Why this is interesting: As we move from pandemic to financial downturn to extinction event, organisations will increasingly call on individuals to be more “resilient”. Beware.
I’ve just finished the incredible EPIC 2022 conference here in Amsterdam.
Top of mind as I sit in the Autumn sun, enjoying a beer, is how resilience, the theme of the conference, has been co-opted by organisations and their leaders as they seek to shift responsibility for their structural and cultural deficiencies from themselves to their employees.
“It’s not us” their actions, words, and remedial programs suggest, “it’s you. And here’s a free sub to a mindfulness app to sort you out.”
But as friend and former colleague Ben Rubin suggests, one of the core components of the successful organisation of the future is its soul.
It’s not a new idea: before the enlightenment and the likes of Descartes, who saw humans as mechanistic beings that operated within mechanistic systems, beings that could be decomposed, disembodied (and discarded), the ancient Greeks saw humans, our cultures, and the environments and ecosystems of which we are a part as inextricably linked. Action (or inaction) in one realm ripples out through our universal connective tissue.
So to tell the individual to be more “resilient” is to place the burden of healing (or creating) the soul of the organisation on the people who - in moments of burnout or crisis - can least bear the strain.
Hot tip: there’s going to be a hell of a lot more folk in moments of burnout or crisis in the coming years…
I’ve left EPIC more convinced than ever that sensing and sensitive organisations will be the ones best placed to face the extinction event of which we are all a part.
Organisations with soul, and connected to the soul, will determine the most humane path forward. But their capacity to do so will be dependent on their ability to support and care for their most valuable sensors: the humans that contribute to them.
So don’t place the responsibility for the resilience of your business on the individual after you’ve already used them up. Instead, be accountable for fostering social resilience at the organisational level. Do the work of nurturing humane organisations that create the conditions for resilience to emerge and, crucially, regenerate.
*Here’s the “So what?” bit*
So, if you’re the leader that’s interested in creating an organisation that’s socially resilient, what can you do?
First of all, listen to the people within your organisation: do you do “resilience” to them, or is the organisation to a greater or lesser extent already socially resilient? Get curious about your own behaviour, and the incentives that drive it. Are you rewarded for behaving in a way that recognises the systemic role that your organisation plays both beyond its borders, and within the lives of your employees? To whom are you beholden, what do they want from you, and how do they pay you for that?
Because that kind of self-reflection can be difficult when you’re embedded in the system you seek to understand, you might want to hire someone to help you hold up a mirror. But what you learn will also show you what changes might next need to be made.
The first change might be at the level of the purpose and, as a consequence, the structure, market orientation, and incentivisation of the organisation. If the purpose of the organisation is not systemically-informed and oriented towards resilience, then it’s going to be very hard to make any further changes. After all, extractive businesses gonna extract. From everyone.
The second change might be at the level of the behaviour of you and your fellow leaders. You are, after all, the folk that set the example for the rest of the business. If your purpose is to be a resilient business, but you continue to behave in an extractive way and are rewarded for it, then how do you imagine others will behave? Shit, as they say, flows down hill. Or rainbows. Rainbows can, too. But as a leader, you get to decide, and then act accordingly.
The third change might then be at the level of your middle management, their teams, and the individuals within them. Your purpose and market orientation has resilience at its core, you’re behaving and are rewarded for creating the conditions for resilience to emerge. Only now can you expect people to enact resilience in a way that is meaningful to them.
The people within your organisation are a resourceful bunch. Give them the tools to think intentionally about what the business needs to foster resilience, and there’ll be ideas popping up everywhere. You then need to give them the permission, the space, the tools, and the incentivisation to embody those ideas in their day-to-day. Before long, you’ll have a cultural movement, driven by new behaviours, traversing and scaling the organisation. The organisation will be building social resilience, and not leaving the burden on individuals.
While this might sound easy, breezy, light’n easy, it’s not. It’s doable. But it’s also really fucking hard. Especially the incentives bit. But the destruction of your organisation because it continues to extract, rather than regenerate, will be way, way harder.