Increasing Organisational Resilience

Megan Wheeler, the Organisational Developmental expert's recent organisational development series gives me fresh views by starting with deepening understanding of personal resilience that leads and drives organisational resilience from fundamental level.

Comparing to those organisational resilience advices that focuses on the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper, Wheeler certainly makes you better understand what resilience means and how to cultivate it within our organisations. The key takeaways are shared hereto.

I. How do we define resilience, both personally and organisationally

According to Wheeler, when we talk about resiliency, we are talking about increasing bump tolerance - which is a term that comes from aviation, and is actually a part of pilots’ training. With resiliency, there are five major strands, which concern our behaviour under sustained stress:

1. Emotional resilience - how well can you clam yourself or regulate your emotions
2. Attentional resilience - how well can you stay focused on tasks
3. Procedural resilience - how well can you make good decisions
4. Rotational resilience - how well can you pull your head up and innovate, looking for new opportunities 
5. Relational resilience - how well can you help others get calm

The research done by Wheeler’s team shows that resilience is not binary. It is not that people are resilient, or they are not. There are different ways that we can show up as resilient. None of us are going to be a 10/10 on all five strands of resilience, but it is important to think through where your strengths are, because even a 10% improvement on one strand can make a huge difference.

As leaders, our goal is to help people develop both their resilience and their adaptivity - adaptivity being the ability to change quickly, whereas resilience is the ability to make that change again and again. 

II. When confronted with sustained stress, what are the different coping style we lean on. 

As humans, our brains evolved to be hyper aware of possible threats. That’s how we have survived, and it is why we are so adaptive. It is no longer the sober tooth tiger in the woods that jolts our adrenaline, but it may be an off comment in an email, or a terrible meeting. Wheeler points out that when stressful moments continue happening in close succession, our stress becomes more chronic, and that adrenaline starts to turn into what’s called allostatic load. Essentially, we have surpassed the amount of space that we can together for fight or flight in our operating system. When this continues in the long-term, tunnel vision is the result. We lose our peripheral vision and perspective, and become hyper-focused on anything that might be a stressor.

When we’re experiencing this tunnel vision, there are 6 primary coping styles leaders rely on:

1st is Freezing: you slow down or stall out finding yourself paralysed by the stress around you.

2nd is Flight: you become aggressive about problem solving, debating all potential solutions, and becoming domineering. 

3rd is Rabbit Holing: you go unnecessarily deep on one single topic.

4th is Spinning - you jump idea to idea, conversation to conversation, not making any real progress.

5th is Robot-mode - you simply detach from your emotions and lose empathy.

6th is Helper-mode - you over lean on giving advice to everyone else rather than dealing with your own responsibilities. 

It is important to identify your default style, and to know that we all have the ability to shift into a new way of processing information. 

III. The strategies to employ to overcome the tunnel vision and hone resiliency

The 1st strategy is called “pause”.

The goal is simply to regain homeostasis. Pausing is the simplest thing that we can do as humans when we are distracted, stressed, or overwhelmed, but it is also the first skill that goes out the window because we get so hyper-focused. This is a tactic professional mediators are trained in - they strategically insert pauses between negotiations, encouraging participants to get a drink of water, or a bathroom break. When emergency responders arrive at a scene, they are also trained to stop and look around before they jump into action. 

To regain homeostasis within our organisations, we need to focus on pauses: 

1. micro breaks - a quick stretch or breath
2. mezo breaks - logging off by a certain time each day
3. macro breaks - modelling the value of actually taking PTO

The 2nd skill is called the “two hander”.

“Two hander” is extremely effective in organising ambiguity and increasing sense of control. It is simply us as leaders saying, we have only two hands, here is what we can control, here is what we can’t. Here is what will focus on, here is what we won’t. Here is what we know, here is what we don’t. This language is particularly important for leaders right now as we navigate such intense uncertainty.

The 3rd skill is reset questions.

When you reset questions, you ask yourself and your team questions that help you stop spinning and get out of the rabbit hole. 

Some of the questions as example can be considered:

• What does success look like?
• What problem are we trying to solve?
• What is the highest priority here?
• How should we best go about this conversation, or decision, or meeting?
• Should we set time limits for each section?
• Should we take a break?
• What are our decision criteria?
• What is another angle we can look from?
• What is the first smallest step that can be taken?
• How can I help?

The 4th skills for increasing resilience is scenario planning. 

It is as simple as putting boxes around ambiguity, and it is especially helpful for rick assessment. 

Take the example of going back to the office. Rather than spinning on a million different scenarios, put boxed around similar options:

Scenario One -return to the office in two weeks.

Scenario Two - return to the office in six months

Scenario Three - return to the office at the end of 2021

Scenario Four - stay virtual forever 

Once we have these boxes, we can hold helpful and conductive conservations, actually analysing the likelihood of each scenario happening and our readiness for each. These scenarios allow us to zoom out, which makes for a more objective conversations.