Page 151 - The Resilient Organization

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

We’re in this kind of lull period where our plans are not clear because
it’s just messy work. One of these days we’ll break out.
—Bob Allen, in BusinessWeek, September 2, 1996, p. 41

As a department in the research division of Bell Labs (later the AT&T
Labs), ODD occupied an organizational position that was several feet
below the waterline in AT&T’s corporate hierarchy. However, such a posi-
tion conferred upon the nascent group a number of advantages. Foremost,
and critical to its inception, ODD was in research and could therefore be
safely ignored by the admirals of strategy in the CSP wheelhouse. Indeed,
had ODD operated from a more potent platform, it would likely have never
been sanctioned. However (and perhaps naively), ODD hoped to make up
for its inferior status by generating so much intriguing content and discus-
sion that the excitement and quality alone would compel business leaders
to listen, regardless of ODD’s lack of hierarchical position.
Being in a research-oriented division of AT&T Labs offered ODD other
advantages besides a low profile. For example, the research division was an
environment in which ODDsters could be distinctly noncorporate and even
irreverent at times—requisite liberties for any group that sought to push
AT&T’s thinking a little further than the CSP department thought useful.
Also important, research afforded ODD some space in which to think with-
out the distractions and day-to-day turmoil that typically characterize a
corporation’s business units. And as members of research, ODDsters bene-
fited from a reputation for being smart, brutally honest, and politically neu-
tral, aloof from the intrigue, factions, and power struggles that pervade
every corporation.

THE BEGINNING

Once instituted, ODD wasted no time in pursuit of its mission. A straight-
forward tool at hand was scenario planning that allowed the group to start
talking to business units. ODD quickly found supporters among AT&T’s
business units for adoption of scenario planning. Early clients included the
Consumer Markets Division, the Business Markets Division, and Network
and Computing Services. Scenario planning provided a clever way for these