Organisational Resilience: the Key to Anticipation,
Adaptation and Recovery
By
Javier Marcos BA MSc
Researcher
Steve Macaulay BA DipIA MCIPD
Learning Development Executive
No organisation should be an inward-looking island.
Key mechanisms that organisations must develop to respond
positively to change and to recover faster from adversity.
This article focuses on

how the organisation can better foresee its future

how it can become adaptive

how it should address crises and adversity.
It is the outcome of a systematic search of practical and relevant,
research-based literature, reviewed and synthesised into key
findings. Cranfield’s Centre for Customised Executive Development
contributed to this research to glean practical results from other
people’s experiences and available evidence.
What is Resilience?
Resilience is the organisational capability to anticipate key events
from emerging trends, constantly adapt to change, and rapidly
bounce back from disaster. This article explores these three
concepts of resilience to understand key mechanisms that
organisations should develop to best cope with ongoing and
continuous change and to recover from adversity. Resilient
organisations are forward thinking and able to foresee relevant
scenarios that are likely to occur which may have damaging effects
on the organisation’s operations.
Resilient organisations strive to be prepared for the best, but also
for the worst where organisational learning inward and outward is
nurtured and encouraged. The combination of personal talent with
productive environments and a balanced approach to managing
explicit and tacit knowledge make them learning organisations.
Resilient organisations believe that with purpose, whatever disaster
hits them, and regardless of the harm caused, they can recover and
bounce back from trauma, quickly restoring business capabilities.
Individuals in resilient organisations are attentive and aware that
failure may occur and continuously search for mechanisms to
improve the reliability of operations across the whole organisation.
Why resilience is important?
The business environment is fast becoming more interconnected,
unpredictable and volatile and the consequences of external events
more substantial. If you respond too late or inappropriately, you
risk getting left behind.
There are a number of phenomena that executives and managers
may need to be aware in their strategic planning activity such as:
- Faster and multi-faceted change
Today’s businesses are affected by changes in their political, natural
and social contexts.
- Environmental changes
Environmental changes, such as global warming, are becoming a
major threat to some sectors, and not just the ones that
immediately come to mind.
- Large scale mergers and acquisitions
Global organisations have wide influence, concentrating resources
and even superseding some countries’ internal product.
- Faster career transitions
Individuals in organisations are less ‘steady state’: faster career
transitions are occurring, and more often than ever before
individuals are changing roles within a given organisation and
across various firms.
- Unprecedented advances in Information Technologies
New information technologies are creating new communications
channels, shifting consumer patterns and new social ways of linking
up.
Taking Action on Organisational Resilience
The key to developing organisational resilience is making second
nature the capability to adapt and recover. In this way, it becomes
dynamic, self – organising and deeply ingrained into the
organisation’s day-to-day operations, and the way it does business.
Design Resilient systems
An appropriate mechanism to develop resilience is to adopt a
systems design approach that emphasises resilience as an inherent
organic property rather than an abstract goal. Typically, resilient
systems are configured by joined-up decentralisation, with
distributed subsystems that are independent, yet swap information
interactively. Overall, this systems design approach encourages
explicit consideration of resilience in both engineered systems and
the larger social systems.
Resilience in action
In 1986 a severe ice storm shut down UPS’s main air hub in
Louisville, Kentucky. The Package delivery giant was able to keep
the facility operating, flying new workers from other parts of their
system to work the Louisville hub.
UPS recognises that disruptions are normal since the company’s
operations are subject to adverse weather conditions. The
company’s recovery processes are tested daily and people trained in
them continuously.
Conduct scenario planning
Organisations cannot predict every potential event that may affect
them, but they can instil processes of strategic anticipation to
promote the identification and exploitation of emerging
opportunities. To anticipate long-term trends in order to inform
strategic plans, organisations can conduct scenario planning using
simulation games¦ these combine known facts about the future,
with plausible underpinning driving forces such as social, technical,
economic and political trends. Scenario planning normally includes
an analysis of major stakeholders, a defined time and scope of the
analysis, a map of basic trends, with driving forces and key
uncertainties. Importantly, it identifies extremes of possible
outcomes from the key driving forces.
Enhance linkages
No organisation should be an inward-looking island. Organisations
are better prepared for anticipation when they enhance the quality
and amount of linkages externally and internally. These linkages act
as sensors for emergent relevant changes in the environment that
can then be transferred internally.
Grow the organisation’s absorptive capacity
To develop ‘bounce-back’, managers and executives should enhance
the organisation’s absorptive capacity, facilitating the scanning of
the environment in search of valuable external information,
assimilating it, and exploiting it.
Resilient organisations recognise that their mission may fail, and
acknowledge that failing to anticipate is anticipating the failure.
Awareness is enhanced by fostering exposure to contexts and
experiences where real change may be emerging outside the
current remit of the organisation.
Resilience in action
The UK’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) will handle more than
2.4 million flights carrying over 220 million passengers this year.
The efficiency of air traffic controllers is as high as 98% of flights
(percentage of flights with no delay attributable to air traffic
controllers).
In June 2004 a control computer system failure in West Drayton in
west London caused thousands of travellers to be delayed. The
NATS operations were, however restored and fully operational the
same morning.
NATS is also an extremely safe but complex system: it achieves
high levels of resilience by shifting organisational structures and by
configuring distributed but interactive subsystems.
Design strategies and structures to fit the context
In fostering adaptation and adjusting organisational strategies and
structures to fit contextual conditions, organisations can facilitate
adaptation using such means as inter-organisational cooperation
and alliances, networking, and internal exploitation of knowledge
resources.
Strengthening mechanisms for integration
Managers can build organisational resilience by strengthening
integrative mechanisms across the organisation. By this we mean
reinforcing the connections between working groups, for example
through building a shared sense of mission, interactive planning,
identifying and working on shared crucial tasks between key
groups.
Conclusion and next steps
Overall, managers can and should develop the means to weather
the storms, by regularly revisiting their organisation’s ethos and
how it organises and works together. Resilience can best be
understood through insight, interpretation and development of
complex and dynamic systems, and their capability to anticipate key
events from emerging trends, to constantly adapt to change, and to
bounce back from setbacks.
Reflections for managers – the present
- What has been the effect of the last major change in your
organisation? What did you learn about this change?
- What are the key factors that help your managers learn? Are
these factors primarily internal or external?
- What is the quality of your ability to look out for emergent
relevant changes in the environment, using alliances, partnerships
and joint-ventures?
Reflections for managers - the future
- How can you and your organisation become more forward
thinking?
- What are the key environmental factors that are likely to affect
your organisation in the medium and long term?
- What mechanisms has your organisation to identify and analyse
emerging trends? How effectively are these trends acted upon and
the necessary changes made?
© Cranfield School of Management 29 May 2008