3. Diverse Teams = Innovation?
No-one questions that diversity is a critical
factor in modern organizational
management.
However, research has provided mixed
empirical results when it comes to the
benefits and negative effects of diversity
(or lack thereof).
Scholars have also come up with a variety
of terms to analyze diversity.
5. Some general statements
No one-size-fits-all recipe for diversity:
leveraging diversity is still a struggle.
Look at both individuals and their
organizations: we need to analysis and
prepare both to leverage diversity.
Diversity as a proxy for change
readiness: we believe that diverse
organization are more resilient.
6. Diversity at various levels
Diversity can be spoken about at
three different levels:
Organizational diversity
Program diversity
Individual diversity
9. 9
Resiliency – the Power to Bounce Back
• Resiliency is about flexibility and
adaptation.
• Resiliency can be an
organizational design feature.
• Resiliency is about process rather
than structure.
10. 10
Resiliency in the public sector
• Resiliency – the ability to quickly and
effectively deploy adaptive change
management strategies – can be
challenging for public organizations that
face
• Limited autonomy
• Longer change times
11. The Public Sector should provide a
professional ‘steading hand’ balancing
governments’ tendency to ‘follow the
votes.’
Resiliency vs. Inertia
11
Resiliency: adaptive
capacity that maintains
the goals of the
organization as
paramount.
Inertia: rejection of
adaptation in favor of
maintaining (mainly)
process-based
continuity.
12. Resiliency is an organizational feature in
the same way any agent-based activity is
organizational:
1. It passes through the activity of agents within the
organization;
2. It is affected and affects organizational culture;
3. Leadership is fundamental in fostering resiliency;
4. Because resiliency is about innovation it is
inherently about accepting potential mistakes.
Unpacking Resiliency
12
13. To assess risks, to anticipate their
shocks and mitigate, avoid, or prevent it
To plan and prepare for disruption, in a
fashion that protects the organisation
To adapt or respond to and manage
shocks successfully, hence stopping the
cascading effects of disruption
To recover to a new “normal” state after a
shock
The Capabilities of Resilience
13
14. Resilience is an organizational feature in
the same way any agent-based activity is
organizational:
1. It passes through the activity of agents within the
organization;
2. It is affected and affects organizational culture;
3. Leadership is critical in fostering resilience;
4. Because resilience is about innovation it is
inherently about accepting potential mistakes.
Unpacking Resilience
14
15. Resilience and Risk I
Mitigate risk by having
options Not the most varied diet
Resilience is about risk
mitigation and risk
prevention.
A resilient organization is
an organization with
options.
Environmental shocks will
trigger challenges
15
Cute, but not resilient
16. Organizations that encourage risk taking
perform well.
Members of these organization however
must holds values of service, stewardship,
results and honesty.
Resilience however needs tools for an
organization
Resilience and Risk II
16
17. Resilient organizations tend to create:
Redundancy
Reliability™
Anticipation
™Preparedness
™Adaptive capacity
™Learning capacity
Characteristics of the Resilient
Organization
17
18. Do a self assessment
How well do you practice resilience? (i.e., how well
have we bounced back, how do we anticipate,
respond, monitor and learn from challenges)
Practice the discipline of emergence
How well do we pick up on early signals of risk? Is
there a program in place for that?
Design metrics that promote resilience
Do we monitor
• Statistics
• Patterns of practice
• Stories
The Tools of Resilience
18
19. Promote situational awareness
Do we have prior-to-action and post-action review
practices? Are they applied consistently? Are the
results of the analysis shared within the organization?
Build the capacity for adaptive learning
throughout the organization
Adaptive problems must be tackled by questioning
our assumptions and change the environmental
conditions that generated them. The latter include
strategy, structure, policy process, culture and
behaviour.
The Tools of Resilience
19
