Keywords

In a Word Organizations must be resilient if they are to survive and thrive in turbulent times. Learning from experience, investments in leadership and culture, networks, and change readiness can help them move from denial and paralysis to acceptance and practical solutions.

Darwin Semper Vivens

Vulnerability has few friends. Naturally, the ability to cope with and recover readily from adversity is the preferred attribute of living organisms and their environments : in the face of shocks that threaten existence or viability, it enables them to bounce back to a previous state of normal functioning, or simply not show deleterious effects. Indeed, the ability of an entity or system to maintain and renew itself—or not—in the presence of stressors is of paramount significance to life on Earth.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

—Jawaharlal Nehru

As you would have thought, resilience has a long history in ecology and, when persons are the subject, psychology. Additionally, of late, it has been used in the context of communities, hence, organizations, where it is more and more defined in active, not passive, terms to connote deliberate efforts to deal with—perhaps even thrive on—hardship. For communities and organizations, resilience must surely stand for more than mere survival.

As a matter of fact, with an initial focus on tragedies in the wake of 9/11,Footnote 1 the notion of organizational resilience has burgeoned because of the need to manage uncertainty and ambiguity in modern societies and their economies, all of them complex and increasingly interconnected.Footnote 2 Where once-isolative system boundaries rupture or wear away, applying the concept of resilience to organizations —the fundamental building blocks of collective human endeavor—is vital to ensure enduring social well-being and economic prosperity in the twenty-first century. Because of its intimate, assimilitative, relationship with such fields as enterprise risk management and business continuity management,Footnote 3 organizational resilience is now considered an outcome—and a fundamental concern—of corporate governance.

The Case for Organizational Resilience

When, in an epoch of change, tomorrow is necessarily different from yesterday, and so new things need to be done, what are the questions to be asked before the solutions are sought? Action learning differs from normal training (education, development) in that its primary objective is to learn how to ask questions in conditions of risk, rather than to find the answers to questions that have already been precisely defined by others—and that do not allow ambiguous responses because the examiners have all the approved answers.

—Reginald Revans

Certainly , in the private sector, success has never been so fragileFootnote 4: large organizations fail more often than in the past.Footnote 5 Every day, the sustainability of organizations is tested in a world that constantly changes and offers new challenges: in deference to the Red Queen hypothesis , depending of course on the environment they operate in, it is as if they must get better just to keep in the same place.Footnote 6 Therefore, with respect to organizational resilience, beyond unrewarding portrayals of maladaptive processes and on a par with concepts of the learning organization, emerging ideas evolve ways to accommodate environmental turbulence and effectively manage disruptive changeFootnote 7 and its paceFootnote 8 to engage, adjust, adapt, and recover; capture or realize opportunity; and in some cases actually morph to become stronger on account of the experience.

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes).

—Walt Whitman

Every organization faces a unique risk landscape and resilience thinking must embrace learning. Achieving desirable outcomes amid strain requires creativity and innovation , aka, competencies borne of practiced skill at harnessing internal and external resourcesFootnote 9 and authority productively to address issues at the edge of chaos .Footnote 10 Importantly, given the developmental properties of resilience, the capacity to constantly adapt, improvise, and even shape change can only spring from latent potential at individual, group, and organizational levels, nurtured over a history of prior experience .Footnote 11 As organizations build on the past to expand their behavioral repertoires across new competencies the range of possible actions they can take to meet hazards grows in breadth and depth. They are not error-free, yet errors do not disable them: they become high-reliability organizations that continuously focus on performance.

There exist some evils so terrible and some misfortunes so horrible that we dare not think of them, whilst their very aspect makes us shudder; but if they happen to fall on us, we find ourselves stronger than we imagined; we grapple with our ill luck, and behave better than we expected we should.

—Jean de La Bruyère

Responding without delay, thoroughly, and constructively with minimal stress to unexpected events and circumstances is now an organizational imperative, alongside client-orientation and agility .Footnote 12 In times of change, organicityFootnote 13 trumps the day through structural flexibility, viz, relaxation of command and control; expansive processing of information; and opportunistic appropriation of redundancy, slack resources, and capabilities for improvisation.Footnote 14

Dimensions of Organizational Resilience

Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them.

—H. Jackson Brown

Resilience is neither a series of principles nor an end state: it is a never-ending journey that, within a risk landscape, is conditioned as much else by organization, people, knowledge, and technology, as well as the interactionsFootnote 15 among these. Notwithstanding, in the here and now of recurrent crises, resilience must be an act of mindful,Footnote 16 strategic anticipation and active waiting spanning day-to-day, exceptional, and emergency management.

Interest in organizational resilience grows daily but, sorry to say, the state of the art still leaves much to be desired—to date, most of the literature propounds generic traits. They include such recommendations as: avoid being overprotective; bounce back from adversity; build a culture of commitment and accountability; entertain the inconceivable; foster trust between leaders and teams; listen to complainers; make sure employees engage with the strategy of the business; move the goal posts every three years; put your motivators where your mouth is; refuse to rest on your laurels; self-correct; shore up your decision-making processes; show the courage of your convictions; think horizontally; use people to change people; etc.

Yes, certainly … But, what specifically might it be that makes some organizations survive and thrive in turbulent times? Helpfully, Resilient Organizations suggest that the resilience of an organization is a function of three interdependent attributes: (i) leadership and culture—which define the adaptive capacity of the organization; (ii) networks—which amount to the internal and external relationships fostered and developed for the organization to leverage when needed; and (iii) change readinesss—which signifies the planning undertaken and direction established to enable the organization to be change-ready.Footnote 17