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Reported by Alice Millington, CSaP Policy Intern
Our sixth resilience seminar introduced CSaP Policy Fellow James Cemmell, Vice President of UK space organisation, Inmarsat. Alongside his colleague, Dr. Mark Dickinson – an expert on space, engineering and procurement – James revealed the importance of resilience to space projects, which have always been high cost, high stakes, and logistically complex endeavours. Almira Zejnilagic, Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting, spoke later in this session, detailing her work on risk investigations in the Middle East and Africa.
Space organisations centre resilience as paramount to safety and design; within Inmarsat, this is ingrained to the point of becoming an almost subconscious concern, a thread which runs throughout the entire company. Dr Dickinson spoke of how this paradigm offered enormous strength to Inmarsat in space traffic management. Previously, Inmarsat was dependent on US government’s notifications to determine if their satellites were due to collide with another space object. Not only would these arrive at short notice, leaving operators unprepared, but the accuracy of the US positioning data was poor in comparison to space operators’ own knowledge of their satellites’ locations. Ten years ago, by pioneering a culture of data sharing between space companies, Inmarsat helped create a legal framework to bypass this system and its inefficiencies. Building upon the shared goals of otherwise rivalled space organisations, a cooperation-based framework was mobilised to allow space operators to share their data with each other, without concern that it will be commercially exploited. Today, around 60% of all objects in space are being processed by this system, which is highly cost effective. This, our speakers iterated, is a key tenet of resilience thinking: a collective willingness to realise a greater good, beyond solely individual interests.
Indeed, the importance of everyday operational resilience was starkly illustrated when the aviation sector was highlighted, as Dr. Dickinson detailed his involvement in the effort to locate the MS70 missing aircraft. Though related in their activities, and facing similar risks and hazards, the aviation sector’s high institutional inertia towards implementing new capabilities has had huge repercussions on resilience and safety. The MS70 tragedy made apparent huge systemic failures, yet international aviation organisations have not significantly changed their framework for analysing risks seven years later – and thereby lost a valuable opportunity in protecting consumer safety and operational efficacy.
Later, Almira Zejnilagic discussed her work on global risk investigation in the Middle East and Africa. It is routine for corporate consultancies to consider topics such as sustainability, risk, continuity, leadership – yet whilst these factors comprise elements of resilience, none tell the ‘whole story’. Indeed, resilience is considered a ‘personal’ or ‘individual’ trait by corporations, rather than something an organisation could be characterised by. However, the COVID pandemic has prompted clients to ask Almira about resilience for the first time. Because the pandemic has coincided with global leadership crises (e.g. corruption), corporations have changed their language, and perhaps their mindsets, in a way that left Almira optimistic about organisational futures.
Though the COVID pandemic has prompted actors take resilience more seriously, these examples illustrated how resilience has been instrumental to organisations long before the present crisis: throughout Inmarsat’s 40-year history, and in sectors which have prioritised this trait. Following this diverse session, enthusiastic discussion was shared amongst the Policy Fellows. Now in our sixth session, the wider value of resilience thinking to policymakers and beyond is becoming increasingly evident.