Page 55 - The Resilient Organization

42 Part One: Why Resilience Now?

are white). Humans in general are not very good at making evidence-based
conclusions. But let us take some blame off: Our experience is admittedly
rather thin—after all, we have only our own lives, consisting of a few
decades, to draw inferences from. How do you generalize from a case
study (our own)? Thus, we, living our sample of one, lack a reasonable
basis for making judgments.
B. H. Liddel Hart (1968), a famous proponent of the indirect approach
as a military strategy, has written the following:

Direct experience is inherently too limited to form an adequate foun-
dation either for theory or for application. At the best it produces an
atmosphere that is of value in drying and hardening the structure of
thought. The greatest value in indirect experience lies in its greater
variety and extent. (pp. 23–24)

Therefore, the essence of being resilient is learning without experience.
Professor Risto Tainio at the Helsinki School of Economics talks about the
hard way of learning: making the mistake oneself and learning from the
failure as opposed to the easy way of learning—learning from someone
else’s experience without having to experience (the failure) oneself. Or, as
Bismarck is quoted as having said: “Fools say they learn by experience. I
prefer to profit by others’ experience.” This capacity to learn from others
can be extended to learning from near events, requisite imagination, and
analogues. We have the capacity to consider the most extreme case—what
the situation might be like taken to its logical limit or conclusion. This kind
of mental gymnastics adds potentially significantly to resilience and lowers
the cost of learning, by eliminating a potentially disastrous failure.
For example, March, Sproull, and Tamuz (1991: 11) suggest a number
of strategies to “learn from samples of one or fewer.” Among them is the
notion that one should “experience history richly,” which involves paying
attention to different experiences as part of a decision. For example, one
must not only consider the decision’s consequences but also the “collateral
consequences associated with the making of the decision and its implemen-
tation” (p. 2). History can also be experienced more richly by experiencing
multiple interpretations of what happened, such as the telling of stories
from multiple stakeholder perspectives and experiencing more preferences