Sensemaking as an approach for resilience assessment in an Essential Service Organization

Environment Systems and Decisions volume 40, pages 84–106 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

Essential service organizations are interested in approaches to assess and build infrastructure resilience to ensure an uninterrupted supply of services, such as electricity or water. This study applied a sensemaking approach to assess the nature of social resilience in a national essential service organization in South Africa. It used the SenseMaker tool to collect and surface patterns from a set of micro-narratives collected in response to a national emergency simulation exercise. Findings show that participants utilized specified resilience resources, such as procedures and protocols, while general social resilience resources, such as social network integration and agency, which would have contributed to the response, did not feature significantly. Participants’ sense of coherence—how they comprehend, manage, and find meaning amidst life’s challenges—had a positive bearing on preparedness, involvement, and expectation of outcome in the context of the emergency simulation exercise and appear to be the organization’s strongest social resilience resource. This study suggests that a sense of coherence can inform resilience-building interventions, and be used as a measure of effective sensemaking towards more resilient outcomes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SenseMaker® is Software as a Service, available through Cognitive Edge, of whom Prof David John Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer (Cognitive Edge 2018).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge contributions by Robert Koch, who heads up Enterprise Resilience in Eskom, and provided useful comments on the article; Jose Correia, who conducts these exercises, for his support; and three anonymous reviewers, whose inputs were valuable in clarifying and strengthening the article. The authors are supported by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant 98766), Investments for Development (GRAID) project funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), and a Young Researcher Grant (621-2014-5137) funded by Vetenskaprådet in Sweden.

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  1. Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Susara E. van der Merwe, Reinette Biggs & Rika Preiser

  2. Enterprise Resilience Department, Eskom, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Susara E. van der Merwe

  3. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Reinette Biggs

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  1. Susara E. van der Merwe
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  2. Reinette Biggs
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Correspondence to Susara E. van der Merwe.

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Susara E. van der Merwe, Reinette Biggs, and Rika Preiser declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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van der Merwe, S.E., Biggs, R. & Preiser, R. Sensemaking as an approach for resilience assessment in an Essential Service Organization. Environ Syst Decis 40, 84–106 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-019-09743-1

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Keywords

  • Critical infrastructure resilience
  • General social resilience
  • Sensemaking
  • Sense of coherence
  • Resilience capacities
  • Emergency exercise