Presentation Resilience

Alan Fowler kicked off the meeting by giving a presentation on resilience. This presentation aims at giving content to the concept of resilience using the 5 capabilities, further referred to as the 5C’s. Alan promised not to use a powerpoint for his presentation. To prevent powerpoint withdrawal symptoms he decided to cheat a bit and use a flipchart.

R: Resilience. The translation of resilience to Dutch would be ‘weerbaarheid’ or ‘veerkracht’. Synonyms would be endurance, flexibility, adaptability, strength…  Are there ways of looking at the 5C’s that could potentially increase the resilience of a system?  What we would be looking for is the development of competencies which feed each or all of the 5 core capabilities the outcome of which would be an increase in resilience.  Alan talks about the Sea of C’s.

P: Proposition. The more unstable your environment the more resilient you need to be. The world is becoming more insecure and uncertain so we need to be more resilient. Resilience is becoming a more important property of organizations and the systems they are part of.

For each of the 5Cs, interventions can seek to change competencies in ways that increase resilience.  The following list sets out the questions, areas or types of organizational change that could have a positive effect on resilience.

C1: Act and self organize: to be able to assert yourself.

-          Refine the ratio between autocracy and democracy in decision processes.  

-          Speed up and improve decision making, to be more responsive

-          Is there any way of increasing the capacity to anticipate?  Can predictive capability be improved?

C2: To generate results

-          Building in contingency (do you have a bit of fat you can rely on, is there a plan B?)

-          Information breadth.  Look wider than your immediate functions to see if there is Tsumami on the horizon, possible already affecting some one like you or your organization.

-          What measures of process or performance are you using and to what extent are they future sensitive?

C3: Relating

-          What is your dependency profile, and in how far are they negotiable and changeable over what time scale?

-          How far are you locked into things that reduce your ability to respond and react?

-          What is the risk distribution? Does it create space or does it cripple or haunt you?  You may survive at the cost of the others.

C4: Adapt and self renew.

-     If you do this well you can forget the rest.  But if you want to increase this ability a culture shift is necessary. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

-          What is the psychology of the organization in terms of strength towards uncertainty?

-          Trust in leadership. How far is  the leadership trusted to make the calls that are needed?

-          Can the rate of absorption of lessons be increased? If adoption of ideas and lessons takes a long time than an organization is probably not good at changing.

C5:  Coherence

-          Between time frames, cycles and processes. The more incoherent these are within an organization the less able it is ascertain the connections and effects of what needs to change.

-          Between linkages that couple micro-meso-macro levels of action to and from the environment.

-          ‘Creep meter’. How clever is an organization  to create a space to manoeuvre without shifting away from or confusing identity.

S: Summary: resilience with regard to capacity concerns material issues, psychological issues, informational issues, connections and linkages and organisational design.

B: Balance: do not be confused that it should be 20-20-20-20-20. It’s an active dynamic thing. Let’s speak of a contextual balancing, a system story. The public adds the idea of a capacity dance.