An integrated approach to managing disruption-related risk: Life and death in a model community

Carl A. Gibson, Director, Risk Management Unit, La Trobe University

Abstract
One of the difficulties in examining organisational resilience in a community setting is the sheer complexity of the interrelationships essential to creating and sustaining that resilience. Very often, one is reduced to synthesising simpler hypothetical models to try to define and analyse the key aspects of resilience to volatility in the environment. This paper uses a university organisational setting as a real-life model of a community to explore the key arrangements essential for establishing resilience. Australia’s worst recorded natural disaster, the devastating Victorian bushfires of February 2009, provides a context against which the resilience arrangements of an organisation, and by extrapolation a model community, can be examined.

Keywords
resilience, risk, business continuity, disruption, bushfire, crisis

Carl A. Gibson, is Director of La Trobe University’s Risk Management Unit and is the university’s overall incident controller across its seven campuses. He is also responsible for chairing the university’s Emergency Planning Committee and the university’s Threat Assessment Team, which undertakes assessments and behavioural interventions on disturbed individuals. Carl undertakes teaching in risk, emergency management and business continuity management on several continents. He is also undertaking research into resilience and catastrophic failure. Prior to joining the university, he held senior executive roles in government and corporate sectors, working in Australasia, Africa, Asia, North America and Europe. He has formerly served in the army and police and is a current volunteer Country Fire Authority fire-fighter, serving during Australia’s worst disaster, the Black Saturday bushfires.

If you wish to read the full text of the article you will need to subscribe.