Page 191 - The Resilient Organization

178 Part Four: Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience

visitors to their cause for an enduring way, for instance, by using calls for
action that are personally relevant, invoking meaningful imagery and
symbols (such as the baseball bat) as community rituals, and inviting small
tangible acts and contributions that help cultivate larger commitments in
the future. Thus, the visibility of online activities may provide an initial step
toward capturing regular visitors, who can help sustain an organization or
community.

EVOLVABILITY AND OPEN-COMMUNITIES ORGANIZING

In a qualitative study, Rindova and Kotha (2001) focused on the executive
team’s ability to “morph” its organization (that is, to design it to be evolv-
able). “Make no deal that limits Yahoo!’s future evolvability.” However, in
the Dean campaign, such evolvability—the managerial intent of being
careful with actions that might close out future options—does not reflect the
actions that contributed to the Dean campaign’s unexpected growth.
Instead, the campaign organization’s growth was derived from its connec-
tions to the potential outside in the larger civic community. The Dean for
America campaign achieved unexpected growth and significance by blurring
the boundaries between who is “in” and who is “out.” Independent volun-
teers and unofficial groups were embraced as full participants, perhaps even
owners, of the campaign, despite being outside the campaign organization
and therefore beyond its prescribed roles of who must do what.
Such roles for nonpaid participants, outside traditional managerial
control, are becoming increasingly important in “open” organizations that
range in purpose from political campaigns to software development to
scientific research. To some extent such amateur activity (also discussed in
Chapter 11, “Postcard No. 1: For the Love of It!—The Resilience of
Amateurs”) has always been manifest in free societies, but the role of digital
technology may be coordinating such activity to an extent never feasible
before. Yet the tapping of the communities outside of organizations for
volunteers is not new: the Oxford English Dictionary project in the nine-
teenth century used hundreds of volunteers from a variety of physical
locations (and social positions) in a decades-long effort to correct deficien-
cies in existing dictionaries (Winchester, 1998, 2003).