2 What is Business Resilience?

The term ‘resilience’ is used in Preparing Scotland core document to mean ‘the capacity of an individual, community or system to adapt in order to sustain an acceptable level of function, structure and identity’. Business Resilience is this capacity or attribute of a business or other organisation. Category 1 responders that are sufficiently resilient in this sense will therefore be fulfilling their duties under the Civil Contingencies Act and Regulations to be able to ‘continue to perform his or its functions’.

1 Introduction and Context

Resilience, as described and promoted in Preparing Scotland1, has many different but interconnected elements. In an organisational or business context, this manifests as the practical ability to avoid disruptions to normal activity, to keep the things that matter most going and, if disruptions occur, to get back to a desired state of operation quickly – not by good fortune, but by design.

Questions to Ask

Disruptions can affect any part of your day to day business, and often affect several aspects at once. How would the following affect your organisation’s ability to carry out its statutory duties and achieve its strategic objectives?

Loss of Access to Premises

Days of severe weather have made some important parts of your property unsafe for use and damaged the facilities and resources it contains; they have also caused a sharp increase in demand for your services.

Annexes

Annex A

Types of Exercises: Pros and Cons Matrix

Annex B

Exercise Checklist

Annex C

Scenario Considerations

Annex D

Exercise Risk Assessment

Annex E

Health and Safety Considerations

4. Post Exercise

Cold Debrief Post Exercise

Follow Up Meeting

 

Cold Debrief

Debriefing is an essential part of the exercise process. It allows for collated data to be reviewed and new data to be collected. It is learning through reflection and should be used to identify learning from the experience of the exercise and how best to move forward.

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