Quantitative system dynamics modelling of organisational health/resilience of infrastructure service providers

Abstract

Despite universal recognition of the importance of the infrastructure services, there has been very little focus on the enabling organisations and how they are affected by major disruptions. The work of Resilient Organisations, in particular, has introduced organisational resilience as a central theme in organisational performance post-disaster. Their work emphasises the roles of leadership, networks/connections, economic and insurance impacts, and regulatory frameworks, on post-disaster operability of any organisation. Most recent research identifies the importance of interacting behaviours of physical (working conditions), human (worker attitudes), and organisational (strategies, plans) elements when understanding organisational resilience.

System dynamics approaches have been used to provide insight into safety systems, which have many similarities to the interactions relating to organisational resilience. The time is ripe for the application of a systems dynamics approach to better understand organisational resilience. Application to the particular issues related to infrastructure service providers would seem a valuable starting point.

Advance in this direction will require the use of qualitative relationships as well as attempts at verification of model reasonableness through analysis of questionnaires. A first step would be the development of causal loop diagrams to identify system archetype diagrams to describe commonly occurring behavioural themes.

Causal loop diagrams can be used to develop quantitative dynamic systems models where the parameters can be varied systematically to identify plausible versus implausible behaviour, helping to constrain uncertainty. This process of refining models to match expected archetypes provides the opportunity to identify critical components or factors that influence the wider system-level behaviour (e.g. resilience).

This direction for research has potentially significant value because it would enable the assessment of an organisation under varied conditions, and the identification of leverage points for intervention to improve performance and avoid failure. The outcomes of such research could valuably interface with the MERIT platform to allow for evaluation of the vulnerability of economic recovery to fragile internal processes of infrastructure service providers. Identification of key components, roles and processes that would cause organisational failure when placed under stress is fundamental to improving performance and resilience.