Four traits of resilience
Dynamic, Insightful, Whole System, Open Innovation
“In life we have two choices, we either create the future, or let the future create us”
Resilient businesses, communities and organizations exhibit four fundamental traits:
1. It sees itself as a ‘whole system’.
Any organizational form is a connected, complex, diverse, ‘whole system’ – a ‘plexus’ - an interdependent network of networks - for example, most organizational forms whether a business or community are made up of social, economic, ecological and built systems. Each of these systems is critical in its own right, and combines and complements to make up the whole. Disregard any one, or the whole at your peril. Intervene in one element and you impact all. Bias growth toward one or two elements and you may imbalance and weaken the others. When these systems are connected, a resilient community knows to not over connect, or under connect - as a severe disturbance in one, will effect all that are connected. Hence resilience requires wealth creation to value a balanced, ‘multiple bottom line’ outcome through accounting for all these systems.
2. It has the insight to understand itself in the world.
There is an informal and formal process to understand the position and possibility a resilient organization or community occupies in the world, at multiple scales. Through foresight and hindsight, through looking inside and outside - locally, regionally and globally - it discovers and forms a 360 degree view of the immediate and emergent conditions that are or may have an impact. Simply put, it understands the state that it is in, and what is emerging that might impact that state and require or force it to change state. Through this view it builds a shared context and understanding that provides a foundation for inclusive and robust decision-making.
3. Planning is dynamic.
‘Strategy in action’ is the process that underlies all decisions. This requires the leadership to apply a planning and change process that moves the community or business in sync with the immediate and emergent conditions. The planning is more like designing, and the plan like a continually evolving platform for strategic change - together these two elements weave a tapestry that is always a work in progress. The platform is constantly trim-tabbing its cause and capability to be relative to conditions, and taking catalytic action as and when the need arises – this is ’strategy in action’.
4. Innovation is open to All.
Resilience champions open platform innovation. The mantra here is ‘think Linux’ - like the open source operating system - where it is a platform that holds a central purpose and set of standards that are negotiable but changed only from the center. That is the only rule and from there all are free to participate and share in the capability, network, brand image, application, proliferation and wealth creation derived from being connected to that central ‘kernel’, cause or strategy. Another benefit of open platform innovation systems is that a disruption in one part of the system, doesn’t bring down the whole system - the platform goes forward and adapts to the new conditions. The platform is self-communicating and learning as there isn’t a reliance on ‘the media’ for news to communicate with each other or to set the agenda – the platform is the agenda, the message and the media. Social networks drive an ‘organic narrative’ that spells out clearly who they are, where they are at and what they are up to. Such communities embrace new forms of multi-media like social software and open source technologies like web 2.0, wikis and blogs.
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