Existential crises question the organization's readiness to withstand uncertainties. Geopolitics and natural disruptions have changed human behavior into a “new normal.” In improving business continuity, HEIs must strategically deal with operating models, resilience, and agility and be better prepared for disruptions. Typical HEI reactions of online home TLR lack addressing the human capacity/capability needs, technologies/infrastructure, academic/student services support, and TLR evaluation/assessments that cover the HEI broader approach of education values, systems, mechanisms and pedagogies, and student outcomes assurance. It includes HEI human, infor, and organizational capital capacities and capabilities of these systems. Being resilient and agile calls for faster decision-making focused on HEI priorities. This chapter addresses the HEI strategic readiness through a strategic organizational readiness model (SORM) managing the HEI organization readiness. The SORM evolves around the HEI six thematic systems, with resilience and agility as vital analytical and assessment parameters.
TopIntroduction: Organization Strategic Readiness
Since 2000, global uncertainty and natural disaster frequencies have grown manifold, including a 24% point increase in cyber incidents since 2013, with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and Ukrainian crisis being the turning point (Nauck et al., 2021) in the backdrop of other geopolitical adversities and natural calamities of past decades. These have affected all human life, moving from the “normal” to the “new normal.” Human life has revolved around the “real normal” that has been around, downplayed, and greatly ignored for decades due to its acceptance as part and parcel of life. This normal is the human life “real normal” Diversity-Discrimination-Displacement-Divide multifaceted variables of age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, language, race, color, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, cultural, religious and political beliefs and ideologies, physical and mental ability interplayed and impacted by four human-centered personal-personifications, psycho-pretense, political-pretense, and power-posture dimensions (Teay and Wattanasap, 2020). Succeeding in natural or uncertain times through strengthening institutional resilience and being agile enough to adapt to disruptive changes and challenges has never been more critical to all profit & non-profit enterprises or academic institutions (Tomlinson et al. 2021).
The FERMA–McKinsey (Federation of European Risk Management Associations) research of 200 senior executives and risk and insurance professionals (Natale et al. 2022) from various industry sectors and countries showed that risk is still mainly involved in crisis response. It highlighted that previous risk management practices focused on a few well-defined risks, primarily financial ones. Two-thirds of responding companies acknowledge that the global pandemic has made risk and resilience significantly more critical to their organizations. The respondents said that resilience is central to their organizations' strategic process. It calls for secure and flexible organizational and technical infrastructure at the potent intersection of digitization within other resilience areas, including work-from-home strategies. It also indicated that a better risk governance model is vital for efficient and effective decision-making. Crisis management with foresight capabilities (scenarios and stress testing) emerged as one of the core areas for improvement. Natale et al. (2022) surmised that “resilient organizations develop business models that can adapt to significant shifts in customer demand, the competitive landscape, technological changes, and the regulatory terrain.”