Although National Preparedness Month (NPM) is over, the campaign to educate organizations on how to prepare for emergencies and disasters continues. One of the pillars of that program is tracking progress toward resilience. How to measure your progress?
Check out FEMA’s Resilience Maturity Model. Read on to learn what it’s all about.
Where to find the Resilience Maturity Model?
The Resilience Maturity Model features prominently in FEMA’s (Federal Emergency Management Agency’s) latest National Resilience Guidance (NRG)1.
The Guidance, which came out in August 2024, is intended to help all individuals, communities, and organizations understand the nation’s vision for resilience, the key principles that must be applied to strengthen resilience, and the players and systems, such as emergency management software, that contribute to resilience.
The NRG also outlines how to strengthen resilience by organizing and engaging people, incorporating resilience concepts into planning efforts, creating change through policies, prioritizing projects and programs, financing resilience efforts, and measuring and evaluating resilience.
How to understand resilience
Resilience itself is defined in the NRG as the ability to prepare for threats and hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from adverse conditions and disruptions.
What is the Resilience Maturity Model?
So, what about the Resilience Maturity Model?
To simplify, the Resilience Maturity Model illustrates stages in the evolution of a community’s or organization’s approach to resilience.
More specifically, the Resilience Maturity Model identifies the key characteristics of resilience-related activities and how communities and organizations can progress from the early stages of starting to think about resilience all the way to fully integrating resilience into all aspects of their functions.
To that end, the Model offers four tiers of activities – from Ad Hoc to Emerging to Enhanced to Integrated. These tiers might be linear, but organizations can still slide back and forth along the tiers as their efforts evolve.
How to use the Resilience Maturity Model?
But how should organizations use the Resilience Maturity Model?
Organizations should deploy the Model to systematically think about where their efforts can be strengthened and where additional investment of resources might boost their ability to become more resilient.
Here’s what the Model says:
Resilience Leadership
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
Minimal, if any |
Informal and limited |
Formalized |
Formal structure coordinates and directs resilience efforts. |
Resilience Efforts
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
Informal, sporadic, and/or lack structure |
More formalized, structured, and address a broader range of objectives, but still often reactive to immediate needs. |
Proactive, forward thinking, and centered on the wellbeing of people. |
Proactive, forward thinking, agile, adaptive, and centered on the wellbeing of people. |
People, Planning, Policies, Projects/Programs
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
Disconnected |
Disconnected |
Well integrated |
Fully integrated and driven by resilience goals |
Decision Making
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
Reactive, centralized, and largely informed by the availability of outside funding |
Proactive and involves a broader range of participants |
Inclusive and data-driven, considering historical and forecasted data |
Highly inclusive, transparent, and data-driven, considering historical and forecasted data |
Collaboration
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
Minimal. Efforts are primarily top-down. Limited community and stakeholder engagement. |
Limited. There is greater engagement of partners and community members, but inclusion of underserved voices is still limited. |
Seamless collaboration among partners leads to fully integrated efforts. Community engagement is extensive, with meaningful participation from all segments of society, including underserved communities. |
Strong collaboration among diverse sectors fosters collective action and shared investment. All community members, including historically underserved, are engaged. |
Shocks and Stressors
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
Limited understanding of the relationship between shocks and stressors; both are addressed ad hoc and independently. |
The connection between shocks and stressors is starting to be understood and addressed. |
Shocks and stressors are well understood and collectively addressed. |
Shocks and stressors are well understood and collectively addressed. |
Goals and Priorities
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
General, short-term, or unclear |
Long-term goals and priorities are established and clear, but only sporadically used to inform or drive efforts. |
Clear, coordinated long-term goals and priorities drive policy, plans, projects, and programs. |
Clear, coordinated long-term goals and priorities drive policy, plans, projects, and programs. |
Efforts
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
Focus primarily on short-term, single purpose solutions and immediate needs without a clear alignment to long-term goals or sustainability. |
Focus primarily on short-term, single-purpose solutions. Future conditions and sustainability are considered in a limited manner. |
Multi-objective policies, plans, projects, and programs that offer co-benefits are standard and consider resilience principles. |
Resilience goals and principles drive multi-objective efforts that offer co-benefits and are fully integrated into budgeting and capital planning processes. |
Systems
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
Solutions do not account for the interdependence of systems. |
Systems thinking is used in a limited manner. |
Systems thinking is applied to identify and implement solutions. |
Systems thinking is applied to identify and implement solutions, including innovative and transformative solutions and financing models. |
Measurement
|
Ad hoc |
Emerging |
Enhanced |
Integrated |
|
No efforts to measure resilience exist. |
Performance measurement is limited and input or process based. |
Performance measurement is strong and focused on outputs and outcomes. |
Performance measurement is robust and outcome-based. |
Finally, instruments like the Resilience Maturity Model bespeak the importance of resilience in a world full of escalating challenges. How else to build up resilience in your organization?
We recommend supplementing the Resilience Maturity Model with the international standard devoted to businesses resilience, ISO 22316.
What should you know about the standard? Check out our Guide to ISO 22316 to find out.
Sources
1 FEMA National Resilience Guidance (NRG), available at: https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_national-resilience-guidance_august2024.pdf
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