Building Resilient Organizations Through Change, Chance, and Complexity

by David Lindstedt

A must-read in the wake of COVID-19, this book unpacks the nature of resilient organizations and how they prepare for unpredictable, complex, and profound change. Organizations that do not adapt and evolve die. To date, however, it has not been at all clear how to build a resilient organization. That puts us all in the unenviable position of trying to ready our organizations for an increasingly uncertain future without the proper guidance to do it. This book introduces 14 elements of resilience that consistently emerge in organizations that have thrived amid adversity and volatility. Resilience is not about determination, grit, cybersecurity, or teams of resilient individuals; resilience, it turns out, is often confused with robustness. Readers will discover how resilient organizations build and employ a distinctive combination of crews, capital, culture, and leadership―and, crucially―how to adapt these combinations for their own organization. Senior business leaders, consultants, entrepreneurs, students, and professionals will appreciate this book’s practical, approachable, and engaging guidance, including insights by leaders from Health Care for the Homeless, The Ohio State University, NBCUniversal, retail stores, and more.

214 pages, ebook

Published July 15, 2022

Reviews

[Gary Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent survey of the major factors that lead to organizational resilience. Many of the concepts described in the book are likely familiar to many readers from modern business, leadership, and agile concepts, but Dr. Lindstedt pulls them together in an attempt to create a holistic collection of how organizational resilience is best achieved.

Aside from being a great resource on these modern practices and how they are critical for organizational resilience, some of the concepts from the book that really stood out to me are:

- The difference between robustness and resilience
- Maintaining the status quo ("playing defense") versus taking advantage of transformation opportunities ("playing offense") in the face of significant change
- Excellent use of the Cynefin framework related to situation leadership at an organizational level
- The ever-present balance between exploitation ("optimizing status quo") and exploration ("experimenting and finding new ways of operating")
- The need to deal with losses as part of the process of transforming
- The importance of regularly shifting money from less valuable endeavors to use to invest in developing new and potentially growing endeavors
- How to operate in the midst of a complex environment where solutions are not pre-planned but rather emerge over time
- The comparison between fragile, robust, and antifragile organizations

I also really liked the author's final definition of organizational resilience, although you have to wait until the last page to get the definition.

Overall, a well-researched and thought out book that has given me more to think about that I can share with the people I work with to help create more agile and more resilient organizations.

Also, I learned a new word from the book - hermeneutical, so there is that too.

Finally, my one "complaint" was that "The Ohio State University" was mentioned quite profusely throughout the book (for good reason), but as a University of Michigan alum, that made it a bit tougher reading for me! :-)