Fragile vs resilient at organizational scale, a 2 min overview
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In 2021 I did a talk on building resilience into customer service organizations, and since then I think resilience has come and gone as a trend. So it’s the perfect time to talk about it.
The concept of resilience is both simple and complex. It applies to how prepared we are to act in the face of challenge, how we adapt during challenge, and how we recover after challenge. It can exist as a quality of an organization. So how do we do resilience as an organization? Design researcher Ezio Manzini wrote about this in a very human-focused way, based on insights from biological systems, so today I’m pulling from that.
Put very simply: A resilient organization is one in which the system is able to adapt and recover if one condition changes or one part fully breaks, while a fragile organization, the opposite of resilient, is one that breaks down when something changes.
Looking at the fragile tells us what not to do. In fragile organizations, people have standardized roles, set practices, they relate to each other in scripted ways based on relative power and seniority, and they don’t work outside those ways. Fragile organizations, in other words, are hierarchical, standardized, and closed. This is not uncommon in customer service organizations, which is why I gave the talk originally.
So we don’t want to do that. In contrast, in resilient organizations: people have roles that may have some flex inside units that may some have flex; they relate to each other in more diverse ways rather than scripted ways; and knowledge is shared based on collaboration rather than hierarchy. You’re supporting both interconnectedness and self-sufficiency, thus creating a dynamic system that can flex and change. Resilient organizations, in Manzini’s words, are distributed, connected, and open.
I do want to acknowledge that this is a lot of pretty imprecise word usage, so think of this as a broad overview of resilient orgs with one major point to take away: Resilience is much more difficult to do on purpose than fragility, but fragile organizations—hierarchical, standardized, closed—will fail in the face of change while distributed-but-connected groups with self-sufficient-but-collaborative processes, i.e. resilient organizations, will thrive. So it’s worth trying to get there. Thanks for listening.
Source: https://current.ecuad.ca/resilient-systems-and-sustainable-qualities