proactive capabilities
Resilience is an organisational capability. Resilience consists of positive, proactive activities aimed at being prepared for situations you cannot really prepare for. Resilience is the anchoring of necessary adaptations to absorb unexpected and often complex future events. Resilience is not something an organisation has, it is something it does. Resilience is essentially a verb. The resilience of an organisation consists of four capabilities (Woods, 2015).
Organisational Resilience
What exactly is organisational resilience? Where does it come from? And how can we retain or enhance that resilience? What role does our safety work play in this? Do we understand what makes our organizations resilient? And do we understand what undermines our resilience? Do we understand how to deal with this adequately? The better we understand what makes our organization resilient, the more we can increase our organisational resilience. Do we have enough resilience for future adversity? Or does kayfabe undermine our resilience?
Due to turbulence, rapid change, and complexity in our society and organizations, topics like psychological, social, and emotional safety, integrity, and inclusion are becoming increasingly important. These subjects all relate to the central themes in the work of Your Safety Jester: employees, the position of rules, controls, and systems, and the suggestions to approach them differently so that we achieve more resilience, safety, and success.
‘We cannot control external events, we can control our responses to them. Resilience is important. Leaders should accept events as they happen and focus on maintaining their own integrity and rationality’. – Epictetus
Four abilities
These four abilities that demonstrate resilience are:
- Recoverability – the ability to observe adversity and adjust or bounce back before things go wrong.
- Extensability – the ability absorb unplanned events and continue or extend operations while things go wrong.
- Adaptability – the ability to continuously adjust to the situation to achieve intended results.
- Sustainability – the ability to continuously learn from adveristy and improve operations.
These capabilities are cumulative, meaning that each subsequent capability only functions if the preceding capabilities function effectively.
Less compliance & control, more trust and craftmanship
The key starting point to get there is to rely less on compliance & control activities and build more on trust and craftmanship. And that starts with embracing uncertainty
‘We cannot change the human condition, but we can change the conditions under which humans work – James Reason