Organizational resilience

An authentic future vision strengthens organizational resilience. Focusing on a desirable future vision that takes the emotions in the company seriously unfolds an action-guiding orientation for collaborative processes and is thus a driver for innovative organizations.

A well-communicated and operationalized future vision clarifies the contribution of individual organizational units and employees to the achievement of strategic goals and, therefore, unleashes tangible performance incentives.

Organizational resilience requires, in addition to meaningful leadership, the establishment of suitable structures and routines for foresighted self-renewal, which strengthen resilience and adaptation with regard to external and unexpected influences.

Leaders will increasingly need to keep an eye on changes in the organization’s environment and align them with structures and routines within the organization. In the future, the primary task of leadership will no longer be to maintain regular operations, but rather to ensure irritation, deviations, and constant questioning of the path taken.

Resilient organizations depend on employees who are able to classify and question the meaning of their activities within the framework of the organizational value chain. Accordingly, meaningful leadership – in line with the requirement for New Work – also becomes central to the resilience of organizations.

Employees today need and want to understand why they are doing a particular job. In this context, it is not enough to explain a work order and its meaning well. Ideally, the goals of an organizational area are developed together with the team and its contribution to value creation is defined collaboratively.

In resilient organizations, control and steering are replaced by agility and flexibility, which enable organizations to deal proactively, permanently, and appropriately with constantly changing requirements. Organizational agility does not unfold solely through the establishment of modern and agile methods:

An organization is agile and capable of innovation if it has the organizational competence to recognize uncertainty with regard to a required solution as well as a corresponding solution path and to use agile working methods for these challenges in a targeted and skillful manner.

This also includes being able, depending on the situation, to set up or dismantle structures that allow and support agile ways of working.

In resilient organizations, it is essential to establish structures for continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of resilience factors. On the one hand, this involves establishing observation criteria and patterns that make it possible to monitor not only the implementation of measures but also their effectiveness.

In addition, it is important to establish routines that go beyond the specific need for development and the reason for the change to show how the organization has dealt with change in the past and whether these established patterns themselves need to be changed.

In this sense, the organization uses occasions for change to critically reflect on previous solution patterns from a meta-position and, if necessary, to find and establish new change patterns.