Three stages of the resilience process
As risk and volatility increase, businesses are rightly seeking to develop their own resilience capability. Such a capacity will enable them to address unexpected challenges, recover from active crises, and even emerge stronger.
The open question is: how? On this point, there’s growing consensus of the organizational capabilities needed to ensure resilience.
And so, in the following, we look at business conditions required for the development of a resilience capability, laying out three stages of the resilience process.
What is resilience?
Is resilience achieved or maintained, though?
Funny enough, many definitions of resilience often focus on the business characteristics, resources, or processes that stand out in achieving resilience rather than what resilience actually is.
As a result, we often miss what makes resilient organizations really tick and what practices less resilient organizations can learn from their more resilient peers.
Business scholarship is a good place to look to correct this oversight.
One such scholar, Stephanie Duchek, has actually articulated a process-based understanding of resilience that can be quite handy for practitioners.
Examining existing scholarship about enterprises, Duchek surmised that resilient organizations respond to the past, the present, and the future. They, therefore, exhibit reactive, concurrent, and anticipatory actions.
From there, Duchek proposed a model (or definition) of resilience constituting three stages.
The stages of the resilience process
What are they? Here are the three stages of the resilience process:
- Anticipation. The first dimension is anticipation, referring to the “ability to detect critical developments within the firm or in its environment and to adapt proactively.”
Does that mean that all resilient organizations can prevent every crisis? Not at all. In fact, there are varying levels of anticipation, with some organizations better at it than others.
What’s important to know, though, is that while “anticipation capabilities build the foundation for an effective response to critical situations,” they can’t provide full-term control.
- Coping. That level of control comes from real-time action, adjustments, and decisions during a crisis. It happens as a result of coping capabilities.
Coping, which sounds like a negative, is closely linked to crisis or incident management. Duchek separates that capability into two categories:
- The ability to accept a problem
- The ability to develop and implement solutions
Why not just say incident management, then? Well, this stage involves more than just putting plans into action. The ability to develop solutions requires resilient organizations to have both “formal structures and clear responsibilities” as well as “openness and freedom for flexible and creative action.”
- Adaptation. The final stage of the resilience process is adaptation. Where recovery, the final phase in crisis/incident management, usually means rebuilding and stabilization, adaptation refers to the ability to adjust to adverse situations and change for the better.
In Duchek’s telling, adaptation requires two sub-capabilities:
- Reflection and learning. The ability to reflect on the crisis situation and incorporate insights gained into the knowledge base of the business.
- Organizational change. The ability to act on knowledge gained to produce positive change.
Change, for those who’ve attempted it, isn’t easy, though, often encountering organizational resistance. Adaptation, which involves change management, must, therefore, include overcoming that resistance.
Where to start on your resilience journey, then? Well, the moral of the story is that businesses will need to develop all of the capabilities above rather than focus on isolated stages.
In addition, businesses will also need to prioritize drivers of resilience, such as a “broad and diverse knowledge base,” talent and funding, “deep social capital” (e.g., information sharing and cross-functional collaboration), and finally support from powerful actors.
So, how to put some these ideas into practice?
Check out Noggin’s Decision-Maker’s Guide to International Business Resilience Standard: ISO 22316 to find out.
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