Page 106 - The Resilient Organization

Why Leadership Matters, but It Is Not Sufficient 93

5. Culture: Organizations express resilience in a culture when they
have sisu—values that do not allow the organization to give up or
give in but instead invite its members to rise to the challenge.

Let us consider how to build resilience in each of the five organizational
dimensions in turn.

Organizational Intelligence: Resilience as Imaginative Thinking

The guiding principle for organizational intelligence from the perspective
of resilience is inspired by the classical Ashby’s law of requisite variety. 2
As the law states, the capacity to accommodate environmental change
depends on the variety available inside the organization. Weick (1976)
talks about the “cultural insurance” that affords the multitude of inter-
pretations inside an organization. Cherish the conversation with different
voices and perspectives! Have framing contests (or interpretational
debates of what’s going on) for important strategic issues. How does the
opportunity frontier change? Requisite thinking ought to express as much
possibility as contained in the environment (and hopefully little more).
Only highly imaginative thinking inside the organization can accommo-
date such thinking outside. (Not all people with imagination work for one
company either!) Therefore, from the resilience point of view, the key is
not integration and alignment of the executive team or organizational
members in general—such characteristics may be good for smooth and
fast execution. From the resilience point of view, it is the variety and
imaginativeness, reflective of environmental threats and opportunities,
that are critical for organizational intelligence. Such requisite thinking
can be enhanced by the following:

1. The ability to act under ambiguity (when you are not sure about the
right answer)
2. Never taking your own (ready) answers for granted (Always keep
examining them: are they self-serving?)
3. Questioning the received setting in which the problem and the
solution are formulated: under whose authority, following which