Exploring Operational Resilience in the Context of Military Aviation: Finding the Right Mode at the Right Time
INTRODUCTION'Constant change is the new normal' is a theme of the modern business world. Organizations are evaluating recent natural disasters, world health threats, global financial crises, cyber attacks and terrorism threats to learn from the past and seek robustness, agility and resiliency despite decades of cost reductions and streamlining under lean philosophies (Fiksel et al. 2015) But it seems that understanding current environmental conditions and vulnerabilities still lags in many firms (Pettit et al. 2013) Even then, in a dynamic world simply knowing your current environment must be enhanced with sensing it for changes and repeatedly adapting operations to match, to avoid or at least mitigate supply chain disruptions (Ambulkar, Blackhurst and Grawe, 2015) This study leverages current theory on resilience attributes to evaluate how organizations can quickly and effectively change their operational modes to more accurately match their changing environment.LITERATURE REVIEWOperational resilience in the field of business is a new and evolving concept. Initial definitions were created from resilience applications in engineering as, "the tendency of a material to return to its original shape after the removal of a stress that has produced elastic strain" (Merriam Webster, 2007) from ecology as, "the ability for an ecosystem to rebound from a disturbance while maintaining diversity, integrity, and ecological processes" (Folke et al. 2004) and from psychology as, "an individual's stability or quick recovery (or even growth) under significant adverse conditions' (Leipold Greve, 2009) These underlying objectives have been translated to the enterprise of business as, "the ability to survive, adapt and grow in the face of turbulent change" (Fiksel, 2006) Recent works have explored the characteristics that develop resilience, focusing on the capabilities that enhance resilience and the vulnerabilities that make an enterprise susceptible to disruptions (Christopher and Peck, 2004; Sheffi, 2005; Pettit, Fiksel and Croxton 2010; Blackhurst et al. 2011; Brandon Jones et al. 2014; Habermann, Blackhurst, and Metcalf, 2015 among others) Much of this work has focused on the application of resilience toward preventing, or at least mitigating, operational disruptions caused by natural disasters, supplier problems, market change or terrorist attacks. Hence, these concerns primarily arise in the domain of emergency and disaster response. However, there is often a poor understanding of disaster conditions in this earlier body of work, and many use ill fitting assumptions from outside disaster domain (Green and Kolesar, 2004; Altay and Green, 2006; Boin et al. 2010; Charles et al. 2010; Pettit and Beresford 2009; Pedraza Martinez et al. 2011; Holguin Veras, et al. 2014) Just as the field of resilience is evolving, operational management during emergencies or disasters is perceived as new, young, and/or underdeveloped (Boin, 2009; Kovacs and Spens, 2009; Boin et al. 2010; Janssen et al. 2010; Tatham and Pettit, 2010) Despite advances, operational resilience in the area of emergency and disaster response still lacks the theoretical understanding needed to integrate case study findings (Altay and Green, 2006; Boin et al. 2010) Compounding this problem, emergency and disaster response management also lacks performance metrics to properly evaluate success or failure (Thomas and Kopczak, 2005; Altay and Green, 2006; Beamon and Balcik, 2008; Boin et al. 2010; Janssen et al. 2010) With those limited metrics, existing emergency and disaster related research heavily favors mathematical programming (Altay and Green, 2006; Simpson and Hancock, 2009; Galindo and Batta, 2013) which generally render the system under management as a given set of processes that interact according to a single mode of operation.MODELING RESILENCE AS MULTIPLE MODESMoving beyond resilience as a single operational mode, there is a lack of understanding of how organizations can adjust their operations between modes or states, or even know when to adjust, let alone prepare for quick and effective operational adjustments.