Page 118 - The Resilient Organization

Resourceful, Robust, and Adaptive 105

or resist change to negotiate its future. Robustness can thus be structural
(a return to stability) or strategic (dynamically adaptive) in quality. 3

Structural Robustness

Structural robustness is the ability to survive challenge and maintain form.
The key to structural robustness is to avoid systemic risks materializing and
collapsing the organization. Beyond solid operations, such structural
robustness can be enforced through loose organizational coupling: different
organizational parts occasionally communicate but do not depend on each
other for operability. Thus the organization (or some of its parts) tends to
remain functional longer under stress as damage can be more easily isolated.
Modularity, or organizational design that can be broken into separate inde-
pendent parts, similarly adds to robustness but also to flexibility as one part
can be replaced without other parts being affected. (Note that robustness is
an important operational resilience concept in crisis management, and as
such, it is outside the focus of his book.)

TAGUCHI AND ROBUSTNESS
A Japanese engineer, G. Taguchi, greatly influenced the robustness of
quality control and experimental design in the 1980s and 1990s.
Taguchi suggested that “quality” should be thought of not as a product
being inside or outside of specifications but as the variation from the
target. He was concerned not only with the understanding of product
but also with societal quality costs that would ultimately, he thought,
find their way for the corporation to pay. Taguchi’s methods pertain to
the design and the manufacturing of a product. Taguchi claimed that
making products insensitive to process variations was often cheaper
than controlling the causes of such variation (Taguchi, 1986, 1987). See
Levchuk et al. (2001).

Strategic Robustness

Strategic robustness is the ability to accommodate change in a timely, non-
traumatic way. It is a dynamic capability that can be judged only over time