Organisational Resilience – Are we built on a House of Cards?

On 16 May the Constructing Excellence Members Forum at the offices of Trowers and Hamlin considered the issue of Organisational Resilience, based on the recent report by Project 5.

The report’s purpose – to provide an overview of how resilient the industry is in relation to a range of internal and external factors – explores the role of organisational resilience in enabling construction companies to adapt to changing conditions. It addresses the evidence of failure, posits why they fail, considers the issues, areas of risk, and proposes how to build resilience and the benefits therein of doing so for the individual companies and the sector as a whole.

The report, written by Project Five Consulting, has identified the construction industry as a key enabling sector for the wider UK economy. A resilient sector should be good for UK plc. However, it has a higher rate of failure than the average across all industry sectors. This fragility is underpinned by structural issues that characterise the weaknesses in the industry. These are borne out by the recent collapse into liquidation of the country’s second largest construction company, Carillion.

The report stimulated some lively and engaged discussion around how we can we change this culture?  Given the risk that is posed to clients by lack of resilience in the sector it was suggested that an industry maturity framework could be established to provide organisations with a consistent basis to measure resilience. This can then be used by client’s and supply chain partners to make informed decisions around organisational resilience.

Project 5 are already working with CITB on the development of a framework tool and Constructing Excellence members will have the opportunity to feed into the development of that tool.  Moreover the team will be offering opportunities for regions and clubs to find out more about Organisational Resilience.

Read the full report on the Project Five website.