"The Quest for Resilience"

Gary Hamel and Liisa Valikangas

Harvard Business Review

September 2003, pp. 52-65

Organizational resilience is currently a hot topic, and this article is the seminal discussion of the issue.

The authors state that "Strategic resilience is not about responding to a one-time crisis. It's not about rebounding from a setback. It's about continuously anticipating and adjusting to deep, secular trends that can permanently impair the earning power of a core business. It's about having the capacity to change before the case for change becomes desperately obvious."

The approach to strategic resilience suggested in this article is to develop an aspiration of "Zero Trauma." This means that revolutionary change can happen in "lightening-quick evolutionary steps—with no surprises, no convulsive reorganizations, no colossal write-offs, and no indiscriminate, across-the-board layoffs."

There are four challenges identified to becoming resilient:

1. The Cognitive Challenge: Denial, nostalgia, and arrogance are the three elements to root out. The organization must perpetually stay aware of changes and be willing to look at how those changes will affect the organization's strategy for success;
2. The Strategic Challenge: The organization must be able to create multiple new options as alternatives to strategies which will no longer be effective;
3. The Political Challenge: The challenges of shifting resources from dying approaches to new approaches must be dealt with. This will often mean resourcing of breakout experiments with capital and with organizational talent;
4. The Ideological Challenge: Operational excellence and flawless execution will no longer be sufficient as a creed. Renewal must be continuous and opportunity-driven, rather than episodic and crisis-driven.

Back to top of page