Page 140 - The Resilient Organization

Case Study: Resilience in Action—Building Reservoirs for Change 127

(such as complacency or lack of effective strategy options when the retail
environment changed). A reading list and resilience glossary were produced
together with a manifesto.
The final period began in November 2005 when the company hired a
new executive (in a position of a COO) to cut down bloated administrative
costs, which had gained attention by industry analysts and had taken a toll
on the quarterly profit. Despite various appeals by Jampions on the impor-
tance and the low cost of the work they were doing, the quest for resilience
was one of the programs cut as part of an overall blanket effort to trim the
number of activities ongoing in the company. Nevertheless, the program left
a lasting impact. To quote one of the number of similar e-mails received by
the program lead at the time:

Thank you for driving this journey. I greatly admire your creativity
and passion you brought to this initiative. Through the tools and
support you provided, I’ve been able to network with other people
within [the company], experiment with management innovation, and
mentally engage in work differently.
Even though the Resiliency Journey has reached its conclusion,
please know you’ve made a difference with the hundreds of Jampions
you’ve connected together. I believe [the company] is better because of it.

WHENCE RESERVOIRS FOR RESILIENCE?

What immediate and lasting effects might the program have created in the
company and for the participants? Let us first consider what tends to stand
in the way of resilient change—that is, the issues that were found to be
impediments as revealed in the company interviews, and how the program
eventually helped participants begin to address these issues and facilitate
learning as spillovers to other activities.

Mental Models and Precommitments

Beyond complacency as a seductive companion to success, received mental
models frequently act as impediments to adaptation, requiring the unlearning