ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a detailed case study into the behavioural content of eight industry Standards relevant to a resilience reasoning system. These are viewed from three perspectives: the authoring process, the extant literature on their efficacy and a hierarchical content analysis. Standards such as BS65000 – Guidance on Organisational Resilience – are created by the expert judgement of a technical committee over years. We note a scientific hesitation around how authoritative this can be, since a body of professional opinion is not the same as validated evidence. Casting a net for scientific evidence to validate the effectiveness of Standards only deepens this caution when we discover nothing in the public domain to substantiate their impacts or validate their content. The pervasive confidence in Standards, scientifically, only amounts to confidence in collective wisdom. Using a hierarchical content analysis across the eight Standards reveals a requirement of at least 165 new operational compliance behaviours. Taken in total like this, we can see how unsustainable their wider application could become. A more detailed content analysis reveals that almost all of these behaviours can be reduced to seven operationally focused performance-shaping factors at the cross organisational level. The implications for application and measurement are discussed.
