What Organization Resilience is?

What Organization Resilience is?

Organization Resilience is the capacities and capabilities of an organization, that enable it to recalibrate in response to varied conditions, such that can sustain and improve its performance. Resilience is its capacity to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in altered circumstances.

One of the key factors in building well-prepared resilient organizations is to engage constantly in preparatory practices, such as vulnerability analyses, drills, scenario exploration, and network exercises. These activities create a culture of awareness, a sense that things may go wrong, but also a shared belief that all involved stand ready to cope with whatever threat they may face (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2002). Resilience can thus be viewed as a result of hard work and elite involvement. 

Managing for Resilience, it requires a fundamental different mental/mindset model of business one that embrace complexity, uncertainty, interdependence, system-thinking and a multi-time perspective. 

Benefits of being a Resilient Organization:

1. Anticipation Benefit: You are ready to face the crisis or adversity faster 
2. Impact Benefit: The impact of the crisis might not be so high and enormous. You can resist crisis better by having better preparation
3. Recovery Speed Benefit: represent the ability to rebound from the shock more quickly by identifying the adjustments needed to return to the prior operating levels.
4. Outcomes Benefit: represent fitness of the new post -shock environment

Organizations for developing their Resilience they should:

1. Build a culture of connection & understanding by developing a Psychological Safe environment.  Follow rules and routines that already have been checked and working well by bringing security
2. Seek advantage in adversity by offering flexibility and adequate resources
3. Look forward for changes and not backwards 
4. Measure beyond performance – How people are? Consider flexibility & adaptability
5. Prize diversity by generating alternative views and opinions for seeing things with fresh eyes
6. Identify your priorities. In a crisis moment “red lights” are on from everywhere. Focus on the actions that will take out from the storm the organization.
7. Design & promote a systematic approach of how to gather the right information and how to share critical information
8. Organize flexible structures & processes that enable the organization to innovate & change
9. Renew status quo & activities and have the courage to swift from your identity by continuously assessing results and re-evaluating the environment
10. Promote employee’s well-being & invest in mental health, training and education.

Steps that you might take for preparing in advance your organization for being resilient and facing crisis/adversity:

1. Build a strong organizational culture with commitment & trust from people
2. Promote emergent Leadership. Leaders that respond quickly in a crisis and have been tested in minor crisis too (self-motivation, creative thinking, find solutions, adaptability)
3. Capture value by restructuring relationships with other players in various ecosystems
4. Organize in response to a threat by reallocating resources, transforming processes, enforce capabilities and aligning governance and structure
5. Renew the organization capabilities needed to create and capture values through a crisis

Resilience it is not a destination; it’s a way of being.  Resilient organizations learn to expect the unexpected, rebound quickly when a crisis occurs, and take advantage of unforeseen opportunities. Can be an opportunity for competitive advantage for organizations that focus & train on it.  A resilient organization is not simply the one that returns where it was before a crisis. Rather, is the one that has transformed, build attitudes, agility and structures to its DNA that enable to not just recover from where it was but to move forward quickly.