Resilience in high performing organisations

Grant Leboff: Brian, one of the things that you identified, characteristics of high-performance organizations, was this idea of resilience. I think perhaps there are certain characteristics that if you say to people, "engagement," for example, they'd say, "Oh, I understand that," something that's talked about a lot. I think resilience is something that's perhaps a little bit more surprising. What do you mean by resilience?

Brian MacNeice: One of the defining characteristics of a high-performing organization for us, that qualified the examples that we put into the book was that we wanted to find organizations that were performing, relative to their peers, at the top for an extended period of time, for literally decades, in some cases 150 years and longer.

What we were looking for, and one of the things that we found was that those organizations tend to have an organizational capability for resilience. Then when we studied that in a little bit more depth, we found that One, they're very good in at anticipating problems before they happen. Getting ahead of the curve, if you like. Figuring out, well, what are things that could throw us off, strategy. How do we prevent those from happening in the very first instance?

The second thing that they were very good at is, inevitably things go wrong. Every organization, through its history, will encounter speed bumps along the way. How you react to that will define the level of organizational resilience that you have. The high-performing organizations that we looked at were very good at making sure that they didn't allow those setbacks to knock them off course. They effectively recommitted to the ambition that they were aiming for, the vision of where they were trying to go after the setback. It might seem a bit odd, but we used the Kirov Ballet, the Mariinsky Theater as an example in the book. The Mariinsky Theater has been through a number of crises. It survived the whole kind of post-revolution era, very much attached to the old guard in terms of tsarist Russia. Seemed to be part of that and reinvented itself as a thing that the people of St. Petersburg really cherish and value.

What we found when we looked at it was there was a level of organizational resilience that was present within the Mariinsky that displayed some of those characteristics, anticipating problems before they arose, and then reacting to problems in an organizational way that allows them to recommit to a future vision of where they want to go, and doesn't knock them off course.

Grant Leboff: How do you build organizational resilience? We all understand resilience as a concept in an individual. Some people, however much you knock them down, they get back up, dust themselves off and carry on. We can see that. How do you create that in an organization and build a resilience within a thing rather than in a person?

Brian MacNeice: Yeah, so I think you've got to build some processes within the organization that allows you to A, anticipate some of the problems that you might encounter, and B, mitigate against those risks from happening in the first instance. Be very clear that if something does happen, we have a response, an organizational response that will allow us to weather this storm and come out the other end and flourish and thrive. We're seeing it at the moment with the Tata Group, for example. The Tata Group is another organization that we studied. Again, through the years, the Tata Group have been fantastic at making sure that they built processes into how they manage the organization, both at a strategic and an operational level, that allows them to overcome multiple setbacks that they've faced through the years.

You could argue that they're going through another one. They've just had a replacement of a CEO. I'm absolutely confident that the organizational capability to be resilient that's built into the Tata Group, that's survived for 150 years, will see them through the next phase of their development as an organization and an institution.

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