An integrated approach to managing disruption-related risk: life and death in a model community

One of the difficulties in examining organisational resilience in a community setting is the sheer complexity of the interrelationships essential to creating and sustaining that resilience. Very often, one is reduced to synthesising simpler hypothetical models to try to define and analyse the key aspects of resilience to volatility in the environment. This paper uses a university organisational setting as a real-life model of a community to explore the key arrangements essential for establishing resilience. Australia's worst recorded natural disaster, the devastating Victorian bushfires of February 2009, provides a context against which the resilience arrangements of an organisation, and by extrapolation a model community, can be examined.