Transforming standards of organisational safety and resilience
- Cranfield’s research into safety, risk and resilience created a new model for organisations
- At the heart of the new framework was attention to the crucial role of organisational behaviour and culture
- BS 65000: Guidance for Organisational Resilience, built on the foundation of Cranfield’s work, has been described as a “landmark standard”
Organisations face a cascade of threats: climate change, conflict, financial shocks, pandemics.
Cranfield’s research into safety, risk and resilience has helped to shift standard management thinking from defensive measures and prevention to the need for flexibility, agility and innovation. The model for how organisations anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to shocks and sudden disruptions has been transformed.
The work has led directly to a new British Standard for Organisational Resilience; an improvement in Safety and Airspace Regulations for the UK Civil Aviation Authority; new policies for the European System of Central Banks; and, many other public and private sector bodies making use of the Cranfield frameworks and models, reducing the harm from disruptive events and ensuring the continuity of critical services.
How organisations anticipate, prepare for and adapt to shocks and sudden disruptions in the UK and internationally has been transformed.
Making risk and safety management work
Research examined the workings of traditional risk and safety management and why policies and practices could be less effective and influential than they should be.
This led to new insights. Rather than just classifying the probability and consequence of known threats and connecting vertically from strategic or policy objectives to individual components (infrastructure, applications or operational processes and behaviours), there also needed to be horizontal connections: across the ‘end to end’ delivery of essential services and a focus on the capacity for making a rapid response and being agile.
Implementing new frameworks
Projects for the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) into safety leadership, and into the influence of organisational change on safety, identified the specific management practices across sectors that contribute to and limit safety and resilience. The work also produced a framework for improving safety during organisational change, with a specific focus on outsourcing.
Engagement with risk management practices was found to be driven by five beliefs: legitimacy (the need to apply best practice standards); value (risk management must be demonstrably useful); competence (ability to control risk); fact (risks need to be tangible, perceptible and real) and authority (the need to have the power or authority to act).
From risk to resilience
The concept of organisational resilience was augmented and refined to provide a new holistic framework. At the heart of this was attention to the crucial role of organisational behaviour and culture, together with a methodology for diagnosis and action.
The Strategic Tensions Assessment Tool (STAT) and 4Sight methodology are the basis for a strategic, performance-based, organisation-wide perspective. The STAT identifies four ways of thinking about Organisational Resilience: preventative control (defensive consistency), mindful action (defensive flexibility), performance optimisation (progressive consistency) and adaptive innovation (progressive flexibility). 4Sight helps leaders throughout an organisation introduce and sustain organisational resilience by developing four key practices: foresight, insight, oversight, and hindsight.
Dr Colin Pilbeam, Reader in Safety Leadership at Cranfield University, discusses new research funded by IOSH examining how safety is managed in outsourced relationships and some of the associated challenges.
At the heart of the new framework was attention to the crucial role of organisational behaviour and culture.
Safety and resilience
Cranfield’s research has led to a host of applications and impacts across business sectors. This has included:
- undertaking a safety assurance review for the world’s leading aviation safety regulator, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in 2016. The review led to more than 100 recommendations and a bespoke Safety Maturity Model, embedded as a means of ensuring a cycle of ongoing assessment, development and progress. In this way, the research has been central to the CAA’s ambition to achieve a transformation from compliance-based regulation to performance-based regulation of aviation safety in the UK;
- the adoption of the CAA Safety Maturity Model by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). This means roll-out to more than 27 national aviation authorities across Europe;
- and also, its adoption by an international helicopter company providing offshore transportation and search and rescue services through its operations in the UK, Norway, Turkmenistan, Australia, Nigeria, Trinidad, Guyana and the Gulf of Mexico;
- the use of Cranfield’s models of safety leadership in IOSH training programmes and applied work with organisations. Siemens, for example, has used the Outsourcing Safety framework to ensure maximum understanding, alignment and performance effectiveness between itself and its sub-contracting parties in the initial stages of a new power plant build;
- the publication of the BSI (British Standards Institution) BS 65000 Guidance for Organisational Resilience (2014), built on the foundation of Cranfield’s work — described as being a “landmark standard”, critical for coherence and the integration of crisis management and business continuity management;
BS 65000: Guidance for Organisational Resilience, built on the foundation of Cranfield’s work, has been described as a “landmark standard” for organisations.
- the European System of Central Banks’ Taskforce for Organisational Resilience using the research to formulate its baseline policy approach, assessment and application toolset and implementation guidelines, providing insights both for individual banks and across the shared system;
- many organisations making use of the STAT framework to maintain their resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Managers from Personal Group attended a workshop on the framework two months before the start of the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK;
- the growing adoption of Cranfield’s five principles of resilience. A study by AIRMIC (the Association of Insurance and Risk Managers in Industry and Commerce) among 152 risk managers and a number of associated professions (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; Chartered Insurance Institute, Business Continuity Institute; Association of Chartered Certified Accountants; Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors and the Institute of Risk Management) showed how most respondents believed their organisations have embedded, to some extent, the five principles, with particular progress being made on 'rapid response', 'review and adapt', and 'relationships and networks'.
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