What is resilience?

Resilience is “the capacity for adaptation in the service system to recover from a disturbance to achieve the same or higher outcomes.”

(Adapted from Bovaird and Quirk 2017)

Governance International Public Value Model

Resilience has become a key concept in public administration during the time of Covid-19. However, reflecting its roots in several different disciplines, there is still no coherent conceptual model for how resilience can be embedded in the overall public service system. This remains a key challenge in overcoming the major problems of risk management in the public sector.

Resilience is important not only because it allows public service systems to cope better with the crises that engulf them from time to time but, perhaps more importantly, because it allows public service organisations to escape from the tendency to be highly risk averse. Governance International has developed a model for achieving greater resilience in the whole public service system, making intensive use of user and community co-production to enable positive risks to be taken through social innovation which allow rapid learning to be achieved.

How can Governance International help you to achieve whole-systems resilience?

It is essential to recognise the different form of resilience required to cope with the risks to different types of outcome:

  • individual outcomes require user resilience, helping individuals to adapt to disturbances to their outcomes;
  • community outcomes require community resilience, doing the same for communities;
  • business outcomes require market resilience, doing the same for the overall set of firms in the economy.
  • resilience on the part of service providers is required (service provider resilience), as each of the public service providers is at risk of failing to provide the services expected from them.

In most public service organisations there has not been sufficient recognition that these four different types of resilience form a ‘whole system resilience network’, which must be managed holistically.

Resilience Model

The Governance International model for managing the ‘whole system resilience network’ shows you how to improve each element in the chain linking user-community-provider-market resilience, while bringing each element into a sound and well-balanced relationship with the other elements.

The model also shows how each link in this resilience network can be improved through user and community co-production of public services and outcomes, whereby citizens can learn and improve their own resilience, while also supporting other stakeholders in this dynamic system to improve their resilience, too.