Testing resilience at Sevenoaks District Council

The challenge

Sevenoaks District Council delivers a wide range of essential services to residents, businesses and communities across the locality. Maintaining these services during major disruption requires effective emergency and business continuity arrangements, clear decision-making and coordinated use of staff and resources.

Like many local authorities, the Council had established emergency arrangements and business continuity plans. However, it recognised that organisational resilience also depends on managers understanding their responsibilities, identifying dependencies between services and making informed decisions as an incident develops.

The challenge was to examine how existing arrangements were understood and would operate collectively during an emergency. This included exploring how managers would establish priorities, coordinate across departments, maintain critical services and sustain workforce availability as disruption progressed.

Our solution

The Scenario Informed Resilience Assessment (SIRA) combines structured assessment with specialist facilitation and scenario-based exploration to examine organisational preparedness and identify practical opportunities for improvement.

Delivery was led by facilitators from The Workforce Development Trust and the Resilience Advisors Network (RAN), combining the former’s workforce resilience expertise with RAN’s specialist emergency planning knowledge and understanding of the local geographical context.

The assessment followed four connected stages.

1. Understanding the Council’s objectives

Ahead of delivery, the team met with Sevenoaks District to understand its existing arrangements and agree the objectives, so the workshop could be tailored to the local authority’s operating context. This ensured the scenario and facilitated discussions were relevant to the organisation, its responsibilities and the challenges it might face during a major disruption.

2. Establishing a baseline of preparedness

Participants completed a structured pre-workshop assessment exploring key dimensions of organisational and workforce resilience, including preparedness, governance, coordination and individual readiness.

The assessment established a baseline of perceived preparedness, providing a consistent framework for exploring organisational resilience and informing the workshop discussions.

3. Challenging assumptions through a developing scenario

The Workforce Development Trust and RAN facilitators led an interactive workshop centred on a prolonged power outage, with the scenario developing over time to introduce escalating pressures and increasingly complex decisions.

Participants explored how disruption to power, communications, premises, transport and workforce availability could combine to affect critical services and the Council’s ability to sustain its response.

The facilitated discussions examined decision-making, service prioritisation, workforce sustainability and dependencies between departments.
By bringing together managers from operational, corporate and customer-facing services, the exercise encouraged participants to challenge assumptions, share perspectives and consider the Council’s collective response rather than individual service arrangements in isolation.

4. Reassessment and practical recommendations

Following the workshop, participants completed a further assessment to explore changes in their perceptions of preparedness and understanding of organisational resilience.

The findings were considered alongside facilitator observations, workshop discussions and participant feedback to develop a rounded assessment of organisational resilience.

A comprehensive final report brought together the evidence, key insights and practical recommendations, providing Sevenoaks with a structured basis for strengthening its resilience arrangements.

Impact

SIRA helped Sevenoaks managers look beyond their individual services, challenge assumptions and develop a clearer understanding of how the Council would respond collectively during major disruption.

Post-workshop evaluation demonstrated the value of the approach:

• 100% reported a clearer understanding of how the Council would respond to and maintain critical services during an emergency.
• 100% said the exercise helped identify gaps or areas requiring greater clarity or preparedness.
• 93% reported an improved understanding of how their own role and service contributes to the Council’s response.

Beyond these measurable outcomes, participants highlighted the value of sharing perspectives across departments, recognising dependencies between services and understanding how personal circumstances could affect workforce availability during prolonged disruption.

The evolving scenario was particularly valued for encouraging collaboration and bringing different perspectives into the discussion:

“It was invaluable as it laid out an unfolding scenario and allowed everyone from different backgrounds and roles to put forward comments and share suggestions freely on how to deal with it.” – Workshop participant

Participants also recognised the value of being challenged to think beyond their immediate responsibilities and consider both individual and organisational resilience:

“Highly valuable, very thought provoking and forces you to think bigger picture.” – Workshop participant

“Well organised workshop, experienced presenters. Really good at challenging thought processes and exploring personal and corporate responses to emergency.” – Workshop participant

Importantly, the assessment provided a safe environment to explore potential challenges and identify opportunities for improvement before a real incident:

“I found the experience extremely valuable and would encourage others to participate. It raises awareness in a safe environment, allowing organisations to identify issues and put measures in place proactively, rather than having to address them during a real emergency.” – Workshop participant