Page 137 - The Resilient Organization

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

RESILIENCE IMPEDIMENTS: A SUMMARY

• Bureaucratic sense of responsibility
• Standardization: One size fits all
• Human nature: Personal fear, mistrust, and cynicism
• Inflexible policies and processes
• Don’t know how to drive change

The next experimentation phase began with the formation of a small
team to motivate and explore the effort. Most of the work was performed
on a volunteer basis. For example, there was a team of eight people from
different parts of the company who together designed an exhibition that
was to become a key communication tool. Called the Resilience Deficiency
Ward, the exhibition featured small beds with pillows that had names of
once leading retailers embroidered on them. The point was to invite the
4,000 people (including the company board of directors) who visited the
“Resilience Hospital” to ponder the temporariness of success and analyze
the causes that brought these leading companies to the brink of extinction.
Does their own company suffer from any of these resilience deficiency
symptoms? was the question each visitor to the hospital, wearing a lab coat
and reading the “X-rays” that described the malaise of the hospitalized
companies, then answered. The exhibit’s purpose was to engage partici-
pants in the diagnosis of resilience but also to motivate participation in the
quest on the grounds of a personal, memorable experience.
The exhibit visit was the kickoff to a workshop that came to be known as
the Management Innovation Jam, an opportunity to innovate the company
management principles, processes, and practices so that one or more of the
resilience impediments could be removed. The jam invited the participants—
some 30 to 50 volunteer managers and employees at any one event—to con-
sider the following: (1) the impediments to resilience at the company; (2)
resilience principles extracted from such adaptive systems as cities, markets,
and democracies; (3) examples of management innovation from noncon-
formistic settings (such as the novel formation of editorial rights of a Web site
called Slashdot); and (4) ways to apply the resilience principles and examples
so that one or more novel ways of accomplishing managerial work can be