Page 46 - The Resilient Organization

Parts More Resilient than the Whole 33

choices that lessen the burden the environment must bear, and resilience by
developing capacity to make timely changes before they become too costly.

THE TESTS OF RESILIENCE

Resilience has a number of tests it must choose from to prove itself. A
shielded life suggests privilege, not resilience. Even a long life in itself
might not suggest resilience—for instance, an organization living off an
uncontested natural resource might not be resilient at all. Nevertheless,
longevity is certainly worth something—if only the chance to learn
through experience. (However, the paradox of resilience is that strategic
resilience really means learning by means other than crisis- or failure-
taught experience.) In this sense, resilience is about learning without
having to learn from experience.

Competition

The first and most obvious external test of resilience is competition. Those
that survive a competitive threat are by definition found resilient at a point
in time (that of the testing).
Competitive logic invites a contest for superior know-how or resource
use to produce something that the judge (such as the paying customer) per-
ceives to be of value. Traditionally, (non)competitive strategies have been
divided into those that focus on superior quality (differentiation) and those
that produce the lowest cost (price competitiveness). The basis for such
strategies may be, for example, a unique customer insight, superior mana-
gerial competence, or control of some rare resource, an entry barrier, or
certain intellectual property. Upstarts may disrupt the landscape, but occa-
sionally, as in the case of proprietary technology like Microsoft’s Windows
or a natural resource like oil, users develop a dependency that becomes a
source of power for the producers. Such complacency can be exploited for
premium pricing. These types of strategies exploit market dominance and
are hence, by nature, noncompetitive: dominant power can be used for
good or for bad, but eventually, without competition, it is said to corrupt.
Buyer beware.