Empowering People for Sustainable Utility Resilience

Resilience planning is common among utilities, however these efforts often overlook people-centric factors that are critical for sustained resilience, such as workforce readiness, effective partnerships, and community engagement. Further, the events of the last three years such as natural disasters, supply chain disruptions, labor market dynamics, and emerging contaminants have fundamentally changed how utilities are viewed by their staff and community. Without an people-centered approach that engages these critical stakeholders, the resulting resilience plans will fail to meet utility needs when stressed by an emergency. In 2023, the Moulton Niguel Water District (District) led an effort that broadly engaged their organization, external partners, and global experts to develop a people-centered approach to sustained organizational resilience. The resulting Resiliency Action Plan (RAP) now serves as a framework for strategic and operational planning that can be scaled statewide. Framing Impact and Change Readiness. The District led a comprehensive series of interviews with their staff, management, leadership, and Board of Directors to define resilience and five aspirational 'abilities' for maintaining readiness including; forecasting disruption, balancing operations with preparation, handling simultaneous challenges, recovering quickly, and adopting new practices. These abilities served as specific organizational attributes that they intend to improve through the implementation of the RAP. District staff was also asked to reflect on the organization's past responses to disruption. These perspectives were used to define default organizational reactions to emergencies as well as strengths and potential improvement areas. These experiences helped to define which type of mitigation strategies the organization might find easier or more difficult to implement in the future. Using Megatrends to Assess Current Practices. The District considered the potential impacts of four megatrends including Security Challenges (e.g., cyberattacks, physical attacks), External Events (e.g., weather events, supply chain disruption, financial recession), Workforce Dynamics (e.g., staffing shortage), and Customer Experience (e.g., on-demand information, tailored services). By considering how these megatrends are impacting the national water sector and utilities, the District identified specific challenges for further evaluation including cybersecurity, compound natural disasters, supply chain disruption, recruitment, retention, emergency communications, changing customer expectations, affordability, and effective two-way communication with the community. Engaging the Ecosystem for Improved Resilience. Through a collaborative workshop series, District staff used the specific challenges to define potential acute and chronic impacts on operations, brainstorm mitigation strategies, and identify gap areas. Rather than use typical megatrend-based scenarios to test current practices, the District used the potential impacts in operations to create complex scenarios. By doing this, the District defined nine alternative future scenarios that combined elements of several challenges to support idea development. To encourage idea development, the District considered a range of opportunities to engage internal stakeholders, the community, operations, technology, digital, and organizational design to improve organizational resilience. After summarizing the scenarios and ideas, the District hosted a series of work sessions with a wide range of partners including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Governor of California's Office of Emergency Services, Orange County Fire Authority, Water Emergency Response Organization for Orange County, Orange County Employees Association, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center to discuss the scenarios, risk factors, and collaborative mitigation strategies. Reaching Beyond Utility Sector for Solutions. Based on these sessions, the District identified 22 investment areas for improving resilience. People-centered areas included sustainable emergency staffing, staff bandwidth, knowledge exchange, coaching, vendor partnerships, customer disruption experience, and customers in emergency preparedness. To augment ideas from staff and ecosystem partners, the District researched best utility practices as well as insights from other industries (e.g., automotive, digital, manufacturing, consumer products) for each of these investment areas. Through focused work sessions, they shortlisted practices that represented the greatest impact on the resilience 'abilities' for the organization, as well as identified resources needed for implementation. The RAP summarizes the District's planning journey, shortlisted practices, and implementation roadmap. The roadmap includes near- and long-term actions to strengthen and maintain resilience as well as supporting business planning activities. This resource is intended to help manage efforts to engage staff and ecosystem partners to implement the recommendations. It also serves as a guide for the continued development innovative strategies to sustain resilience at the District into the future. The RAP process provides a model for utilities nationwide seeking an engaging ecosystem-centered approach to sustainable utility resilience.