Page 117 - The Resilient Organization

104 Part Three: Step 2. Building Resilience into the Organization

1950s and early 1960s, a time when German aircraft manufacturers
weren’t allowed to build planes. Incidentally, Messerschmitt was also the
first company to produce a fighter jet [along with Heinckel (see Gibbert,
Hoegl, & Välikangas, 2007)], so it is probably no surprise that the
Kabinenroller looked like a scraped-off fighter-plane canopy on wheels
(of which there were, appropriately, only three). More to the point, this
“at-hand” kind of thinking led to characteristics such as aircraft light-
weight materials, tandem seating, and aerodynamic styling, which made
the little car not only highly fuel efficient—even by modern standards (87
miles per gallon or 2.7 liters per 100 kilometers)—but also very fast for
its day (65 miles per hour or 105 kilometers per hour).
Or consider another fuel-efficient microcar that was built more than
half a century ago: BMW’s Isetta. The origins of this car were with the
Italian firm of Iso SpA. In the early 1950s, the company was building
refrigerators, motor scooters, and small three-wheeled trucks. Iso’s
owner, Renzo Rivolta, decided he would like to build a small car for
mass consumption. By 1952 the engineers Ermenegildo Preti and
Pierluigi Raggi had designed a small car that used the scooter engine,
and they named it Isetta—an Italian diminutive meaning “little Iso.” It
is said that the stylists had arrived at the award-winning design of the
Isetta by taking two scooters, placing them side by side, and adding a
refrigerator door!

ORGANIZATIONAL ROBUSTNESS: RESILIENCE
AS A DESIGN ISSUE

When designing systems that are resilient, robustness is called for.
Robustness is the system’s (or organization’s) structural stability to survive
challenge while maintaining operability (and reliability). The more varied
and intense the challenges the organization can cope with, the more robust
it is. Robustness is also the capacity to accommodate multiple, different
futures [being a “multimission” organization (see Levchuk, Meirina,
Levchuk, Pattipati, & Kleiman, 2001)]. In this sense, robustness is the port-
folio of strategies available for an organization and its capacity to adapt to