Page 40 - The Resilient Organization

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Now, what is resilient? Or, asked differently, what is the unit of resilience?
Richard Dawkins (1976, 2006) claims that genes are actually more
resilient than people. They recombine with others. They mutate. They
evolve. They are subject to natural selection (and hence test their resilience;
no time for complacency). They benefit from serendipity if there is an
appropriate “preadaptation” or mutation present. There is redundancy as
insurance. In these qualities, genes speak to the innate resilience that life
manifests.
Dawkins’s formative thinking has been extended to memes—units of
cultural expression, such as ideas like capitalism or rituals like handshaking—
that spread through mimicry or imitation. The discussion is insightful in its
suggestion of a unit that is particularly resilient—not people, organizations,
or nations but, like atoms, the much smaller building blocks of life and/or
culture. Let’s look at one of our most recent microunits, the tweet:

ARE TWEETS RESILIENT?

“What are you doing now?” The microblogging service that invites peo-
ple to send messages of fewer than 140 characters in response to this
question has some 3 million users, of whom 200,000 are active on a
daily basis (Comm, 2009: 4). However, the users are very fragmented in
terms of whose message streams they follow. A recent survey (Fast
Company, July/August 2009) reported that 24 percent of Twitter users
had between 11 and 25 followers. According to Joel Comm, “The top
10 percent of Twitterers have more than [or only!—ed note] 80 follow-
ers and follow more than 70 people.” The tweet universe is then highly

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