Organisational Resilience

One recurring theme in coaching conversations is resilience: personal resilience, team resilience and organisational resilience. At the core are nearly always the questions: how can we achieve our goals and thrive, riding the wave of both known and unexpected challenges?

Here at Praesta, we’ve taken some of these questions into our Insight publications. This spring we have a new a new Praesta insight on The Resilient Leader. And already available to download from our website is The Resilient Team (2017) where we explain and explore the ten characteristics we’ve noticed in teams that stay resilient (www.praesta.com).

It seems like a good opportunity therefore in this blog to step into the third strand, organisational resilience, exploring a little of what it means and how coaching can offer a place of safety and support to tackle some of the related issues that leaders, managers and teams often encounter.

The meaning of resilience varies with context. An example familiar to every organisation is the IT system, where resilience essentially is the ability of the system to recover from a problem. To systems engineers, ‘redundancy’ is a critical component of resilience, meaning the intentional duplication of parts of the system, some running in parallel, others ready to kick in should a main operation fail.

Why are some organisations better than others at maintaining even improving performance in the face of unexpected change? This was a question posed back in 2001 by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe in “Managing the Unexpected”, a seminal work on the subject. Drawing on the lessons of ‘high reliability organisations’, such as fire-fighters, flight operations of aircraft carriers and emergency health services, they developed a template for any organisation wanting to improve its overall reliability and resilience including, their research suggested, the need for both flexibility of response and the ability to learn and grow in the face of adversity.[1] .

When it comes to evidence in the round however, it seems things are not so clear cut. Recent work by Professor David Denyer of Cranfield Business School is helpful. He defines organisational resilience as “the ability of an organisation to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper”. But he goes on to reveal a lack of common or even good practice: is organisational resilience about stopping bad things from happening or is it all about making good things happen, optimising performance? And does consistency of management practice matter more or less than flexibility?

Fortunately for all of us, Professor Denyer has done a brilliant job in reviewing half a century’s worth of evidence and he offers some new thinking as well as case studies on how to go about strengthening organisational resilience[2]. He challenges the old ‘either/or’ thinking and encourages leaders to be both defensive and innovative in how they strengthen organisational resilience. “Waiting out a storm” the foreword to his report says “is no longer an option. Rather leaders must face the paradox of embracing risk if they are to succeed. Doing so requires them to prepare their businesses to react to threats as opportunities, adapting to survive and prosper”.

Given this scale and complexity, coaching for senior executives can be very much part of work to develop resilience in an organisation. A coach offers the leader something distinctive: space in a confidential conversation to reflect and make sense of what is going on around them and then to discern their priorities for action.

Here are some themes for reflection for anyone engaged in making their organisation more resilient:

Values and purpose: all the evidence on resilience, personal, team and organisational, points to the significance of values and purpose in helping people endure adversity. How well is your organisation’s purpose understood by employees? Do leaders and teams have shared values that underpin trust and working relationships?

Proactivity: the examples from IT systems engineering and from high reliability organisations are telling, the best do not wait for disaster to happen but look to the future. How well does your organisation scan the horizon and build-in the capability to change course as and when needed?

Recovery from adversity: An organisation that values learning and adaptive change over blame will enhance its resilience. How effective are your organisation’s practices when things go wrong? What more can be done to ensure that employees can speak without fear and contribute to what needs to change?

Well-being: Stress and exhaustion undermine resilience, making it much harder to be alert to changing circumstances and adapt, whether as an individual, team or whole organisation. What does your organisation need to do to develop its strategy for employee well-being? If you could make only one single change this year what would it be?

In the context of human resilience Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, is a towering figure; his words are inspiring: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”

[1] Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K. (2007). Managing the Unexpected, 2nd edn. Jossey-Bass

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