In a recent essay on future warfare in Foreign Affairs, the former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, together with the former CEO and Chair of Google, wrote: ‘To adapt for the future, … the United States will need to do more than simply reform the way it purchases weapons. It must also change the military’s organizational structures and training systems. It should make its complex, hierarchical, chain of command more flexible and give greater autonomy to small, highly mobile units. These units should have leaders trained and empowered to make crucial combat decisions (1). For two proponents of technology, this is a strong endorsement.
If the military needs to review its organizational structure to cope with future trends, civilian entities should consider doing the same. Perhaps one of the best examples of major organizational change across both the private and public sectors has been because of Covid-19. The pandemic required organizations to change their working patterns immediately because of employee illness and public lockdowns and there is a lingering aftermath caused by new working-from-home / hybrid routines for part of the working week. Organizations have recast their training, routines, accommodation, security protocols, management accountability, and sometimes cultural attributes such as leadership style. Some have accepted this change more easily than others. One former senior official believed that an organization’s past readiness to adapt would indicate whether it would change fast enough in the future or not (2).
There is a clear need to focus on the way we (re)construct and adapt our organizations to cope with an increasingly dynamic and uncertain world. Organizational resilience is a natural response to change. The more significant the change, the more radical or transformative the reorganization often needs to be while retaining the essential purpose of the organization.
According to the new UK Resilience Academy, ‘The resilience of an organisation is the ability to achieve intended outcomes through uncertainty, disruption and change,’ (3). It goes on to say that ‘Highly resilient organisations emphasise foresight, preparation and planning for adversity, can manage through disruption with minimised service impacts and expedited recovery, learn effectively from their own and others’ experience, and can more smoothly adapt to challenges and change in the longer term.’ The readiness to absorb change and adapt is a measure of an organization’s agility.
Agility
Agility marks out an organization from its colleagues and competitors by virtue of its success and survivability, no matter if that is on the battlefield or in the boardroom. One part of the mix is to have structures that enable rapid decision-making, including the swift reallocation of resources against recast priorities. These choices will determine who wins in the selected battle or market space.
Milley and Schmidt believe that agility in the US military will come from less complex and fewer hierarchical organizations and with smaller units. These more dynamic, less rigid structures can be expected to confer a flexibility in operations that will get ahead in the decision-making cycle, the so-called OODA loop (i.e. observe, orient, decide, act), to deliver early results and bounce forward. That shift to greater decentralization holds equally true for business.
Yet, whether in uniform or not, agility requires good leadership that is clear on its mission and goals in the face of rapidly changing circumstances. That leadership should be less concerned about the detailed method and mode of delivery, which should always remain fluid and innovative. The shift can be seen in post-pandemic businesses that have remained focused on employees delivering outcomes over the precise location and duration of their work: in the majority of cases – and accepting there are some downsides – employees appear more content and motivated with such hybrid working.
Top down, bottom up
Organizational resilience requires both top-down and bottom-up engagements. At the top level, senior departments or c-suites must supply plans and policies to provide the broad direction of travel and intended outcomes. But at the lower levels, teams, shop-floor managers, and local communities must exert their influence, as it is they who actually deliver resilience on the ground: no plan will be resilient without the people to implement it. Frequently, local parties kick off any response, well before higher echelons can exert their influence. Hopefully, the two levels will meet sooner rather than later and synergistically deliver for the greater good.
Two academics have discovered that the most effective leaders were those who had ‘the uncanny ability to knit together different constituencies and institutions, brokering relationships and transactions across different levels of the political, economic and social organization (4)’. Such leaders were directing from neither the top nor the shop floor. Instead, they represented ‘a third form of “middle-out” leadership’, seamlessly working up and down and across organizational hierarchies, connecting with groups who might otherwise be excluded, and translating between constituencies. The academics called these ‘translational leaders’. They discovered that when disruption strikes, the presence or absence of such a leader can have a profound impact on the outcome.
Networking can facilitate the transfer of ideas and actions between top and bottom and avoid an overly rigid vertical hierarchy. A flexible, scalable, network of local teams, with clear accountability for where responsibility lies and with good communicative skills, can allow swift responses to translate up and down the chain without waiting for central direction. This confers organizational resilience in the face of a wide range of disruptions. Regrettably, terrorist groups also operate in networks against a larger opponent, which allows them to persist in spite of operational failures and captures.
Empowerment is at the heart of the ability to adapt
For agility and adaptation to take hold and provide that all-important resilience, it is necessary to enact a high degree of empowerment. By giving people the latitude to interpret the mission of the organization in changing circumstances or crisis and granting them beforehand the responsibility to act on their own experience and use their own judgement, then not only are respective skill sets maximised but also the mission is likely be achieved without further deliberation and delay. This is again a form of decentralization but it is one that requires a high degree of trust to exist between all involved.
The benefits of empowerment can also apply to non-critical situations. The upsides have been revealed in the book Humanocracy (5). The authors believe that routine, often low-skilled, jobs can be improved when employees in those jobs are given the opportunity to use their initiative and change the way they work. Of eight leadership behaviours documented, empowerment was the most highly correlated with employee engagement, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment.
The authors report that: ‘What makes a job low skilled is not the nature of the work it entails, or the credentials required, but whether or not the people performing the task have the opportunity to grow their capabilities and tackle novel problems.’ This is possible if managers are willing to relax their bureaucracy, devolve power to lower levels, and treat people as more than a human resource.
Fit for the future
These comments apply equally well to civilian and military organizations. Clearly, the two have very different missions and cultures but as the opening description reveals there is an appetite for change to make organizations resilient and fit for the future. What is common to all organizations is the need for a high degree of trust to make teams at all levels work together to achieve a collective goal. Decentralization, agility, and empowerment are also common requirements for organizational resilience.
The authors of Humanocracy believe that if there were to be a shift away from over-centralization and adherence to bureaucratic rules towards providing teams with their own accountability and responsibilities – in effect, generating a ‘hyper-powered workforce’ – businesses can become more resilient, creative, and productive. That must be a worthwhile objective for organizational resilience. It is also a message that Milley and Schmidt would probably endorse.
The author
Robert Hall is cofounder and former Executive Director of Resilience First. He is now an independent consultant, writer and speaker.
This article is based on a chapter titled ‘Organisational Resilience: How do we organise for change?’ in Robert’s book Building Resilient Futures, (ISBN: 9781035812622, Austin Macauley Publishers).
References
(1) Milley, M. A., Schmidt, E. America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future, And They’re Already Here, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2024. Published on 5 August 2024.
(2) Danzig, R (former US Secretary to the Navy). Civilisation, February/March 2000.
(3) Organizational Resilience Guidance for UK Government Departments, Agencies and Arm’s Length Bodies (ALBs), Version 1, UK Resilience Academy, August 2024. According to this guidance, the indicators of a strong culture of resilience within an organization are listed as: leadership, common purpose, communication, systems mindset, engaging with failure, psychological safety, diversity, empowerment, adaptability, and welfare.
(4) Zolli, A., Healy, A. M. (2012) Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, Headline Publishing. ISBN: 9780755360352.
(5) Hamel, G., Zanini, M. (2020) Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People. ISBN: 9781633696020.
