The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 7

Step 3: Creating insight

The previous two steps helped an organisation to gain an accurate and deep intuitive

understanding about how resilient an organisation is, but also about how vulnerable it still

remains to the environmental challenges. Foresight is established in order to move an

organisation forward in light of the past and multiple, still unrealised, futures.

Looking at insight from an organisational resilience perspective (see Figure 7.2), it raises

questions such as

• How much do we need to enhance our resilience repository?

• How do we need to manage the tensions between opposing poles of resilience?

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 7.2: Organisational Resilience (Denyer 2017)

An insight-driven organisation may well drive such a discourse by relying on a few

experts, just as the French relied predominantly on their generals, who turned out to be

human beings, flawed in their decision making. Instead, an insight driven organisation may

spread the degree of responsibility out towards those at an operational, tactical level,

exploiting the mindset of all those in an organisation, and not just of a few individuals.

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