20-minutes could help secure your centre’s organisational resilience

How relieved would you feel, if all it took was 20-minutes of working through a peer designed scorecard to build up your organisational resilience and feed data seamlessly into your annual planning processes?

In this article, we show you the importance of developing a strategy to build your disaster resilience maturity while incorporating it easily and quickly into your annual planning processes.

 

What is disaster resilience maturity?

Resilience maturity – as an executive level strategy – goes beyond the operational response to a disaster and tackles how an organisation can adapt, learn and grow during periods of disaster management to increase their effectiveness and position.

Resilience maturity is about your business’ capacity to respond to short term shocks as well as long term challenges, and also looks at whether your business survives and thrives in the face of those challenges. In this context, the shocks and challenges we’re looking at are specifically related to disasters.

Organisations will be at varying stages of resilience maturity ranging from those who accept the adversity of a disaster and cease to operate, through to those who are not just surviving but who are also able to improve on their business-as-usual and possibly take advantage of market opportunities.

 

What if disaster resilience planning was super-fast? 

In October 2022, CSIA and their project partners (including Neighbourhood Centres Queensland), launched a free, secure and super-fast online tool for community services organisations to understand and build their resilience maturity.

The Community Services Disaster Resilience Maturity Scorecard (the Scorecard) can take as little as 20-minutes to complete and provides community services organisations with insights to accelerate their strategic planning and preparedness for disasters.

This makes it very easy to slip into the annual planning processes that you’re no doubt going through right this second.

The tool produces reports with graphs that can be used in other reporting and planning processes to show your current state, and (when you’ve done this a few years in a row) it will map your progress year-on-year.

 

How do we use the Scorecard?

There are many ways to use the Resilience Maturity Scorecard (we’ve outlined a few on the website https://csialtd.com.au/resilience-maturity-project/). Having the conversation about your organisation’s level of resilience maturity and thinking about what steps you can take to build on that, is the first crucial step.

If your CEO and the Chair of your Board take some time to work through the Scorecard together, it can be completed within a span of 20 minutes to 2 hours. This timeframe assumes only two people are working together to read and rate each of the statements in the Scorecard while discussing and including examples along the way.

Some CEOs might take their entire Board through the process in a half-day workshop fashion. It may be worth considering having a session this size facilitated to keep the process on track.

Others might choose to gather up likeminded small organisations and have a facilitator support your process in a full-day workshop style. The benefits of this are being able to identify shared gaps in the resilience maturity of the organisations in the room, and then collaborate to find shared solutions.

 

What’s in the Scorecard?

The Scorecard is based on a research-backed model and is consistent with the Australian Government’s Organisational Resilience HealthCheck. Our Scorecard has been built in consultation with the Community Services Industry, for the Community Services Industry.

The Resilience Maturity Framework has three domains that include a series of indicators. The Scorecard asks you to rate your organisation against a series of statements under each of those indicators. The result of those ratings points to your organisation’s current resilience maturity position and gives you insight on where to focus your efforts.

In addition to those ratings, you will get a series of suggested actions to help you accelerate your resilience maturity. Those actions represent real-life tactics your peers across the Community Services Industry have taken to successfully build their own resilience.

You’ll also be provided with resources from the Disaster Resilience Maturity Playbook to help you achieve the suggested actions.

 

What are people saying about the Scorecard?

Neighbourhood Centres Queensland CEO Em James said, as a partner in the project, they saw the Resilience Maturity Scorecard and accompanying Playbook as important new resources for boards and senior leadership.

“The Scorecard has been developed in consultation with Neighbourhood and Community Centres and other community service organisations to support them to be in a position to work with their communities to meet increasing demands of the impacts of disaster events,” they said.

“An emphasis on planning and leadership facilitated by the Scorecard will provide organisations with a clearer means of identifying and addressing gaps in the way they are able to respond to these events over time,” said Mx. James.

Also a project partner, Hervey Bay Neighbourhood Centre CEO Tanya Stevenson said: “The key to becoming a sustainable organisation starts with knowing how to measure resilience and the steps to take to become more resilient in the future,” she said.

“This free online tool empowers organisations in regional and rural communities to understand their resilience maturity quickly, at no additional costs and with available resources. They can download a report for sharing for internal discussions.

“Using the dashboard, report and playbook, organisations can bring their extensive experience on the frontline during disaster together with an evidence-based tool and resources aimed at sustainability,” Ms Stevenson said.

CSIA General Manager, Programs Matthew Gillett said the Scorecard and Playbook joined their larger suite of tools and resources to build community services organisations’ disaster resilience and preparedness.

“We have been working in collaboration with government, Industry, universities, and other peaks like Queenslanders with Disability Network (QDN) to accelerate inclusive disaster and pandemic planning and preparedness,” he said.

“It’s through this work we continue to deliver capability building with a focus on excellence, facilitating system change and Industry-wide communications and collaboration.

“CSIA is providing tools and resources to accelerate the business of preparedness so organisations can focus on delivering essential services to community.

“We look forward to our continued work to advance Industry by doing business better in times of disaster and recovery,” Mr Gillett said.

The Community Services Resilience Maturity project has been funded by the Queensland Government Queensland Reconstruction Authority.

Find out more and start your Resilience Maturity journey at https://csialtd.com.au/resilience-maturity-project/


Written By: CSIA
Published: January 2023