What is organisational resilience? Meaning and practice

Organisational science uses the term organisational resilience for the capacity to withstand the tension between stability and flexibility. It refers to a resilience that keeps an organisation performing even under very unfavourable environmental conditions. It arises when necessary changes are initiated early enough to leave sufficient time for their implementation.

Crisis management is something different. Those who do not recognise early signals or misinterpret them decide too late. Imbalances arise that force radical cuts. Often one emergency operation then follows another, because nothing has changed at the core. The price is high. Such cuts cost a great deal of energy and destroy competences that would be urgently needed for self-renewal.

Organisations need reliability for ongoing business and the capacity to respond to new conditions. Both place demands on leadership, strategy and cooperation. A focus on resilience therefore links current performance with the question of how the company can continue to work viably in the future.

Organisations develop structures, processes and routines to solve problems in their environment. Once this has succeeded, they prefer to take up impulses from outside in a way that confirms the established solution patterns. Gathering and processing information becomes highly selective. There is a reason for this, because no organisation would be able to act if it had to react to every event in its environment.

This self-adaptation is sufficient as long as the relevant environments remain relatively stable and only small adjustments are needed. In turbulent environments with sudden, massive changes, the established mechanisms of the vast majority of organisations are no longer sufficient. Markets change faster than organisations do of their own accord. They only keep pace if they are specifically enabled to do so.

Relevant environments are observed, existing assumptions questioned and new developments put into context. Such observations must reach the organisation and be able to be worked on there. What matters is which information is relevant for strategic decisions and who brings it into conversation.

An observation alone does not change a way of working. Its significance is clarified in connection with customers, markets, value creation and the organisation's capabilities. This can lead to decisions on strategy, organisational design, leadership or people development. In the consulting assignment this connection is made concrete.

Social systems develop through three mechanisms. Variation supplies the organisation with a greater wealth of usable impulses, for example through special forms of cooperation with key customers, development partnerships with suppliers or contacts with research institutions. Selection decides which impulses give rise to change and where the status quo remains. This requires regular occasions at which impressions are evaluated for their strategic relevance.

Re-stabilisation turns the selected innovations back into firmly anchored routines and consistently replaces old ones with new ones. This gives rise to three core questions. How does the organisation supply itself with more diversity in order to recognise opportunities? How does it allow the new in during selection? And how does it reduce resistance to innovations so that implementation succeeds? At its core, an organisation needs routines for changing routines.

Which assumptions underpin your current direction? Where are divergent observations discussed? Which decisions have you most recently derived from them? These questions help to look at the capacity for self-renewal in your own everyday work. They do not replace a diagnosis, but they offer a concrete entry point into clarifying things together.

Self-renewal builds on a culture in which employees contribute divergent observations and opinions. Mistakes and unusual deviations are seen as prompts for learning and are not immediately sanctioned. New employees with their fresh view and encounters with people from outside the organisation help to discover blind spots. Unfinished ideas also have value. Experiments and possible failures are permitted, provided lessons are learned from them.

For management this requires a paradoxical allocation of resources. It funds the constant optimisation of existing processes and at the same time the discovery of the new. It must deliver good results today and remain open to new opportunities. A common mistake is to attribute the organisation's unsolved problems to external circumstances. Those who do so overlook their own opportunities to act.

Resilience is linked to strategic self-renewal. Leadership must perceive relevant changes and at the same time secure the reliability of ongoing business. Collecting risks on a list is not enough for this. Observations from markets, customer relationships and inside the organisation need a place where their significance is examined together. Different interpretations can stand side by side before a decision is made.

Implementation then shows whether the original assumption was sound. In this sense resilience is a recurring capacity: taking in information, developing options, selecting and anchoring what has been learned. Which routines an organisation needs for this depends on its strategy and its tasks. A blanket resilience score would conceal these differences.