Page 235 - The Resilient Organization

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

Task 2: Consider the resilience principle you have been prescribed,
and describe what happens when you apply the principle to the
company’s (a) beliefs and values, (b) existing management sys-
tems and processes, and/or (c) day-to-day actions and behaviors
as you have just diagnosed them (or ask for another prescription
if entirely inapplicable).
Task 3: Ideate. How might you change the company’s management
practice and/or work environment so that the resilience principle
would contribute to the company’s capacity to change without
crisis?

This exercise may be classified as consulting to the extent that there
were outsiders involved as initiators or facilitators. (However, the company
in question had also engaged in this exercise without outsiders.) Scholars
may critique on and ponder the premises of the work or study the out-
comes. But inventively experimental scholars ought to participate in the
context in which this type of management innovation takes place and share
the responsibility in the quest. How should a company go about innovating
its management practices (to support resilience or any other goal) assuming
competitor imitation or serendipitous change (March, 1981) is not
sufficient? The question relevant to scholar-inventors is, how to create and
contribute to an appropriate, fruitful context for the invention and
experimentation.

TYPES OF EXPERIMENTS
1. Lead-user experiment: Running an experiment with a small num-
ber of lead users
Example: “eBay for HR,” an in-company experiment to invite the
most passionate employees to donate some of their time to causes
they found worthwhile and work on the projects of their choice
voluntarily