The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 1

Progressive (Achieving results)

Performance Optimisation (Improving and exploiting)

Adaptive Innovation (Imagining and creating)

Consistency (Goals, processes, routines)

Flexibility (Ideas, views, actions)

Mindful Action (Noticing and responding)

Preventative Control (Monitoring and complying)

Defensive (Protecting results)

Figure 1.2: Organisational Resilience (Adapted from Denyer 2017)

A progressive organisation longing for consistency focusses its attention on

Performance Optimisation, relying on aspects of continuously improving its capabilities,

while focussing on efficiency gains through standardisation: the objective is to eliminate

human error through compliance to rules, processes and procedures.

Adaptive Innovation applies to organisations that themselves shape or even disrupt the

market in which they are operating. In contrast to Performance Optimisation, it is less

focussed on continuously improving the status quo and more on setting a (radical) new

standard through innovation.

Mindful Action puts situated human cognition centre stage − in opposition to

Performance Optimisation − as experience, expertise and teamwork is seen as an answer to

anticipating and adapting to threats.

Preventative control aims to maintain capabilities over time to protect the organisation

from threats. The emphasis is on standardisation of rules, processes, and procedures. This

mode of resilience may well be the most common approach to Resilience in business, as it

appears to be the most stable, most efficient, and supposedly simplest form of resilience.

The challenge in being resilient on ‘all fronts’, to be progressive and defensive, to be

flexible and consistent, lies in the tension between the opposing poles. It is really a question

of what to focus on, making trade-offs in regard to the opposite pole. The practical dilemma

is that consistency-seeking organisations seek to eliminate situated human cognition as a

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