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Value chain analyses that help businesses build competitive advantage must include considerations of unpredictable shocks and stressors that can create costly business disruptions. Enriching value chain analysis with considerations of system resilience, meaning the ability to recover and adapt after adverse events, can reduce the imposed costs of such disruptions.

The paper provides a perspective on resilience as both an expansion and complement of risk analysis. It examines applications of both concepts within current value chain literature and within supply chain literature that may inform potential directions or pitfalls for future value chain investigations. Established frameworks from the broader field of resilience research are proposed for value chain resilience analysis and practice.

The synthesis reveals a need to expand value chain resilience analysis to incorporate phases of system disruption. Current explorations in the literature lack an explicit acknowledgement and understanding of system-level effects related to interconnectedness. The quantification methods proposed for value chain resilience analysis address these gaps.

Using broader resilience conceptualizations, this paper introduces the resilience matrix and three-tiered resilience assessment that can be applied within value chain analyses to better safeguard long-term business feasibility despite a context of increasing threats.

Water is a critical and contentious resource in California, hence any changes in reservoir management requires coordination among many basin stakeholders. The Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO) pilot project at Lake Mendocino, California explored the viability of using weather forecasts to alter the operations of a United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) reservoir. The pilot project demonstrated FIRO's ability to improve water supply reliability, but also revealed the key role of a collaborative Steering Committee. Because Lake Mendocino's Viability Assessment did not explore the features of the Steering Committee, this study aims to examine the relationships and interactions between Steering Committee members that supported FIRO's implementation at Lake Mendocino.

The project identified 17 key project participants who spoke at a FIRO workshop or emerged through chain-referrals. Using semi-structured interviews with these participants, the project examined the dynamics of human interactions that enabled the successful multi-institutional and multi-criteria innovation as analyzed through text-coding.

The results reveal the importance for FIRO Steering Committee members to understand the limitations and constraints of stakeholder counterparts at other organizations, the importance of building and safeguarding relationships, and the role of trust and belonging between members. The lessons learned suggest several interventions to support successful group collaboration dynamics for future FIRO projects.

This study identifies features of the Steering Committee that contributed to FIRO's success by supporting collaborative negotiations of infrastructure operations within a multi-institutional and multi-criteria context.