Page 166 - The Resilient Organization

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The basic thesis of this book is that our organizations will be required to
show resilience of a much greater degree than before to make it to the future.
The five ways described in Part Three to building resilience are a start. Once
resilience is built into the organization, it needs to be rehearsed. How?
The prior case studies have given some indications as to how to rehearse
resilience. The leading U.S. consumer electronics retailer experimented on
management practices to overcome impediments to change. The Afghan
students rehearse resilience partly as a way of life due to harsh conditions
but also as a determined aspiration to become entrepreneurs. Resource
scarcity requires resilience but also constant innovation to overcome daily
challenges. Resilient thinking can be exercised in a playful exercise, as did
the ODDsters at AT&T, seeking to engage business units in a totally differ-
ent kind of future strategy conversation and developing an entirely new
strategy vocabulary as part of the game. (Chapter 13, “Postcard No. 3 from
San Jose, California: Tempered Radicalism and Management Practices That
Stick,” will expand on the success factors of such organizational activism in
this section.)
There are, in addition to the resilience building blocks described in the
previous chapters, a number of growing phenomena with the potential to
help. They are ways of unleashing human capability for solving problems
and joining forces between unlikely partners and across the globe.
Engagement, passion for innovation, crowdsourcing, institutional activism,
and inventive experimentation are departures from the standard organiza-
tional tool kit of hierarchical control, task specialization, process standardi-
zation, or reward-oriented performance control. User-driven innovation,
positive psychology, and open innovation promise further progress. They
certainly suggest that we need to refresh our management approaches in
building a culture of resilience.

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