Page 34 - The Resilient Organization

Fallen Eagles: Bet on Resilience, Not on Strategy 21

tail” (rare) events that are outside the normal course of operations. They
could turn in a nasty direction, but a resilient company is able instead to
turn these surprises to its advantage. A resilient company is alert and
poised enough to see the irregularity, and it is also conscious enough to
make sense of it.
Thus resilience is not about having a highly competitive strategy or exe-
cuting it faithfully. Rather, it’s about the company’s capacity to benefit from
unlikely events, which could have been threats, and turning them into
opportunities. It’s about the capacity to take advantage of serendipity—to
be “accidentally sagacious” like the Princes of Serendip, who in Robert
Merton and Elinor Barber’s 2004 book The Travels and Adventures of
Serendipity, traveled the world and smartly found opportunity to learn
something they were not originally seeking:

“As their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries,
by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in the quest
of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right
eye had traveled in the same road lately, because the grass was eaten
only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do
you understand Serendipity?” (pp. 1–2)

TRAVELS OF SERENDIPITY
The discovery of the new and unexpected is often serendipitous—it
happens without intentional search for the particular happenstance but
being alert and tuned in enough to take note. The letter of January 28,
1754, to Horace Mann by Horace Walpole, the original serendipity sto-
ryteller (Merton & Barber, 2004), states that such “accidental sagacity”
excludes any “discovery of a thing you are looking for.” Yet as the story
defines, such luck requires “sagacity” to see and interpret what one may
have encountered. As the luck favors the prepared, similarly serendipity
is likely to inhabit those who take an active interest in their surround-
ings, engage with discovery, and have the capacity to interpret and seize
the potential importance of serendipitous events as they occur. This
amounts to sagacity, a particular kind of alert wisdom.