Quantifying and mapping resilience within large organizations

To complement risk assessment, large organizations need to be resilient in order to maintain critical functioning in the face of uncertain future threats (whether the threat is environmental, cyber, security-related, social, etc.). Given the complexity of both large organizations and future threat space, it is challenging to enact programs and protocols that ensure resilience across whole organizations. We propose that large organizations can map current organizational resilience across threat event cycle phases (Plan, Absorb, Recover, Adapt) and context-specific resilience domains (Physical, Information, Cognitive, and Social) to contextualized resilience metrics. Subcomponents then can be compared to one another through dashboards or quantitative indices to facilitate decision making for resilience through identifying organizational strengths, weakness, synergies, and redundancies across its subcomponents in the context of their associated missions and capabilities. The United States Department of the Army is used as a case study example of how resilience approaches of large, complex organizations can be visualized to enable resilience insights using this methodology.