The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 7

work (see Figure 7.1)

Scoring: If your answers tend to the left, you tend to produce fewer insights into organisational resilience. If your answers are more on the right, your process triggers greater recalibration of resilience in your organisation.

Epilogue

In social as well as military science, managers and commanders tend to be portrayed as

rational human beings, able to rely on well-oiled organisational structures, procedures and

processes; incredibly farsighted and efficient in their ability to adapt to an ever-changing

environment. What is missing from this mosaic are the emotive dimensions of human

beings, whether they are operating in military institutions or in commercial organisations.

In the time leading up to WWII the French may have been less farsighted, and thus less

resilient in their ability to repulse a German invasion which was in itself a high-risk

undertaking. Ultimately, fighting on the ground was down to the ‘grunt’ (a term often used to

describe a low-level worker), the front-line infantry soldier and his survival instinct, and his

ability and willingness to kill.

[Text Box starts] Comment on de Jomini and Clausewitz

The Jominian Weltanschaung has had an unfortunate impact on the effectiveness of those military

services that embraced it. When military doctrine aims at a simplicity and a clarity possessed only by

the clean red and blue arrows of post-war military histories, it leaves the landscape littered with

smashed aircraft and the burnt-out hulks of tanks, not to mention dead and mutilated human beings.

Unfortunately, narrowly-educated wartime commanders have often attempted to make reality fit

doctrinal preconceptions, for example, the experiences of Eighth Air Force and Bomber Command in

the Second World War. In the former case, Eighth Air Force Commanders threw large unescorted

formations of B-17s against German fighter defences until their command came close to destruction

in the skies over Germany in October 1943. Similarly, Arthur Harris in 1944 nearly destroyed Bomber

Command in the Battle of Berlin in his effort to prove that independent ‘strategic’ bombing could win

the war by itself. D.C.T. Bennett, the commander of the Pathfinder force in Bomber Command, has

suggested that the best method for avoiding such unwillingness to face reality in the upper levels of

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