BEND BUT DONT BREAK: OPERATIONAL RESILIENCE

The word resilience was coined by Emmy Werner in the 1970s. She studied a cohort of children from Hawaii.

- Usha Yadav

The cohort typically comprised of families that were quite poor, among the children who grew up in these detrimental situations only one third didn't exhibit destructive behavior in later stages and hence Werner deemed this group to be "resilient".

Being resilient means "the capacity to recover from difficulties" but unlike the movies we can't wait for miracles to happen. In the real world we anticipate, prevent, recover and/or adapt. These 4 pillars make up the institution that is "operational resilience".

If we break down operational resilience, we can find two core drivers and two core approaches that organization usually adopt:

The first driver is a defensive agenda which is about stopping bad things from happening as opposed to a progressive agenda which is about making things happen. (taken up on Y axis) In terms of approach some organizations drive for resilience by driving for consistency opposed to having a flexible agenda, which is having people that have variety of different ideas, beliefs, outlooks, and practices which enables them to be much more agile. (taken up on X axis)

Now this creates four core quadrants, in the bottom left we have preventive control which is about defensive agenda by being very consistent, this is about putting defenses in depth and stopping bad things from happening opposed to the bottom right quadrant that is mindful action, this is about having people who notice the problem, raise those concerns. Those concerns are listened to and they are further powered to act from further escalading.