Author: Phillip Wood
ISBN No: 9781-84928-382-3
Review date: 12/12/2025
No of pages: 132
Publisher: IT Governance
Publisher URL:
http://www.itgovernance.co.uk
Year of publication: 25/02/2013
Brief:
Resilient Thinking - Protecting Organisations in the 21st Century
In his book Resilient Thinking, Phillip Wood, pictured, has thrown down a challenge to all security and risk managers, writes Mark Rowe. From the March 2013 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
Phillip Wood does not much like what he calls the ‘checklisters’. He makes the shrewd point that the internet and all the information that could set us free, has in fact allowed the ‘checklist culture’ to thrive. The curse of cut and paste – even easier electronically than in the days of real scissors and glue – has tempted us to lift other people’s plans, cut corners and be lazy. Not that Phillip Wood is necessarily championing people with experience rather than tick-boxes. Experience is a good thing, but it can be downright dangerous if the ‘experience-mongers’ assume they have the answers. The author is also against silo-thinking: “Think in stovepipes and your organisation may well go up in smoke; go beyond frameworks and mental constraints and you may have a chance of coming out the other side in one piece …”
He argues that business continuity, security, health and safety, emergency planning, disaster recovery, and so on, ‘are all different elements of resilience’. As a head of department at Bucks New University, offering courses with some of those elements, he practices what he preaches. This slim book does not have case studies, quotes from experts, or reading lists – deliberately so; instead, it ends with ‘starter questions’, then it urges the reader to put the book down, ‘and go and make it happen’. In style and content, this slim book is for the practitioner to think – about impacts, preparing and planning, and ‘breaking free from conventional thought’. My only query would be who the book is aimed at: someone already in the field of resilience who needs inspiring, or a newcomer to the field who needs encouraging to think for themselves, rather than be trapped by checklists and conventions. Either can profit from it. In style and content, Phil Wood has pulled off an exhilarating and original read that deserves the widest readership among security managers and beyond.
