The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 7

danger – all must be present to a considerable degree if action in this debilitating element is not to fall

short of achievement that in the study would appear as nothing out of the ordinary.

Real war has little in common with the clear, concise depictions that appear in military histories,

little to do with the Jominian clarity: it is blood, and fear, and terror. (Handel 1986, 272–74)

[TEXT BOX ENDS]

We can learn a lot from military science. Modern armed forces tend to be very

progressive in their doctrinal thinking whereas many commercial organisations are still

‘stuck’ in traditional, rigid, ways of operating. Organisational resilience is indeed an art, with

no prospect of a ‘Holy Grail’: an approach that is universal to all environments, and thus per

se self-evidently correct. As such, an art is very difficult to master given the need for a

holistic form of resilience, and the paradoxical tensions on the roads to resilience. An

ultimate unknown remains in the individual psyche. In organisations which deal with stress

and emotions a battle is nothing but blood, and fear, and terror.

A Wehrmacht soldier in the ruins of a French village. The destruction throughout villages in France was immense. It is evidence that the French forces defended their homeland with tenacity and courage. (Kutsch, n.d.)

30 | P a g e