A Framework for Resilience Thinking

The first step to achieving an understanding of how complex adaptive systems such as enterprises can be made more resilient is to understand what is meant by ‘resilience’. Resilience as a concept has been contextually developed in a wide range of disciplines, providing a variety of resilience concepts of various foci and potential relevance to enterprise systems. This paper demonstrates how the use of systems thinking principles and systems thinking methods have contributed to the development of a research framework for enterprise resilience, by drawing together resilience concepts from multiple disciplines. Soft Systems Methodology is used to draw together viewpoints from fields including ecology, physics, sociology, psychology and disaster management. The incorporation of an enterprise system model enables resilience concepts to be contextualised for enterprises and is used to develop a set of key features of a resilience system, providing a framework to guide further research. Significant contributions are an inclusive theoretical framework for a resilient enterprise and an example of the use of systems thinking methods as a means of organising multi-disciplinary research, including the novel use of Wilson's Enterprise Model in developing the theoretical framework.