Joanne Murphy

This article was first published on the 17th of June 2020

For many leaders, issues of risk and resilience have leapt to the top of their organisational agenda as a result of the Covid19 crisis. Resilience is generally regarded as the ability to bounce back from adversity. For organisations, this means having the capacity to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper. This short blog will look at how we think about and build resilience in our organisations, our teams and ourselves.

To begin, it’s helpful to think about resilience in two ways. The first is the idea of personal resilience: an ability to cope with and emerge from personal challenges to ourselves, our lives and our beliefs. If you’re interested in this, a previous blog in this series looks at it in detail here. In terms of the organisational dimensions of resilience, approaches tend to be dominated by two principal concerns: defensive resilience (essentially stopping bad things happening) and progressive resilience (making good things happen).

Building organisational and team resilience requires an appreciation of a number of central questions such as the nature of risk and disruptive events in the organisational environment.  For example, are these potential risks sudden and unpredictable, or slow and silent in their emergence? They also relate to where risks come from; are they internal to the organisation and relating to systems, processes or people or external within the near or distance economic, social or political environment? There should also be a concern here about the organisations position on how much risk it or its leaders are prepared to tolerate.  

The practice of organisational resilience itself is often conceived as four processes:

• Foresight (anticipating threats),
• Insight (understanding your organisations purpose and position),
• Oversight (being able to respond and adapt) and
• Hindsight (what have you learnt that you can apply now and in the future?)[1].

It is important to remember that resilience needs to be understood as a connected and integrated set of activities and practices which is tightly coupled with an organisations structure, culture and people. As such, this needs as much work as any other organisational process and should be a daily concern for leaders and managers alike.

At the heart of building and maintaining this ability to adapt is a central paradox. How do you retain control over the layer systems that characterise modern organisations and achieve compliance with external regulation, while cultivating the necessary flexibility to be able to work in a different way when a system shock requires it? It is the ability to hold and maintain this paradox which produces resilient, flexible and adaptive systems. Research also pinpoints the significance of mindfulness observation as a technique useful for leaders who want to build resilient organisations[2].

But what happens when a significant event does occur such as the Covid19 pandemic and organisational resilience is tested? The work of Powley[3] illustrates for us that often three mechanisms kick into allow the organisation to adapt. The first of these is the process by which the organisation goes into a mode of ‘liminal suspension’ and the crisis temporarily alters the structures of relationships and opens a space in time for those within the organisation to form new relationships and build on existing ones. You may have noticed this within your own organisation as people scrambled to make sense of the early days of the pandemic. The second set of activities are equally important: they relate to how organisation members’ use and build on their interpersonal connections and contacts to respond to other individuals’ differing needs and requirements. This personal connectivity is vital as it protects individual organisational members at a time of crisis, danger and flux. The third identifiable practice is the exercise of social capital and connections across organizational and functional boundaries to activate networks of relationships that enable resilience. Building additional connections allows leaders to gather the type of information which is critical to surviving and thriving in a crisis event.

#Resilience #Risk #Covid19

[1] Denyer, D. (2017). Organizational Resilience: A summary of academic evidence, business insights and new thinking. BSI and Cranfield School of Management.

[2] Wyke and Sutcliffe 2006

[3] POWLEY, E. H. 2009. Reclaiming resilience and safety: Resilience activation in the critical period of crisis. Human Relations, 62, 1289-1326.