Page 139 - The Resilient Organization

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

During 2005, the volunteer community, known as Jampions (having
attended a Management Innovation Jam and being champions of resilience
and management innovation), grew to 250 people (of which all except 10
directors or above were managers or employees). The community began to
hold themed monthly Resilience Clinics as regular get-togethers and discus-
sion forums. Teams of Jampions presented their ongoing experiments but also
invited outsiders to talk about related work (such as customer service experi-
ments ongoing in stores). An internal resilience Web site was set up that invited
anyone to become familiar with the notion of resilience and join the quest.
Most active Jampions joined the ongoing effort to further develop the
content for the Management Innovation Jam, to make it experiential and
easy to relate to. They also helped to redesign the jam from the original
two-day event to a one-day event. They then participated as facilitators and
mentors to new Jampions, sharing some of their experiences as manage-
ment innovators. Some new material was developed, including a play on
resilience (where a number of Jampions had leading acting roles) and an
inspirational video that showcased “the resilience principles” and issued an
invitation to the audience: “Join the quest for resilience. Become a manage-
ment innovator.” Videos were also developed based on interviews with
existing Jampions, describing their management innovation ideas and
experiments, and these videos were used in addition to the Jampions attend-
ing and participating in multiple forums in person. The forums included
hosted discussion groups on the challenges of innovation. Groups of
Jampions met with the senior executive in their area of responsibility to
share their insights and give the senior executive a chance to ask questions
and offer support. In November 2005, a group of senior executives, includ-
ing the CFO, were asked to present their perspectives on resilience in a
roundtable discussion with the Jampion community.
Additional activities included an Idea Elaboration Jam, a workshop to
support the experimentation of ideas and to develop them as experimental,
iterative designs that benefited from some of the test methodology used in
the company in its retail stores. Case studies were also written about other
company change programs in the past, offering some potential learning in
how to engage in organization-wide change. There were regular informal
conversations about whether the company manifested any of the “resilience
deficiency” symptoms common to companies in the Resilience Hospital