Resilience Reimagined: A Practical Guide for Organisations

Define impact thresholds

Balance strategic choices

Consider connected impacts

Understand essential outcomes

Stress test thresholds

Discuss future failure

Enable adaptive leadership

Leaders make strategic choices and adjust organisational strategies and practices to fit contextual conditions. However, they often struggle with balancing seemingly competing priorities including: • assuring compliance to a prescriptive system of rules, regulations and standards, protecting people, reputation, assets, and the environment. • responding to issues as they emerge with flexibility and agility, empowering people to take ownership of problems and formulate creative solutions. • satisfying investor expectations, meeting productivity and efficiency goals and increasing capacity to meet the growing demand. • innovating to keep pace with new technology, business models and consumer trends. Our previous research 1 found that organisational resilience strategies differ on two core dimensions: mindset (defensive vs progressive) and design (consistency vs flexibility). The two dimensions form an integral part of a framework, which we termed the Strategic Tensions Model (Figure 2), which highlights four common strategies for achieving organisational resilience 1 .

• Mindful action. Organisational resilience is created by people who use their experience, expertise and teamwork to anticipate and adapt to threats. Responding flexibly to unfamiliar or challenging situations requires creative problem solving and expert improvisation. Mindful action is a defensive strategy based on flexibility. • Performance optimisation. Organisational resilience is formed by continually improving, refining and extending existing competencies and exploiting current technologies to serve present customers and markets more efficiently and effectively. It involves improvement within the current paradigm rather than creative ‘blue skies’ or ‘out of the box’ thinking. Performance optimisation is essentially a progressive approach based on consistency. • Adaptive innovation. Organisational resilience is created through innovation and by developing new products, services or markets. It is also the strategy required to resolve complex, intractable issues, both internal and external, requiring a fundamental rethinking of the business and culture. With this strategy, forward-thinking businesses can themselves embody the disruption in their environment. Adaptive innovation is a progressive strategy based on flexibility. PARADOXICAL THINKING The four resilience strategies could be seen as separate opposites, with an ‘either/or’ choice. However, organisations can live and thrive with paradox. Leveraging these tensions by employing ‘both/ and’ thinking is a critical aspect of organisational resilience 1 . We explain the importance of tensions using the example of climbing. In organisational resilience, tension is also seen as a positive attribute.

Figure 2. Strategic Tensions Model of Organizational Resilience. (Source: Denyer, D. (2017), Organizational Resilience: A summary of academic evidence, business insights and new thinking. BSI and Cranfield School of Management)

PROGRESSIVE (mindset, logic, mental model)

Performance optimization Improving and exploiting

Adaptive innovation Imagining and creating

CONSISTENCY (organisational structures,

FLEXIBILITY (organisational structures,

systems, routines, behaviours)

systems, routines, behaviours)

Preventative control Monitoring and complying

Mindful action Noticing and responding

DEFENSIVE (mindset, logic, mental model)

• Preventative control. Organisational resilience is achieved through robust risk management, physical barriers, systems back-ups, safeguards, and standards. The focus is on protecting the organisation from threats and predicting and preventing disruptions and crises. Preventative control is essentially a defensive strategy based on consistency and returning the organisation to its current state if there is a crisis.

27 Resilience Reimagined: A practical guide for organisations