Page 41 - The Resilient Organization

28 Part One: Why Resilience Now?

distributed, with some 4 million connections among users. Tweets may
be the new unit of communication that—like genes and memes—are
highly resilient, more so than books, articles, news releases, or other
more complete, and less mobile, means of communication.
Source: www.fastcompany.com/blog/cheryl-contee/fission-strategy/new-studies-provide-
insight-twitter-tweeters (July 31, 2009).

The key to resilience according to nature is to make the parts more
resilient than the whole. To accomplish this feat, the parts—the genes and
memes and tweets—need to be able to combine with others (there are many
more gene combinations available than atoms in the known universe); be
variative in their expressions (thus not be of any one kind); be constantly
tested through competition for survival; mutate (and hence be beneficent of
serendipity); and finally, be able to travel (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996;
Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005). They must interact with other genes and
memes in different locations, in different parts of the world, virtually or
physically. The benefit is to be exposed to different influences and thus
avoid orthodoxy (in the case of memes) and incest (in the case of genes).

RESILIENCE CHARACTERISTICS

• Redundant (insurance for failure or error)
• Recombinatory (not monolithic)
• Variative (mutating)
• Subject to natural selection or resilience test (not complacent)
• Subject to and/or beneficiary of serendipity (not isolated, capacity
to benefit from luck)
• Mobile (able to interact across distance)

Genes may be more resilient than individuals, but individuals tend to be
more resilient than large corporations, which live, on average, shorter lives
than people do (about 40 or so years). Charles D. Ellis’s account of
Goldman Sachs mostly recounts the contributions of the remarkable