Measure Resilience
Management should set out to develop a 'Resilient Organisation' i.e. one that constantly re-invents itself in an unending dynamic process.The development of a 'Resilient Organisation' is critically dependent on operational people being empowered to adapt products and processes to meet customers' needs, and to make decisions to test ideas that will produce improvement.
This in turn depends on changing the 'hidden permissions' that operate in all organisations so that they enable operational people to fulfil their strategic role.
Data Analysis
Our system was designed to measure organisational resilience, using 15 output dimensions. It uses source data that avoids the need for judgemental inputs by respondents. Instead, using web based data collection it builds a database by asking questions about observable practices and processes and links these to diagnostic outputs through an inference engine model. The patterns displayed are derived indirectly from how people report their experiences of what it is like working in their jobs - their observed experiences, not their opinions or judgements. The 15 outputs are not just parametric descriptions of peoples' perceptions, but indexes of specific characteristics of the organisation, where there are known causal relationships with its ability to change, provide staff with satisfying jobs and generate self-motivation.There is a theoretical 100% perfectly resilient company - one that has a perfect set of '1s' in the Graphical Report for the company. It is unlikely that such a company actually exists. The 15 outputs are weighted according to the strength of their connections with the resilience of the organisation, and that produces a new set of weighted scores that are then used to calculate the index for the whole company, as a percentage of the 100% maximum score. This produces the red bar on the Resilience Chart (see below).
The structure of an organisation with its number of levels of reporting and the transfer of information through those differing levels plays an important part in the resilience of an organisation. Thus the same process as described above is used to calculate the percentage score of each level as shown in the blue bars below. There are no rights and wrongs about the indexes for the various levels. They are included so that senior management can see how far their perception of how the organisation operates differs from that of other staff.
The system also produces a frequency distribution chart based on the sets of inputs from each individual producing a calculated individual index. These indexes are then shown as a frequency distribution indicating how different people's experiences produce differing indexes. This chart is important for qualifying the validity of the overall company index, as it can show how much the overall result may be skewed by small groups of people.
A resilient company 'will be able to make sense of its environment, generate strategic options, and realign its resources faster than its rivals'1. Such a company will enjoy a decisive advantage.
1Gary Hamel and Liisa Valikangas - The Quest for Resilience - Harvard Business Review (September 2003).
