Organisational Resilience as Understanding and Agility, not Power.

Recently we have seen several “Covid-19 Pandemic Recovery Guides” appearing across Linked in, promising to assist you in pulling your business out of the current situation and back into effective trading and success, being ahead of the curve. Unfortunately for those who are looking for the magic bullet, these guides, when stripped back, are little more than business continuity frameworks slightly tweaked to take advantage of the fears of current business owners.

As history has shown us, there is no easy or quick way to recovery from a “Strategic Shock”. Those that manage a rapid transition have spent several months and a substantial amount of money in building effective frameworks to manage their recovery – buying the “Guide” while trying to enter a recovery phase is too late. The purchasing of the guide is similar to closing the gate after the horse has left; the investment needs to now be into the workforce, not into "quick fix" help guides to assist in organisations attempting to address a situation that has already occurred.

Recovering from a Strategic Shock needs effective leadership, flexibility in approach and a strong focus on you Social Capital. History has shown that Resilience is Understanding, not Power. Those that seek to develop their resilience to build a powerbase have completely mis-understood the importance and role of resilience within the workplace. The diagram above reflects the journey an organisation will experience when it encounters a strategic shock. The level of it's performance drop is reliant on the level of its internal "natural" Organisational Resilience. This clearly demonstrates that the importance of the understand and prepare phase, which lessens the immediate drop the organisation will experience. Several local council organisations within the UK only started to prioritise their key resources after their workforce had gone into isolation; this is similar to organisations buying a guide to help you recover from a Pandemic when you are in the middle of it.

The fact that this approach is currently being pushed across the internet as the next thing in business raises serious concerns in how “Organisational Resilience” is being used by those who do not fully understand the concept as a means to sell repackaged “Business Continuity” and “Risk Management” products. It is trading on the concerns and fears of business owners who, having failed to invest effectively in the understand and prepare phases for building their own resilience, are looking for a mechanism to limit the risks and impacts caused by their failure to prepare.

A good example of how to manage the transition from a Strategic Shock to effective business is the case study of Sandler O’Neill and Partners LLP. Having suffered a catastrophic change in circumstances, the organisation was strongly tipped to collapse within days of suffering the shock. Yet, within six months it was operating at a better capability than pre=shock. The reason? The strategic management invested in its people and mobilised its social capital, understanding that the very survival of the organisation and long-term resilience resided in its people, nor its systems, processes, investment in IA or real estate expansion. Discussion papers on Organisational Resilience are available here.

The UK has also recently witnessed this during the Covid-19 pandemic – it was the key workers and the workforce of the NHS, supply chain organisations and communities coming together that built and sustained organisational, community and national resilience. Going forward, the workforce will be coming back to the workplace with multiple pressures impacting on their performance and engagement. The importance of the flexibility of the organisation to understand the pressures that the workforce is experiencing, and have in place an effective plan, prior to the workforce re-entering the workplace, is critical. A failure to reassure the workforce and invest in the "social contract", as well as building trust, will impact heavily on performance and the organisation's level of resilience.

Those organisations that manage to invest and grow their social capital will survive and thrive; those that invest more in IT, IA and processes will struggle in the current environment. Technology, processes and IA may enable an enhanced level of resilience, but they do not deliver resilience. Those individuals who continue to push this message are demonstrating a fundamental lack of understanding the concept and are rearwards looking, rather than forwards looking.