
Ensuring robust and high-quality decision making is occurring at all levels of the organisation in the key areas of risk, readiness and response, so that assurance can be provided to key stakeholders.
The Critical Thinking Framework is used to draw upon a combination of strategic and critical thinking skills and harnesses the diverse experiences and perspectives of the team to enable complex problem-solving. The framework:
- Optimises the speed and quality of decision-making, drawing upon the brains trust of the organisation.
- Enables cross-functional and regional teams to collaborate on complex issues and deliver quality outputs.
- Guides high-quality decision-making where there are high levels of scrutiny, compressed timeframes and/or significant impacts.
- Informs critical decisions which may have cascading impacts.
- Generates new perspectives, and practical solutions to complex problems.
- Helps to clarify the facts and the unknowns in a highly complex or changing situation.
- Challenges assumptions, uncovers blind spots and builds a shared view of the risks and opportunities.
- Provides a robust, objective and defendable approach to decision making.
The 7-Step Process enables individuals and organisations to build agility and resilience.
Organisational Resilience Scorecard
New thinking in Organisational Resilience
Now more than ever, organisations are operating in increasingly challenging conditions. Many organisations are seeking better ways to proactively build their resilience, alleviate the impact of external forces and ensure they can respond effectively to a range of potential disruptions.
Aligned with these drivers is a stronger focus on identifying resilience indicators that lead rather than lag, major events or change. Leading indicators of resilience provide quantifiable evidence of investments already made, visibility of capability that exists and the ability to prioritise future investments.
Benchmarking allows organisations to review their capacity to deal with change, build confidence and provide assurance to key stakeholders.
If you can measure it you can build it
Defining and measuring organisational resilience is a challenge, however it is essential in proving the value of investing in resilience capability to boards, shareholders and key stakeholders. It enables senior management to identify areas of vulnerability that may require future attention and investment.
The International Benchmarking on Organisational Resilience comprises the key indicators that demonstrate organisational resilience capability. These are grouped into four main areas of assessment RISK, READINESS, RESPONSE and ASSURANCE.
Organisational Resilience Scorecard
Case Studies
Superannuation
An organisation in the superannuation industry uplifted their cyber resilience through a review of their Cyber Security Playbook and the design and facilitation of a cyber scenario.
Government Agency
Following a data breach incident, Janellis subject matter experts used the 4-Step PIR Process to assess their response and made recommendations to uplift capability.
Aviation
A leading organisation in the aviation industry engaged Janellis experts to develop and implement a BCP framework to navigate growing demand in a high-risk environment.
Case Studies
Incident, Emergency and Crisis Management Exercises
Link to: Protected: Brisbane Airport Corporation Exercise
Brisbane Airport Corporation Case Study
Janellis worked closely with Brisbane airport stakeholders over several months to develop the exercise scenario and delivered a highly successful 1 day exercise.
Link to: Exercise Facultas for Sydney Water
Sydney Water Case Study
Janellis brought together key players in Sydney’s water delivery network together in a joint response to test capability, both individually and collectively, using an escalating and converging 1 week scenario.
“Following the recent Government announcement, there is a renewed focus on the ownership and resilience of Australia’s national critical infrastructure.”
The diverse number of threats and the need for an ‘all hazards’ approach presents significant challenges to owners and operators of critical infrastructure.
Executive and Board Crisis Training
Janellis has been working with executive leadership teams in building their crisis management expertise for over fifteen years and understand that the Executive Team and the Board have a key role in preparing for and responding to a crisis.
We have developed and applied a robust executive capability development process within corporate organisations as well as infrastructure groups and government agencies. Our crisis tools and training programs are designed to improve the capabilities of people and teams in their decision making and response process.
Related Articles:
Digital and Executive War Rooms
Organisational or industry ‘war rooms’ enable executives to come together in a focused session to collaborate on complex problems.
Enabled in a virtual setting utilising digital collaboration technology the ‘war room’ enhances team collaboration and communication, and information flow on strategic problems and opportunities.
This type of focused activity facilitates better problem solving, decision making, planning and strategy development. This is enabled by using a robust process that allows an in-depth analysis of the problem drawing upon the brains trust of the organisation.
Executive Scenario-Based Planning
Scenario-based planning is a tool for further analysing and understanding the potential impacts of an identified threat or vulnerability to the business, and exploring options and approaches for minimising the potential likelihood, and the negative impact.
Scenario modelling can help to understand the level of planning and readiness required to manage the risk, and assist in raising awareness of the risk.
Scenario-based planning should be used for those ‘catastrophic risks’ assessed to have a major or significant consequence, of which we have limited understanding, irrespective of the likelihood. These are often risks that are too expensive to mitigate, or are a result of multiple risks escalating, compounding or converging in an unlikely way.
Catastrophic or extreme events usually require a significant or coordinated response capability across the organisation and with external parties. This is particularly important where the consequences of these risks may include intense political, media or community interest and/or the potential loss of confidence from key stakeholders.
Multi-Agency Capability Awareness Programs
A crisis by its very nature is going to challenge any team. The interdependencies that exist between organisations means that diverse stakeholder groups will need to work together in a significant emergency or crisis event to respond effectively.
Capabilities and plans need to be aligned with critical suppliers and relevant agencies who would need to work together. This applies to all organisations to some degree but critical infrastructure providers have an added level of community expectation and critical dependencies.
Conducting regular multi-agency awareness sessions allows organisations to understand where gaps exist, prior to an event occurring. Organisations must be proactive in identifying stakeholder groups. They need to work with in an emergency or crisis to understand what they can do to support one another during an event.
Janellis multi-agency workshops involve executive crisis teams, emergency management teams, local emergency services agencies, government and critical suppliers coming together in an interactive hypothetical activity to raise awareness and create alignment around emergency management.
Crisis Communications
Most organisations have considered the role of communications as part of the response effort. However, often the communications team has not clearly defined its structure and process to ensure it can operate effectively in coordination with other teams and as a team itself.
We work with both communications teams and individuals within crisis management teams to build their capability and confidence to craft communications strategy, create key messages and engage effectively with key stakeholders before, during and after crisis events.
Our recommendations for developing and implementing crisis communications capability are:
- Clearly define roles and responsibilities for communications within all response teams
- Create a suite of pre-populated communication templates to accelerate development and delivery of stakeholder communication during an event
- Ensure any employee who may be called on to be a spokesperson in a crisis has undergone formal media training
- Schedule, develop and facilitate a desktop / hypothetical to review the crisis communications capability in a scenario-based environment
- Revise or amend any of the communications plans and concepts based on input and feedback from the scenario-based activity.
Exercise Development and Delivery
Crisis Management exercising is the process of applying the team and individual skills in an operating environment through scenario-based group activities. We use experiential-style training including hypotheticals, workshops, simulations and field exercises.
Scenario-based exercises allow us to highlight and refine the process for making decisions, gaining consensus and creating a plan of action.
In developing exercise programs, we follow a proven process which includes scoping, designing, facilitating and reporting. Our approach ensures there is a shared vision of the requirements and outcomes for the exercise including:
- The drivers for that particular exercise/event.
- Stakeholders to be involved.
- Elements to be tested.
- Elements to be trained.
- Tools, plans and facilities to be used.
A detailed post-event report is produced and presented to the relevant stakeholders to review how the team performed against the set objectives.
Post-Incident/Crisis Review
Post-incident/crisis reviews offer an independent evaluation of how teams have responded to an incident or crisis event that has occurred. We benchmark the response against our ‘better practice’ organisational resilience framework using a structured approach to:
- Evaluate the use of plans, process, frameworks, and tools
- Validate the team/s’ decision-making
- Strengthen future incident or crisis response
Creating “Lessons Learned” is an effective way to improve incident and crisis response planning and procedures and to build resilience within an organisation to respond to a range of potential threats the organisation may face.
Emergency and Crisis Management Response Tools
Janellis has developed a suite of crisis management ‘integrated decision making’ and ‘business impact’ tools that can be customised and implemented across an organisation or industry.
Our experts then train and guide teams on using the tools, helping them be more effective in ‘cutting through’ the issues they face.
About our Response Tools
Our decision support tools supports teams in developing critical thinking, both individually and as a group. They also facilitate:
- Situational awareness – an understanding of the facts and assumptions
- Ability to prioritise
- Understanding of impacts across the business
- Decision making
- Ability to develop tactical and strategic plans under the pressure of tight timelines.
Digital Solutions
Digital solutions are transforming the way businesses operate.
Our custom-designed online platforms can communicate emergency and crisis management information instantly to a broad group of stakeholders on multiple devices – for both training and response purposes.
Our digital crisis management solutions also aid teams in being agile and informed in crisis situations. This includes rapid notifications, access to internal data, media information and resources – assisting teams to communicate efficiently, effectively and make critical decisions.
From resilience portals to help your teams access critical information in plans, to online decision support tools that are available 24/7 on handheld devices. Our solutions give key decision makers access to the right information at the right time.
Request a demo today.
Resilience Frameworks and Reporting Tools
To ensure organisations can respond to low probability but high consequence risks (catastrophic risks) requires a resilience framework that goes ‘beyond risk management’ which embeds both a strong culture of risk management as well as an adaptive culture and capability to respond.
An Organisational Resilience Framework builds upon existing risk practices to assist all areas of the business in developing an integrated and coordinated capability to anticipate, adapt and respond to a range of threats that may impact or disrupt business, people or assets.
Resilience Frameworks
Organisations use our International Organisational Resilience Framework as a roadmap for organisations starting their resilience journey as well as an assurance tool for organisations that already have the capability.
Organisational Resilience brings together all elements of capability under one enterprise-wide framework. It allows organisations to visually and virtually connect all aspects of resilience including: Risk Management, Security, Incident and Emergency Management, Crisis Management, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
Resilience Reporting
Today, key stakeholders seek greater levels of assurance that teams and organisations have the capability to respond to crises. Resilience reporting enables organisations to assess their capacity and capability to manage crises for specific assets and across the enterprise.
City Resilience
In today’s challenging economic, health and environmental climate, communities, organisations and response agencies need to work together to build a resilient city.
Our City Resilience capability looks at risk management from a broader perspective to ensure cities can deal with a number of different catastrophic events. Janellis has partnered with 100 Cities to launch a Global Platform Partnership enabling us to roll out our framework across the world.
Janellis provides tools and strategies to cities to manage and integrate their responses to crises and shocks in more effective ways.
Related Articles
Cybersecurity for Australia’s Critical Infrastructure
Digitisation has transformed our lives by providing boundless economic and social benefits through improved efficiency and productivity. Yet within critical infrastructure organisations, technological innovation has accelerated faster than our ability to secure it.
Crisis teams harness shared thinking via new digital tools
Digital technology is a powerful enabler for collaborative critical…
What is Organisational Resilience?
A holistic view of risk management in the context of ‘better practice’ is now viewed as ‘organisational resilience’ and is built around a framework that incorporates financial, operational and strategic risk.
You may also be interested in…
COVID-19 Resource Section
We have an extensive resource section dedicated to dealing with COVID-19. Helping executive leaders to navigate through some of the most complex challenges, threats and opportunities their organisations are facing.
Our Sites
