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Organizational Resilience | BSI and Cranfield School of Management
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reverse decisions, and the organization can become ‘path dependent’ getting locked,
it loses its capability to adopt better alternatives (Sydow, Schreyogg and Koch, 2009).
Preventative control is diminished over time. Reason (1990) argued that each
defensive layer is like a slice of Swiss cheese, having many holes. The holes in
the defences arise because of latent problems (Reason, 1990), such as defective
maintenance, poor training, when local practice takes over from written procedure
(Snook, 2000) and ‘deviant acts’ become normalized (Vaughan, 1996). When the holes
in many layers momentarily line up, an incident can occur.
Mindful action is weakened when organizations stop investing in the competence
of their people, maintaining efficacy and encouraging growth (Sutcliffe and Vogus,
2003), as well as the structures and practices people become inattentive (Simons
and Chabris, 1999), become mindless (Langer, 1989) and lose situational awareness
(Klein, 2008). In hierarchical organizations those with expertise who are closest to
the problem are not empowered to act (Weick and Sutcliff, 2007) and people diffuse
responsibility for taking action (Latané and Darley, 1970).
Organizational Resilience can be undermined as these factors can combine to
create blind drift and organizations can sleepwalk into disaster. Once failure does
occur most organizations respond by bolstering preventative control by adding new
safeguards, reinforcing barriers and redoubling training efforts but rarely engage
in fundamental changes to the adaptive innovation or mindful action aspects of
resilience (Denyer and Pilbeam, 2015)
In hierarchical
organizations those
with expertise who
are closest to the
problem are not
empowered to act