“Resilience”

The January 2012 article in ASIS International’s Security Management magazine has an interview with Dr. Stephen Flynn,  who is a major “think tank” guy and professor at Northeastern University in Boston.  Here’s one of his answers:

The Obama administration has not changed far enough. They’re tilting in the right direction, but I think more movement needs to happen more quickly.  To the credit of the administration, they’ve embraced the concept of resilience  - a public acknowledgement that every act of terror cannot be prevented and some capacity to respond and recover from them is necessary.  That’s difficult for political leadership to say, but the president and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano have said it, and that’s a necessary dose of reality.  The Obama administration has also gone a bit further than the Bush administration with the all-hazards recognition of the importance of what FEMA’s Craig Fugate calls the “whole community approach.”  I give them credit for recognizing that homeland security needs to expand beyond a narrow focus on terrorism risks to include the broader issues of all hazards and that there needs to be a greater degree of outreach and engagement of communities.”

Couple that with the latest issue of Inside Home land Security (Winter 2011) issue in which Dr. Dave McIntyre, VP for Academic Affairs at the National Graduate School and Visiting Fellow at both the Homeland Security Institute and WMD Center, wrote in his article: Reducing the Risk of Risk Management.  He said:

The traditional approach sees risk as a product of an attacker’s intent, the vulnerability of a target and the consequences of a successful attack.  In forecasting the risk of a natural hazard, likelihood of a disaster may be substituted for an attacker’s intent and capability.  Whatever system of calculation is adopted, someone (or some team) must place numerical values on each aspect of the calculation and then adjust the weight of factors for qualitative differences.  For example, if the calculation of risk to a warehouse and an elementary school turn out exactly the same, you might want to weigh the loss of children more heavily in terms of consequence, than the loss of materials (consequences).  Are Risk Management and management of risk the same?  Many experts say yes. But if Risk Management deals with cycles, processes and allocation of resources over time…then what do we call the day-to-day manipulation of available resources to meet threats?  Are police or security on patrol really risk managers?  Or are they managing the day-to-day risk?  Perhaps we need two different terms for these two different activities.