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Organizational Resilience | BSI and Cranfield School of Management
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Conclusion
To summarize, the key points raised in this report:
• Organizational Resilience is the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare
for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to
survive and prosper.
• To date, there has been a preoccupation with
defensive
resilience behaviours
and not enough focus on resilience to adapt to opportunity to deal with the big,
complex issues that abound in modern business.
• Organizational Resilience requires a holistic approach and an appropriate balance
between preventative control, mindful action, performance optimization and
adaptive innovation.
• Managing the inherent tensions between these distinct perspectives requires
paradoxical thinking
– moving beyond ‘either/or’ towards ‘both/and’ outcomes.
• Organizational Resilience can be difficult to recognize, implement and sustain –
many organizations are sleepwalking into disaster or irrelevance.
• Organizational Resilience requires effective leadership and a shift in mindset –
leaders and colleagues can use the 4Sight methodology.
• The emphasis on PDCA or 4Sight is dependent on the nature of the challenges
faced by the organization. Getting this wrong reduces Organizational Resilience.
• Whether you are the chief executive setting the direction of the business, or
an individual focusing on a specific task, the 4Sight methodology will help you
achieve Organizational Resilience.
• Those getting it right have prospered – as can be seen at Infosys, Baiada,
NxtraData, SAP, and Ciena (see Appendix 2).
None of this is easy—and all of it takes skilled leadership and effort, as illustrated
by the case studies in this report (see Appendix 2). In an increasingly complex and
dynamic world, Organizational Resilience calls for leaders to be able to direct and
coordinate change, but to do so without specifying solutions, or creating ‘top down’
visions and targets that might alienate the very people who can develop solutions to
emerging challenges.
Paradoxically, therefore, executives have to manage and master the tension between
the strong supportive leadership that people want to see during times of change,
and the more demanding collaborative leadership that will sustain the organization.
In leadership, as in Organizational Resilience as a whole, an increasingly volatile,
uncertain, complex and ambiguous world calls for an appropriate balance between
defence and progression, consistency and flexibility.
Whether you
are the chief
executive setting
the direction of
the business, or an
individual focusing
on a specific
task, the 4Sight
methodology will
help you achieve
Organizational
Resilience