When discussing the subject of leaders and systems, the new idea is to make them more resilient. As I noted at the on-line, Winter ‘21 Roundtable, “resiliency is the new efficiency.” The big question is “Why?”
The defining characteristic of our reality today is the need for speed and adaptability within change. We need to come up with realistic solutions to problems and inputs that we have no ability to control or influence. As John Kotter wrote in his book, Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility For A Faster-Moving World (HarvardBusiness Review Press, 2014): “The world is now changing at a rate at which the basic systems, structures, and cultures built over the past century cannot keep up with the demands being placed on them. Incremental adjustments to how you manage and strategize, no matter how clever, are not up to the job.”
This perspective is based on three important points. First, the unpredictability and the complexity of the future is not going away. There will be no new normal, just a series of “not normal” times. Second, efficiency often is about making sure everyone does things the same way each time. The problem with systems is that they depersonalize and standardize everything. And people do not, on one level, like to be standardized. Each person is unique. Third, as Robert Quinn wrote years ago, “Excellence is a form of deviance. If you perform beyond the norms, you disrupt all the existing control systems. Those systems will then alter and begin to work to routinize your efforts. That is, the systems will adjust to try to make you normal.” We forget as leaders that there is no perfect systems.
Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe in their book, Managing The Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty (John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2007) write: “The essence of resilience is therefore the intrinsic ability of an organization (or system) to maintain or regain a dynamically stable state, which allows it to continue operations after a major mishap and/or in the presence of a continuous stress.” The hallmark of a resilient system is not that it is error-free, but that errors don’t disable it. Resilience is a combination of keeping errors small and of improving workarounds that allow the system to keep functioning. This is the point that people are missing this fall when they talk about systems and resiliency.
This week, explore this perspective and discuss it with your team. It is time we hold a strategic dialogue about systems, efficiency, and resilience.
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