The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 3

preoccupied with managing their own risk, and everyone assumes his or her function is

critical to the survival of the organisation.

Such indiscriminate, unfocussed investment, useful as it might seem for addressing any

eventuality, tends to be undermined, by an indiscriminate, unfocussed pursuit to cut costs.

Paradoxically, with the absence of failure, organisations such as BA go on a cost-cutting

binge undermining the very functions that operated reliably in the past. Being noncritical or

complacent about past achievements, it can become easy to question whether a service or

product can be provided equally dependably, but at a lower cost.

As a result, it is folly to think that one can manage everything and provide a linear

defence. Increasingly, it is equally nonsensical to bolster functions in an organisation that are

not customer facing or that provide little or no direct or indirect value to a customer.

Organisations tend to thin out their operational robustness indiscriminately, or allow their

resources and capabilities to be eroded and depleted (see following textbox), until disaster

strikes.

Limitations in Agility

Lack of good sense becomes apparent in the belief that, even after pockets of failure have

started to disrupt operations, it will still be possible to divert resources and capabilities to

‘plug’ (La colmatage) the gap and prevent the situation from cascading into a disaster. As

has already been said, increased complexity of modern solutions and operations does not

allow much time to contain the problem. As happened in the BA data centre, the problem –

supposedly of an external employee switching off the power supply – led to an immediate

shutdown of the entire subsystem; it took three days to bring it back to full working order.

In order to move resources and capabilities to where they are needed, defensively and

progressively, they need to be dynamic in an operational sense (for the strategic importance

of dynamic capabilities, see Chapter 2): they must be able to operate in different contexts,

providing a wide range of expertise that can be quickly deployed wherever needed.

Many organisations, though, turn their resources and capabilities into static lines of

defence/offence that are defined for a single purpose, ‘routinized’ to operate in a single

context. This has the advantage of deploying expertise efficiently, and in a way that is

focussed. However, the resulting rigid focus, although efficient and stable, cannot be moved

quickly enough to enable its application in another context. In the case of the IT meltdown at

BA, the organisation could only – in a somewhat helpless manner – watch the crisis unfold

and hope that their outsourced services would be back to normal as soon as possible. BA’s

own staff (those not already outsourced) simply did not have expertise in running data

centres; nor did they have the authority or time to support those outsourced services, which

are now critical to the viability of an entire airline. They resembled the French fortress

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