Biological Resilience: When the herd moves on, can your organization give chase?
Is your organization biologically resilient? I don’t mean “do you have white cell antibodies roaming your hallways trapping and expelling invaders” - as cool as that might be to watch. More, what I mean is: does your organization have the capacity to withstand major disruptive events in the way that a biological organism might respond to some type of environmental challenge?
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is first attributed to have said, “What does not kill us makes us stronger.” This statement is being reaffirmed by recent discoveries in human anthropology including the work of Professor Daniel Lieberman of Harvard University. New theories postulate that because of climate change in Africa some seven million years ago, the food that our early ancestors depended upon became dispersed. It was those who were able to follow the food, possessing traits that included the ability to walk upright and run after prey, who survived to become our more recent ancestors.
Survival for a modern organization is not about developing the ability to hunt, but it is often about the chase: chasing customers, chasing trends, chasing investment…
In environments as dynamically changing as our economic world today, the important lessons from anthropology include the concept that survival is about adaptability. It is about having the necessary traits within an organization to diminish the impacts of unforeseen negative events.
Unlike nature, modern organizations do not have the liberty to wait millennia for natural selection to sort out the traits that create prosperity. Rather, organizations today must learn from the abundance of evidence, both within the organization and externally, that demonstrates how to overcome adversity.
There are many factors to negotiate. One of the most important is the way in which an organization communicates with customers, suppliers and stakeholders.
How important today is it to rapidly understand an evolving situation, make effective and accurate decisions, execute action in response to events and comprehensively keep stakeholders informed? The bedrock to success in all of these situations is communications. When real-time events are unfolding, a communications breakdown is like suddenly waking up to see that your food has moved on.
Resilient organizations, like biological organisms, can develop adaptations that allow them to overcome environmental changes. Survivors do so constantly. Organizations that prosper become masters of adaptation.
In the past, investments in organizational resilience have often been difficult to justify. In the heat of day-to-day competition, taking dollars from marketplace actions and putting them against the possibility of events that hopefully will never happen can be a tough choice.
The great news is that new technologies are rapidly driving down the costs to implement strategies that will insinuate biological-style resilience into your organization. Often these strategies also serve dual purposes. Once, investing in communications resilience meant expensive duplication and infrastructure reinforcement— I once served a large financial institution that took resilience so seriously, they installed a multi-million dollar duplicate system in a bunker. Today, new underlying protocol suites including Session Initiation Protocol, open source based software and new hardware form factors, including the transition from proprietary single purpose devices to open standards based commercially available hardware, are taking away the need for such arduous investments.
Today communications resilience is much more affordable and more about contingency planning. It is about diversifying communication assets in a distributed server and gateway approach. It is about making investments that serve dual purposes such as software applications that make people more mobile and other applications that include the ability to allow people to telework. These application and architecture approaches not only provide increased resilience in the in the event of a disruptive emergency, they increase productivity on a day-to-day basis.
In this increasingly volatile world, organizations should be constantly asking themselves: where are our most critical functions? What if it were not possible for the individuals performing those functions to access the physical facilities they normally depend upon to be productive? How might these people access alternative communications tools that allow them to maintain robust and effective communications: with the organization, the customers they serve and the resources they need to remain a productive part of your organization’s value chain?
Survival of the fittest dictates this constant questioning is conducted at all levels within the organization. It must have executive sponsorship and it must become part of the fabric of doing business.
Without it, the environment will change often in dramatic fashion. The herds will move on. Will you be ready to give chase? – GWC 9-16-09
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Posted by Guy Clinch at 18:44 on September 14, 2009