What are the biggest contributions to your organisation’s resilience?
The old way of looking at Organisational Resilience was to create effectively a backup if things went awry. Backup IT systems, surplus cash on the balance books, ensuring that the supply chain is crisis-proof, or in the end, counting on a great Risk Management team who puts in place a business continuity plan. Whilst all these mechanisms create a safety net, they do not provide the capability for responding in an agile and adaptable manner when change is unexpected.
Yet we can surely expect the unexpected.
This is where real Organisational Resilience comes in. Organisational Resilience is about the Adaptive Capacity of its people together to anticipate, adapt and evolve the organisation with coherence and alignment towards clear goals.
The Resilience Engine has been researching Team and Organisational Resilience since 2014. We have found that teams are at the heart of a resilience organisation. Indeed it is teams that nurture what we term ’Resilience Assets’, which when combined and aligned, become the golden thread of resilience that joins the organisation so there is agility, adaptability and coherence. It turns out that teams are the birthplace and nurturing ground for building and shaping these Resilience Assets.
Example Organisational Resilience Assets
Key individuals
Specific teams eg senior leadership team
Key processes
Purpose
Core values
When teams become resilient themselves, this is leveragable in the organisation through alignment and consistency. This is achieved through the two key enablers: Coherence and Culture.
