Page 35 - The Resilient Organization

22 Part One: Why Resilience Now?

To the extent that corporate strategy encourages and supports such
accidental sagacity, it can be said to have resilience value:

Resilience Serendipity Sagacity

Unfortunately, there is no set formula for doing that. The steps
described in this book—managing the consequences of past performance,
building resilience into the organization, and rehearsing the culture of
resilience—will help and provide a platform for resilience. Yet to truly turn
threats into opportunities, you also need a good story, like the Honda story,
which is still being told and is very specific to that company—that is, a
story that can be generalized. (How would you find the appropriate old
lady when needed?) Thus building a simplistic theory on how to get to
resilience is likely to be of no help. There are elements that must be present,
such as an internal champion, resources, and timing. Yet the presence of
these elements does not necessarily make it happen. Crucial as they may be,
they do not yet breathe life into the situation. Turning threats into oppor-
tunities requires business savvy—the lifeline of successful venturing. This is
why a lot of theory on innovation is stillborn—consisting of prescriptive
steps that are formulated post hoc, eminently reasonable but lacking
creative power.
The strategic resilience definition—turning threats into opportunities
before their becoming either—has a number of prerequisites. Not all situa-
tions require or can benefit from such resilience. Here are some factors that
encourage it:

1. The environment lacks constancy. There is a lot of dynamism or tur-
bulence, that is, potential for interactions with threat-opportunities.
(Should there be constancy, mere organizational stability suffices.)
2. The organization is strategically evolvable; that is, it is capable of
innovation and change.
3. There is strategic intent or poisedness; therefore, the organization is
not simply a passive object for environmental perturbations, but
instead, it exercises choice as to which threat-opportunities to respond
to and how. (Some threat-opportunities may not be worth bothering
with; responses to others may close out future options; and so on.)