ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses questions of the design and application of a risk-based resilience system in a large organisation. It does this by examining not its design per se, but the positioning of a final system in the organisation’s pre-existing capability set, for example alongside crisis management or emergency planning. This analysis addresses the question of whether resilience should be a stand-alone risk concept, to complement these pre-existing expressions, or a generalised upgrade to their efficacy. A case study examines how Unilever takes the former route and explores the necessary trade-off mechanisms this creates. Seeking either route we discover will be a design based on compromises, as neither will be predicated on evidence for system effectiveness. As a solution to this, a model of the infrastructural decisions that complex organisations could, and indeed should, take to integrate resilience is then introduced. Large organisations clearly have many positioning options to choose from. We argue that, without a requisite total systems approach, and the appropriate appetite for complexity this requires, the effectiveness of a resilience system will always be heavily undermined. Resilience, conceptually and practically, demands that the recipient organisation disruptively evolves its structures to embrace the implications of a new capability.
