Page 120 - The Resilient Organization

Resourceful, Robust, and Adaptive 107

Medici to claim action to be in the city’s interests while benefiting his own
purposes. Such ambiguity allowed that “everything was done in a response
to a flow of requests that, somehow or other, ‘just so happened’ to serve
Cosimo’s extremely multiple interests” (p. 1263). Being able to entertain
such a grand number of varied interests is kind of robust accomplishment in
itself; yet the key to behavioral robustness here is the multivocality—“the
fact that single actions can be interpreted coherently from multiple perspec-
tives simultaneously, the fact that single actions can be moves in many games
at once, and the fact that public and private motivations cannot be parsed”
(p. 1263). Thus it is crucial for robust action “not to pursue any specific
goals” (p. 1264) or lock the organization into the pursuit of a particular goal
in case of change. “Victory, in Florence, in chess, or in go means locking in
others, but not yourself, to goal-oriented sequences of strategic play that
become predictable thereby” (p. 1264). Robust behavior is keeping the
options open while making it difficult to discern one’s ultimate motives—
selfish or otherwise—for any particular move.

ROBUST ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN

Type of Robustness Static Representation Dynamic Representation
Structural Modularity Loose coupling
Strategic Portfolio of options Adaptive managerial
capability (cognitive,
strategic, political, and
ideological challenges)
Behavioral Idiosyncratic network Multivocality (goals and
interests)

ORGANIZATIONAL ADAPTATION: RESILIENCE
AS A FITNESS ISSUE

Organizations seek purposefully to better “fit” their environment (that is,
have a competitive, profitable business). Researchers differ whether such
adaptive intentions are effective: strategic management theorists typically