![DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-2
Chapter 1
An Introduction to Crews
12,165 online courses
“Don’t go, Mommy, don’t go!”
It is March 1, 2020, and Liv Gjestvang, Associate Vice President for
Learning Technology at The Ohio State University, is about to get on a
bus to leave for a conference. She will be gone for a few days, and her
young daughter is tugging at her sleeve, pleading with her not to leave.
Just at that moment, Gjestvang receives a text from her colleague. “Do
not get on bus. Conference cancelled due to COVID.”
Gjestvang’s brain now spins, wrestling with two big problems at once.
What does a COVID virus mean for the tens of thousands of students
at the university? And, more immediately, how in the world do I head
back home with my daughter without her thinking I’ve just given in to
her demands?
One thing became very clear very fast: The university was going to
have to terminate in-
person classes, at least for the foreseeable future.
Fully online classrooms were becoming both pedagogically better
and more available, thanks to new technologies, but there was a long
way to go. Timothy Lombardo, EdD, was an instructional designer
at The Ohio State University for six years leading up to the start of
the COVID outbreak. He saw a big advance in remote learning in the
mid-
2010s due to the proliferation of cameras and microphones in
every laptop and cell phone. The technological tipping point was the
combination of
having a stable system at home with cameras, microphones, and
internet, having software like Skype and Zoom available for mass
gatherings, and platforms for asynchronous pulls like Slack, Teams,
or an LMS [learning management system] where you can keep in
contact with your instructors and your colleagues so you can still
have that social interaction.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-19-320.jpg)
![An Introduction to Crews 9
focused on simple instructions for an achievable outcome. This out-
come was also easily measurable. Either instructors had enabled the
three most critical materials in Carmen, or they had not. And either they
had launched Zoom for instruction, or they had not. Gjestvang’s team
provided regular, daily reports to deans and chairs, showing them exactly
which courses had complied with the Carmen Key 3 +Zoom strategy and
which were in need of additional support. There was not time to make
these reports look pretty; they were simple Excel spreadsheets, and they
got the job done.
In order to support employees during this strange and challenging time,
leaders loosened expectations around performance management goals.
“That actually did create this kind of invigorating space,” Gjestvang
reported, “like we’re diving into solve this [specific] set of problems, and
it was really focused.” And if all this wasn’t hard enough, instances of
“Zoom-
bombing” soon cropped up, so a new crew had to come together
with compliance, legal, security, technical, and other representatives.
Day by day and, eventually, week by week, various crews worked to
manage different sets of problems, trying different approaches, learning
from the results, combining and recombining with unique sets of individ-
uals, and sharing information within their many interconnected lines of
communication.
Naturally, culture played a big role in working together to solve
problems. Educational institutions have a significant advantage in this
area: They are used to collaboration inside and outside of the organ-
ization. Higher education entities are quite comfortable in identifying,
creating, and sharing knowledge and best practices with colleagues,
businesses, and the public. This was particularly helpful when spinning
up the Keep Teaching and Keep Learning websites. These websites proved
essential in guiding faculty and students as they adapted to the pandemic.
The frame and functionality for these websites was repurposed from an
existing business continuity and emergency preparedness site at Indiana
University. Indiana University shared content with Ohio State, and
Ohio State expanded the content to address the challenges of teaching,
learning, and working online. Ohio State then shared their developments
with other universities, including back to Indiana University. Examples
such as this one demonstrate the utility of a culture that allows people to
collect and share information with each other across formal and informal
networks.
Culture is crucial. Gjestvang leveraged and adapted Ohio State’s
culture to help create a psychological space for care and experimenta-
tion. During times of great uncertainty, it is important for people to be
able to admit when they do not know something, ask for help, care for
colleagues, have frank discussions and disagreements, fail, and be vulner-
able. Gjestvang pointed out that, “these are the kinds of words that you](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-22-320.jpg)
![14 The Nature of Crews
organization cannot rely on preexisting teams and everyday processes.
Resilience will require crews.
Innovation and resistance
If the typical behaviors, objectives, processes, responses, and thinking were
enough to solve the problems brought to bear by significant disruptions,
organizational resilience would not be needed in the first place. Dramatic
change in the environment requires change in the organization’s
operations. As J. Peter Scoblic argues in his article, “Learning from the
Future,” “in order to survive and thrive over time, organizations need to
both exploit existing competencies and explore new ones... The problem
is that those two imperatives compete for resources, demand distinct
ways of thinking, and require different organizational structures.”2
The
formation and mobilization of effective crews does not just happen, and
it does not often happen easily. Changing to meet the unknown requires
the willingness to embrace the likelihood of loss.
Most people like the future to be predictable. They like to work today
in mostly the same ways that they worked yesterday. They prefer existing
processes that provide established products and services to familiar
customers. As Bower and Christensen assert,
because managers are evaluated on their ability to place the right
bets, it is not surprising that in well-
managed companies… managers
back projects in which the market seems assured. Risk is reduced—
and careers are safeguarded—
by giving known customers what
they want.3
In particular, human beings are hardwired to avoid loss whenever pos-
sible. But response to dramatic change will often require loss. Few eco-
nomically rational actors will make decisions that are likely to prove
detrimental to themselves and their departments, even if only in the short
term, and even if it will benefit the organization as a whole. As experts
Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas summarize simply: “[C]
onformance
severely hinders the quest for resilience.”4
For these reasons and more,
crews are needed to drive change, and they need to operate outside of
normal silos and reporting lines.
While there were many truly brutal and horrific stories from the events
of Hurricane Katrina, there were also stories of creativity, heroism,
humanity, and kindness. One of those stories is of that of Hancock Bank
in Gulfport, Mississippi, whose employees
stood in front of forty of the branches knocked offline, operating
from card tables, under tarps, and out of mobile homes, and offered](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-27-320.jpg)
![16 The Nature of Crews
Think of it this way: Crews may be the very last entity standing between
the organization and obsolescence. In deeply challenging situations, it
is likely that one or more crews will be responsible for the decisions
and actions that might allow the organization to pivot and evolve. The
crew will be best served if at least one member has a natural proclivity
for independent thinking and the courage to speak up.11
In her book,
Intrapreneur: How Leaders Ignite Innovation, Break Bureaucracy
and Catalyse Change, Irena Yashin-
Shaw lists the following qualities
of intrapreneurs (a specific kind of crew we will discuss in detail in
Chapter 3):
• Action takers
• Change agile
• Collaborators
• Creative
• Determined
• Growth oriented
• Iconoclasts
• Influential
• Opportunity finders
• Resourceful problem solvers
• Risk takers
• Trend spotters12
Such a list is not to suggest a complete catalog of necessary traits; it is
offered here both as a way to begin thinking about the kinds of people
who might be a good fit for crews and as further examples of the noncon-
formist nature of crews.
Other thought leaders highlight similar qualities and skill sets. One
collection of researchers at a European Union Joint Research Center
recommends looking for
strategic designers, user experience designers, service designers,
artists, business correspondants (sic.), software engineers, the
organization’s most creative old foxes… mavericks, trouble makers…
a mixture of bright young people as well as some experienced people,
some academics and some strategic designers… [and] ones who care
enough to speak truth unto power.13
We get comparable suggestions from Bryce G. Hoffman in his book, Red
Teaming:
[I]
t is essential to include men and women with good analytical and
critical thinking skills, close attention to detail, and the ability to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-29-320.jpg)
![18 The Nature of Crews
practices’ that might not be best for the context.”18
This is the way the
most successful airline, military, and sports teams operate, namely, with
a small number of specific objectives, an outline of the rules of engage-
ment, and the authority to make decisions and act in the field as best they
see fit. As Denyer summarizes:
In an increasingly complex and dynamic world, Organizational
Resilience calls for leaders to be able to direct and coordinate change,
but to do so without specifying solutions, or creating “top down”
visions and targets that might alienate the very people who can
develop solutions to emerging challenges.19
Individuals who must work together to solve problems in adverse and
complex situations need guiding principles that inform them in general
terms what they can do, what they cannot do, and what their overall
objectives are. They do not, and cannot, be burdened with a detailed list
of instructions on how to act. They must be allowed to self-
organize, self-
direct, and go where the problem leads them.
Teams or crews?
The research is inconsistent as to whether some crews should be
established as permanent teams within the organization, or whether
they should disband after achieving their goals. The Ohio State narrative
offered an example of a crew that could conceivably be either temporary
or permanent, namely a group tasked to think through “what if?”
scenarios. This group might exist as a team that regularly scans the envir-
onment looking for signals of significant change among the noise, pro-
viding “what if?” scenarios to leadership. “Most likely, there are people
in your organization who are plugged tightly into the future and under-
stand well the not-
so-
sanguine implications for your company’s business
model,” write Hamel and Välikangas. “You have to find these people.
You have to make sure their views are not censored by the custodians of
convention and their access is not blocked...”20
Establishing an official
“what if?” team might provide a steady stream of information, better
weak-
tie networks, divergent thinking, and a set group of individuals
who could be mobilized for rapid analysis. As Bello et al. maintain,
“many of the world’s most successful companies... [a]
re able to repli-
cate the success by building dedicated teams that can evaluate ideas,
identify leaders, provide specialist expertise, and otherwise support new
initiatives.”21
Perhaps organizations should therefore consider establishing several
typesofpermanentcrews.TheCynefinpublication,ManagingComplexity
(and Chaos) in Times of Crisis, recommends that organizations establish](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-31-320.jpg)
![The Nature of Crews 19
six different “permanent and focused crews.”22
The six suggested crews
are as follows and are included here less as a recommendation and more
as items for example and consideration:
• The probing crew: This crew has a special talent in creating people-
centered scenarios to explore novel concepts with the intention of
transforming them into usable, tangible proposals and prototypes.
• The wrecking crew: [This crew] is there to war game decisions
looking for possible unintended consequences, and then monitor for
both the expected and unexpected occurrences. They then create
recommendations to mitigate any negative effects, but also to rap-
idly amplify unexpected positive results that might otherwise be
missed.
• The journaling crew: [This crew is] in place for real-
time capture
of lessons as they are learned, together with ideas for innovation…
Making this data available for peer-
to-
peer information flows during
the crisis is also critical. It is a part of distributed decision-
making to
create such flows.
• The continuity crew: While the crisis is consuming the attention of
our key decision-
makers, this is the time for their deputies or for the
more experienced members of the crew to take over the day-
to-
day
business of the organization insofar as it continues.
• The data analytics crew: Data informed decisions are key in a crisis
but conventional departments need to keep day-
to-
day operations
running… [This crew] can also activate and synthesize weak signal
detection using human sensor networks.
• The healing crew: [This is] …a crew with organizational develop-
ment and personal health specialists that include some of the cynics
from the organization to help… [T]
his crew will allow us to create a
powerful decision support capability but will also allow us to carry
our employees with us on what will be a difficult journey.
And yet, the danger in establishing any crew as a permanent team is that
they could become part of the status quo, eventually unable to produce
the alternate thinking necessary for resilient adaptation. A team can
easily calcify and become stale over time. Crews are likely to become
part of the status quo at some point, thus removing their special abil-
ities as dissenters, iconoclasts, and pivoters. Bryce G. Hoffman in Red
Teaming is insistent that red teams (crews) should never be made a per-
manent fixture of an organization and should always disband after they
have achieved their objectives.23
One critical reason Hoffman offers for
disbanding crews is the tension and strain that mounts as they continue
to operate against the establishment. Crews make employees and leaders
of an organization better](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-32-320.jpg)
![DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-4
Chapter 3
Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs
Prayer for the dead
In the movie Other People’s Money, Danny Devito plays Lawrence
Garfield, a corporate raider who buys out failing businesses then strips
out and sells off their assets until they are fully dissolved. The leaders
of one of the companies that Garfield has targeted for liquidation try to
stop him, arguing that they have hard working employees with a long,
albeit declining, history of success. During a speech at the shareholder
meeting to vote on the acquisition, Garfield neatly discloses the inevitable
outcome:
You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies
making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the
one that made the best [expletive] buggy whip you ever saw. Now
how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that com-
pany? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let’s have
the intelligence, let’s have the decency to sign the death certificate,
collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.1
Past success is no guarantee of future results.
Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs
This chapter explores two distinct crews that have a predefined pur-
pose: Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Entrepreneurs are concerned with
finding and establishing new business (broadly defined) outside of the
organization. Intrapreneurs are concerned with finding and establishing
new ways of conducting business inside of the organization. Both are
important in building resilient organizations. Leadership should consider
establishing these crews as permanent or semipermanent teams, while
keeping in mind the caveats and warnings from the previous chapter, or](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-37-320.jpg)
![30 Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs
But, in a familiar refrain, we must note that changes, even beneficial
ones, almost inevitably challenge established ways of working. We know
from our previous discussions that most human beings do not like change,
especially if it entails long-or short-
term losses. This makes the work of
intrapreneurs very challenging. Bryce G. Hoffman reminds us that “most
organizations... are hierarchical, and hierarchies have a hard time taking
a critical look at their own strategies and plans. Hierarchies tend to
encourage compliance and reward conformity, rather than encouraging
questions and rewarding innovation.”26
If you have read Drive by Daniel
Pink, you know that traditional businesses have historically motivated
their employees with simple rewards and punishments; conformity and
efficiencies were rewarded, while deviation and variation were punished.
As Eggers and Barlow summarize somewhat ominously:
When facing an adaptive challenge, an organization that is not
aligned, or has not built resilience, will do anything it can to main-
tain the status quo. Group-
think is powerful and the magnetic forces
pulling towards the status quo can defy logic and reason in the quest
to avoid the work required to create real change.27
Intrapreneurial crews are needed because change is hard. If the improve-
ment of individuals, units, and organizations were not so challenging and
problematic, it would happen naturally. Organizations should establish
intrapreneurial crews, empower them to do their work, and provide them
with senior leadership support. A single person working independency
will more than likely face serious antagonism, opposition, and even out-
right hostility. Even if the change will directly benefit a department, resist-
ance is the probable response. This is true even for the most successful
units in an organization. As Hoffman notes, “successful units also tend
to resist red teaming [intrapreneurs]. They think that because they have
been successful in the past, they know what it takes to be successful in
the future.”28
Crews are often composed of disruptors and iconoclasts.
Intrapreneurial crews are no exception. Their work is naturally in oppos-
ition to the established practices of the organization. But their work is
essential for change, reinvention, and evolution.
The cost of intrapreneurial crews
Resilient organizations invest in the work of intrapreneurial crews. As with
everything else in building resilient organizations, this investment does
not come cheap, and for many of the same reasons that entrepreneurial
crews do not come cheap. In some ways, we can see intrapreneurial crews
as the upstream feeders and potential partners for entrepreneurial teams.
Internal innovations are a key source of new inventions, products, and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-43-320.jpg)
![Contrarians and Red Teams 37
Efficiency and the fragility it engenders remain at odds with contrarian
crews and the potential for resilience they create. According to some
analysts, cognitive biases, groupthink, and habits that reinforce the estab-
lishment contribute to the failure of an estimated 70% of all organiza-
tional change initiatives.7
Organizations should mobilize an assortment of
“what if?” crews on a regular basis, asking questions and running scenarios
designed to think more constructively about unlikely yet impactful
scenarios. Someone should actively challenge established assumptions and
wonder what would happen if the organization is wrong in its outlook
and assumptions. Authors Zolli and Healy suggest that “what’s needed is
an inclusive way of thinking about various possible, probable, and prefer-
able futures and their implications.”8
Eggars and Barlow remind us that,
“the types of challenges people face in today’s world... Require solutions
that involve thinking differently—
radically differently—
than we have ever
before.”9
Organizations need to collect and analyze data, information,
and narratives from a number of divergent sources in an effort to confront
biases, groupthink, habits, and the status quo. Complex situations call for
small, parallel experiments designed to probe the environment and make
sense of the outcomes. If resilience is required, then so too will contrarian
crews. Hans Rosling sums it up this way in this passage from Factfulness:
[C]
onstantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble
about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new informa-
tion that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. And rather
than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting
examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, dis-
agree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource
for understanding the world. I have been wrong about the world so
many times. Sometimes, coming up against reality is what helps me
see my mistakes, but often it is talking to, and trying to understand,
someone with different ideas.10
Transition
Every crew is, by nature and to some degree, a contrarian crew, and at
least some of their members must embody contrarian tendencies. Cynics,
dissidents, iconoclasts, and mavericks are all welcome—
as long as they
understand the proper bounds of their role in relation to the support
of the organization. Contrarian crews themselves must also properly
balance the tension between innovation and status quo. All this is cru-
cially important because, as Shane Snow argues in his book Dream Teams:
Groups that have a lot of cultural similarity stop searching for better
solutions once they have solutions that work… Seven out of ten](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/23086309-250510085640-b6f3134a/85/Building-Resilient-Organizations-Through-Change-Chance-And-Complexity-David-Lindstedt-50-320.jpg)
Building Resilient Organizations Through Change Chance And Complexity David Lindstedt
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- 6. Building Resilient Organizations through Change, Chance, and Complexity A must- read in the wake of COVID- 19, this book unpacks the nature of resilient organizations and how they prepare for unpredictable, complex, and profound change. Organizations that do not adapt and evolve die. To date, however, it has not been at all clear how to build a resilient organization. That puts us all in the unenviable position of trying to ready our organizations for an increasingly uncertain future without the proper guidance to do it. This book introduces 14 elements of resilience that consistently emerge in organizations that have thrived amid adversity and volatility. Resilience is not about determination, grit, cybersecurity, or teams of resilient indi- viduals; resilience, it turns out, is often confused with robustness. Readers will discover how resilient organizations build and employ a distinctive combination of crews, capital, culture, and leadership— and, crucially— how to adapt these combinations for their own organization. Senior business leaders, consultants, entrepreneurs, students, and professionals will appreciate this book’s practical, approachable, and engaging guidance, including insights by leaders from Health Care for the Homeless, The Ohio State University, NBCUniversal, retail stores, and more. David Lindstedt splits his time between business continuity and resilience consulting, project portfolio management, and research. He founded his own company, established an industry standard, leads an international think tank, and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Business Continuity and Emergency Planning. He consults with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations. He has published dozens of articles, both general and scholarly. He regularly presents at continuity and risk management conferences, is a frequent guest on podcasts, and occasionally lectures in university courses on preparedness and project management.
- 8. Building Resilient Organizations through Change, Chance, and Complexity David Lindstedt
- 9. Cover image: © Getty Images/ Cappan First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, NewYork, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of theTaylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 David Lindstedt The right of David Lindstedt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Lindstedt, David, author. Title: Building resilient organizations through change, chance, and complexity /David Lindstedt. Description: NewYork, NY: Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022002827 | ISBN 9781032280813 (paperback) | ISBN 9781032280820 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003295242 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Organizational change. | Business planning. | Diversity in the workplace– Management. | Leadership. Classification: LCC HD58.8 .L556 2022 | DDC 658.4/063–dc23/eng/20220310 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002827 ISBN: 978-1-032-28082-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-28081-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29524-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK
- 10. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Fumbling for Resilience 1 1 An Introduction to Crews 6 2 The Nature of Crews 13 3 Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs 24 4 Contrarians and Red Teams 34 5 The Recurrence of Crews 39 6 An Introduction to Capital 44 7 Resource Capital 48 8 Relationship Capital 59 9 Information Capital 68 10 Capital Combined 82 11 Transition to an Interlude 86 12 The Cynefin® Sense- Making Framework 88 13 Antifragile 97
- 11. vi Contents 14 An Introduction to a Culture of Experimentation 105 15 A Reality- Seeking Culture 110 16 A Safe- to- Fail Culture of Experimentation 119 17 A Culture of Dissimilar Individuals 129 18 An Introduction to Exponential Leadership 137 19 Situational Leaders 146 20 Purposeful Leaders 153 21 Loss-Aware Leaders 161 22 Empowering Leaders 164 23 Caring Leaders 171 24 Conclusion: The Resilient Organization and the Chief Resilience Officer 182 25 Epilogue: What Is Organizational Resilience? 195 Index 200
- 12. Acknowledgments I would like to express my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to everyone who lent their time and expertise to the interview process for this book: Liv Gjestvang, Steve Gutkin, Kevin Lindamood, and Dr. Timothe Lombardo. My additional and earnest thanks to NBCUniversal for all their cooperation and help. Thanks also to Judge Barry Bowline and Richard Warne for sharing their experiences and thoughts on the impacts of COVID. Thanks to Marcus Dimbleby for reaching out and advising me on Red Teams. Thanks to Dr. Todd Gibbs for our early conversations on the psych- ology of personal resilience. Special thanks to Fen Lindstedt who helped with data entry during the research phase of the book. Thanks to Stephanie Orr who provided data on physical classroom management during COVID. And my best wishes and good luck to “Sidar Kroft” who is indeed very SMRT. newgenprepdf
- 14. DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-1 Introduction Fumbling for Resilience Eating mysterious vegetables Organizations that do not adapt and evolve, die. To date, however, it has not been at all clear how to build a resilient organization. Worse than that: It has not been at all clear what constitutes organizational resilience in the first place. That puts us all in the unenvi- able position of trying to ready our organizations for an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world without the proper guidance to do it. Building a resilient organization requires a size- able investment of effort, money, and time. If we do not know what resilience is, organizations will naturally squander resources as they chase after it. It is very easy to waste finite resources by making investments that “feel” like the right ones but are not. We know we must “eat our vegetables” to grow stronger but have no idea which vegetables are the right ones to eat. I’ll know it when I see it Inspiring stories of resilience do not sound like this: “There was a signifi- cant event, everyone behaved as they normally do, and everything went back to just the way it was.” Pause for a moment to think of an anecdote, case study, or example of a resilient organization. How does the story go? What is the key element of the story that makes the organization precisely resilient, and not, for example, “efficient,” “forthright,” “pro- ductive,” or any one of several other descriptors? What is the narrative of a resilient organization? This is an extremely important question. In order to understand which elements help an organization to be resilient, we must have a clear con- ception of what we are aiming after in the first place. Actual stories of resilience that serve as examples for emulation go more like this: “There was a significant event, the organization enacted major changes, and the transformed organization thrived.” More specifically,
- 15. 2 Introduction: Fumbling for Resilience the narrative sounds like this: “The organization encountered a sig- nificant disruption, confronted it creatively, quickly, and seriously to adapt and evolve in line with the unfolding situation, and ultimately flourished.” We see from anecdotes, case studies, examples, research, stories, and our own experiences that resilience deals with change, loss, and adaptation. And the greatest stories of resilience involve not merely coping with the change but embracing profound change. These are organizations that somehow seek out, welcome, and manage losses as an opportunity to evolve for the better. They adapt, change, evolve, and flourish. Organizational resilience is not a simple enduring. Neither is it mere survival. Resilience is not about “bouncing- back,” nor is it really about “bouncing- forward.” It is about the full willingness to continually adapt in response to, or anticipation of, continuous change in the world. At the end of each story of resilience, the organization is never the same. It does different things in different ways with different people. It may now be half or twice the size it was before. It may have abandoned its original business model and operate in a new market entirely. While its general offerings may, or may not, remain the same, some portion of its people, priorities, problems, and processes have changed. The most resilient organizations adapt, transform, and evolve in order to take advantage of significant changes in their environment. But here is the catch: Truly resilient organizations must do this again, and again, and again. There is no stopping. The organization that ceases to adapt to change will become fragile and, eventually, cease to exist altogether. The environment is always changing, most often in little and predictable ways, but sometimes in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Organizations must monitor for dramatic changes in a VUCA world, and, moreover, be eager to take full advantage of them. Resilient organizations adapt time and time again in a never- ending cycle of evo- lution and survival. No, it’s not “grit” As we are awash in self- help books that deal with personal improvement, we may understandably make the mistake of applying ideas of resilient individuals to our thoughts about resilient organizations. But this would indeed be a mistake. Resilient organizations do not require collections of determined indi- viduals who overcome dramatic change through grit, perseverance, and sheer willpower. In fact, it is frequently just such groups of people that get organizations into trouble in the first place, and then make the situation much worse, sometimes to the point of insolvency. Innovative adapt- ability, not blind determination, is almost always what is required to face
- 16. Introduction: Fumbling for Resilience 3 the unknown and unpredictable. We will see and discuss many examples of this point throughout the book. Interestingly, it also turns out that resilient organizations do not require collections of resilient individuals. Creative, dissimilar, empowering, experimenting, and flexible individuals are vital; personally resilient individuals are not. Many effective teams that have successfully guided organizations through times of dramatic change under adverse circumstances were made up of regular people with regular problems, no more or less personally resilient than anyone else. In fact, in all the interviews, reading, and research for this book, I did not discover a single story of organizational resilience where success hinged on resilient indi- viduals. This is very good news. It means that organizations do not have to spend scarce resources on the difficult task of hiring or shaping indi- vidually resilient people. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, being resilient is not the same as being robust. As we will see in detail throughout the book, robust organizations are those that can absorb shock and return to status quo, while resilient organizations are those that can evolve into something new, especially after dramatic change outstrips their ability to bounce back. When faced with complex, significant, and deeply uncertain situ- ations, robust entities work to keep things the way they are; resilient entities take advantage of the situation to experiment and evolve. This last point may be particularly bad news for many organizations. To date, there has been little differentiation between investing for robust- ness and investing for resilience. There are many functions that likely contribute to robustness, such as, but not limited to: business continuity, cyber security, emergency management, insurance, IT disaster recovery, physical security, and much of risk management. The goal of these robust functions is to absorb shock and return the organization to normal, that is, the status quo. Organizations spend large amounts of effort, money, and time to set up and maintain such functions. But if these functions do not directly contribute to resilience, that means more effort, money, and time must be spent on resilience. We would therefore benefit from a better grasp of the difference between robustness and resilience, as well as a better understanding of the aspects of resilient organizations. Aspects of resilience There are 14 aspects that recur time and time again in anecdotes, case studies, interviews, narratives, research, and stories of resilient organizations. These 14 aspects of resilient organizations do not combine to make a clever acronym, nor do they lend themselves to form a simple diagram. They work together as a whole, as interacting parts of a com- plex system. We could begin with any one of them and examine them in
- 17. 4 Introduction: Fumbling for Resilience any order. Here are the 14 aspects in the order in which the book presents them; I have categorized them into four major themes to aid with discus- sion and understanding: Crews: • Entrepreneurial • Intrapreneurial • Contrarian Capital: • Resource • Relationship • Information Culture of experimentation: • A reality- seeking culture • A safe- to- fail culture of experimentation • A culture of dissimilar individuals Exponential leadership: • Situational • Purposeful • Loss-aware • Empowering • Caring Resilient organizations make purposeful investments in four cat- egories: Crews, capital, culture, and leadership. Resilient organizations prepare for an unpredictable future by building capabilities that bol- ster resilience. In the analysis of how organizations act to flourish when threatened with profound change, these aspects are pervasive. While I do not claim to have identified and cataloged the necessary and sufficient tax- onomy of organizational resilience for all time, this much is clear: These 14 aspects significantly contribute to building resilient organizations. In culling out and calling out these 14 aspects, I have consciously worked to eliminate those capabilities that contribute to success in gen- eral but that are not specifically required for resilience. Importantly, successful organizations are not necessarily resilient organizations, par- ticularly over time. Organizations may be successful for a whole host of reasons, then succumb to dramatic shifts in their environment because
- 18. Introduction: Fumbling for Resilience 5 they are unable to adapt. In fact, as we will see, it is often the most successful organizations that collapse when thrown into complex and unfamiliar situations, as they fall back on the very same responses that made them successful without realizing that those habits are counter- productive in the new environment. As we will explore in more detail throughout the book, resilient organizations build and maintain these 14 aspects, and they do so in unique and innovative ways. Realities of resilience Organizations are wasting money as they chase after resilience without knowing what it is. This is very unfortunate, of course. The world is becoming progressively precarious, and small changes can lead to unpre- dictable impacts that are very costly. Organizations must do their best to face the realities of our VUCA world and be wise in their investments to ready themselves. The good news is that the critical components of resili- ence are emerging more clearly and that these elements can be developed in virtually any organization. There is no possible way to fully ensure that any given organiza- tion will survive, let alone thrive, in the long run. The most successful organizations of today are equally, if not more, likely to fail as time goes by. And building a resilient organization will not come cheap. The 14 elements presented in this book are neither simple nor inexpensive. Yet there are very real organizations that have leveraged their investments in resilience to flourish, even under the most difficult of circumstances; we can learn from them. Be warned. Resilience is not for the lazy, ordinary, or faint of heart. The cost of resilience is high, and its challenges oftentimes daunting. Resilience cannot simply be bought with money or implemented with checklists. It requires the endless embrace of change along with the will to evolve and, hopefully, flourish. These are the realities of resilience.
- 19. DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-2 Chapter 1 An Introduction to Crews 12,165 online courses “Don’t go, Mommy, don’t go!” It is March 1, 2020, and Liv Gjestvang, Associate Vice President for Learning Technology at The Ohio State University, is about to get on a bus to leave for a conference. She will be gone for a few days, and her young daughter is tugging at her sleeve, pleading with her not to leave. Just at that moment, Gjestvang receives a text from her colleague. “Do not get on bus. Conference cancelled due to COVID.” Gjestvang’s brain now spins, wrestling with two big problems at once. What does a COVID virus mean for the tens of thousands of students at the university? And, more immediately, how in the world do I head back home with my daughter without her thinking I’ve just given in to her demands? One thing became very clear very fast: The university was going to have to terminate in- person classes, at least for the foreseeable future. Fully online classrooms were becoming both pedagogically better and more available, thanks to new technologies, but there was a long way to go. Timothy Lombardo, EdD, was an instructional designer at The Ohio State University for six years leading up to the start of the COVID outbreak. He saw a big advance in remote learning in the mid- 2010s due to the proliferation of cameras and microphones in every laptop and cell phone. The technological tipping point was the combination of having a stable system at home with cameras, microphones, and internet, having software like Skype and Zoom available for mass gatherings, and platforms for asynchronous pulls like Slack, Teams, or an LMS [learning management system] where you can keep in contact with your instructors and your colleagues so you can still have that social interaction.
- 20. An Introduction to Crews 7 Yet, Dr. Lombardo estimates that in early 2020, only around 15% of all courses at Ohio State were available online in some fashion. By late March of 2020, just three short weeks after Liv Gjestvang returned home from the bus stop with her thankful daughter, almost every course, 12,165 in all, was available online. In fact, in response to COVID by the end of calendar year 2020 the university had: • Conducted more than 40 virtual online instruction training and support workshops with more than 20,000 digital views • Coordinated the move of 10,000 pieces of furniture and applied over 20,000 safety stickers • Created both the nationally acclaimed1 campus- wide COVID dash- board and the Ohio State health reporting mobile app • Distributed iPads, laptops, and mobile hotspots free of charge to fac- ulty, staff, and students who needed them • Equipped all classrooms with cameras and microphones; tested the rooms for proper air quality and circulation • Expanded online support hours from 40 to nearly 85 hours per week • Launched keep teaching, keep learning, and keep working websites and maintained them daily to support all faculty, staff, and students • Launched virtual tech tutors, direct-to-home shipping, and contactless curbside support • Offered training for mental health and wellness content, including information about student emergency financial and support resources • Transitioned over 12,000 courses online for virtual delivery— twice! (once each semester) This was an extraordinary achievement, especially given the difficult circumstances and extremely compressed timeline. Reflecting on these initial weeks dealing with COVID, Gjestvang notes: What’s really interesting to me is that anyone you would have asked, including those of us who support faculty in making these kinds of transitions, would have said it would not be possible, that we could never have done what we did. Even if someone had told me you’ll be in a situation where there will be no other alternative than to have every course go online within weeks, I would just have said, “That’s not possible. There is no way that’s possible.” What I think is really interesting looking back at this now is to ask, “What are the things that makes something impossible become possible?”
- 21. 8 An Introduction to Crews Making the impossible possible How was all this possible? Naturally, every instructor had a vested interest in continuing their instruction, as did the administration, but the communication, coordination, legal, logistical, pedagogical, and techno- logical challenges were enormous. And yet Ohio State’s story mirrors so many other stories not only about dealing with COVID, but dealing with any complex, threatening, unknown, and potentially disastrous situation. By examining Ohio State’s story, as well as other stories in this book, we get a better understanding as to what it actually takes to build and leverage organizational resilience. To begin with, leadership at all levels of the university began gathering folks together in February, one month before the realities of a global pandemic started to set in, asking “what if?” questions. What would happen if the coronavirus became a pandemic? What if we had to shift some percentage of our research and teaching online? What if we had to close our doors for several months? Leaders at other big universities were asking the same questions, and cross- institutional networks began to form within and between universities. Gjestvang specifically notes “the importance of being connected to those national conversations and then having relationships and contacts with people whom you can quickly pull together.” In the first week of March, Gjestvang and others pulled together a small response team. In the coming days, more people joined the team, from all levels, regardless of rank or title. It was collaboratively organized and informally managed. People came and went as needed. Tasks, duties, and responsibilities changed in response to the demands of the day. Several such teams (or what we will refer to in this book as “crews”) sprung up and interacted to share ideas, information, outcomes, strategies, and the like. No one had to get formal permission, restructure reporting lines, or change their titles. Employees largely self- selected and self- organized when needed to achieve the most critical outcomes for the day. One of the things these crews were able to do was to come to consensus about how to prioritize and measure the work ahead. They decided they should give extra attention to the largest classes, those lecture- hall- type courses of hundreds of students. From a number’s standpoint, this would provide the biggest bang for the buck. They also decided that they would promote a straightforward message about what they wanted all instructors to accomplish at minimum, namely, maintain a syllabus, grades, and assignments in the central learning management system (called “Carmen”), and use Zoom to conduct classes. They called this the “Carmen Key 3 +Zoom” message. These simple instructions were essential, for while there were countless potential actions that instructors could take to further their transition to online learning, the university
- 22. An Introduction to Crews 9 focused on simple instructions for an achievable outcome. This out- come was also easily measurable. Either instructors had enabled the three most critical materials in Carmen, or they had not. And either they had launched Zoom for instruction, or they had not. Gjestvang’s team provided regular, daily reports to deans and chairs, showing them exactly which courses had complied with the Carmen Key 3 +Zoom strategy and which were in need of additional support. There was not time to make these reports look pretty; they were simple Excel spreadsheets, and they got the job done. In order to support employees during this strange and challenging time, leaders loosened expectations around performance management goals. “That actually did create this kind of invigorating space,” Gjestvang reported, “like we’re diving into solve this [specific] set of problems, and it was really focused.” And if all this wasn’t hard enough, instances of “Zoom- bombing” soon cropped up, so a new crew had to come together with compliance, legal, security, technical, and other representatives. Day by day and, eventually, week by week, various crews worked to manage different sets of problems, trying different approaches, learning from the results, combining and recombining with unique sets of individ- uals, and sharing information within their many interconnected lines of communication. Naturally, culture played a big role in working together to solve problems. Educational institutions have a significant advantage in this area: They are used to collaboration inside and outside of the organ- ization. Higher education entities are quite comfortable in identifying, creating, and sharing knowledge and best practices with colleagues, businesses, and the public. This was particularly helpful when spinning up the Keep Teaching and Keep Learning websites. These websites proved essential in guiding faculty and students as they adapted to the pandemic. The frame and functionality for these websites was repurposed from an existing business continuity and emergency preparedness site at Indiana University. Indiana University shared content with Ohio State, and Ohio State expanded the content to address the challenges of teaching, learning, and working online. Ohio State then shared their developments with other universities, including back to Indiana University. Examples such as this one demonstrate the utility of a culture that allows people to collect and share information with each other across formal and informal networks. Culture is crucial. Gjestvang leveraged and adapted Ohio State’s culture to help create a psychological space for care and experimenta- tion. During times of great uncertainty, it is important for people to be able to admit when they do not know something, ask for help, care for colleagues, have frank discussions and disagreements, fail, and be vulner- able. Gjestvang pointed out that, “these are the kinds of words that you
- 23. 10 An Introduction to Crews hear people talk about that are critical to high- functioning leadership and teams, but that are hard to really achieve.” It was an intense and stressful time for everyone, with kids at home, health concerns, nursing home quarantines, restricted movement, and the like. Gjestvang reflected: We were starting meetings with a lot of appreciation; there was humor, connection, all of the elements we know that we need. There was often a moment at the end of the meeting to say, “We know there is a lot coming at everyone; take some time, take a walk today.” That kind of humanity was really important in keeping everybody feeling positive and engaged and safe. But I also think it led to a better product, because those same kinds of cultural elements really translated into the approach to the work too, and shaped the ways we asked faculty to support students. Gjestvang and others worked to establish an environment of what she came to think of as “organizational bravery” where it was entirely acceptable to identify issues, raise problems, admit failure, and generally be human. It was cool to see how the whole context of the way that our entire team was working together was normalizing. Get it done. Do your best. Name it when it’s hard. Name it when you don’t know what to do. That’s okay— we’re here for each other. When interviewing her more than a year later, Gjestvang wonders whether and in what ways they could, and should, go back to their old ways of working before COVID. Hierarchical reporting lines, recurring meetings, traditional organizational structures, and typical performance manage- ment sound increasingly less appealing. How many of the changes that increase engagement and benefit resilience can be kept, and how many will revert to pre- COVID habits? There is a strange sense of loss here, a loss of intensity and the sense of universal dedication to a common pur- pose. The gifts of care, grace, and understanding slip away a little more each day. For better and worse, there may be no going back to the way things used to be. Crews Liv Gjestvang’s story is a fascinating one, and the journey taken by The Ohio State University to adapt to the rapid and monumental changes brought by COVID is equally captivating. The narrative highlights many of the elements of a resilient organization, including: Leveraging infor- mation, relationship, and resource capital; creating crews that are able
- 24. An Introduction to Crews 11 to achieve the unexpected then dissolving them when finished; an experi- mental culture composed of dissimilar individuals; and leaders who both empowered and cared for their employees. While Gjestvang’s account highlights many of the elements of a resilient organization, elements that are helpful to keep in mind as we will revisit them in more detail in the chapters to come, it draws particular attention to the importance of “crews.” Crews are ad hoc collections of individuals who come together, act, then dissipate. They are not established teams or official committees. To deal with the realities and impacts of the global pandemic at Ohio State, individuals came together, worked to solve related sets of problems, then returned to their regular duties. They were united by purpose and common interest. By and large, people joined and left as made sense to them- selves and the rest of the individuals in the crew. Crews were made up of many different types of people from many different roles, and not chosen because of rank along hierarchical reporting lines. Ohio State’s COVID response exhibits many examples of the critical use of crews as they solved problems as diverse as compliance reporting, equipment distribution, physical distancing, training, website design, and even Zoom- bombing. Importantly, crews often act in opposition to past practices and the status quo. Crisis situations repeatedly demonstrate that effective actions and successful solutions are often very different than proven practices. Ohio State crews tried different approaches to classroom furniture layouts, communication messages, reports, signage, software, technology, templates, and hundreds of other little experiments. Some experiments succeeded and some failed, but employees strived to discern what actu- ally worked to solve problems in the face of rapidly changing situations. We can subdivide crews into different types. Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs: Resilient organizations change, whether in taking advantage of an opportunity or in reacting to an unpre- dictable event. They must sometimes make dramatic alterations to their assumptions, business models, objectives, people, procedures, processes, and the like. Two important and often interconnected mechanisms for such necessary evolution are: Finding and exploiting new external opportunities for expansion— and— finding and exploiting improved approaches to internal operations. Ohio State was able to shift from a brick- and- mortar institution of learning to a fully online university in a matter of weeks. The overall success was enabled in part by crews that focused externally and intensely on students (for the business analogy, think “customer”) in tandem with crews that focused internally and pas- sionately on creating the new practices and procedures for faculty and staff to adapt to students’ needs. Contrarians and red teams: The most successful crews have at least one person who serves as an iconoclast. Such individuals are not afraid
- 25. 12 An Introduction to Crews to speak their minds or speak truth to power. They are willing to question the status quo and look for different avenues of exploration. They are usually already in the habit of thinking differently than the typical rank- and- file employee. When most effective, they are rewarded for their unique insights and not punished for nonconformity. In fact, as we shall see, entire crews may be established for the express purpose of “red teaming,” that is, challenging the assumptions, processes, and thinking of the status quo. While Dr. Lombardo’s department was an established and official department, crews were able to take that department’s work and quickly apply it in unique ways for faculty, many who had historically resisted change and stuck with more traditional methods of instruction. Transition This case study serves to bring attention to the powerful and important use of crews by resilient organizations. Such use requires a careful balance of preserving the status quo, branching into new territory, and the knowledge of when to do which. The following chapters examine more completely the general nature of crews, along with some special types of crews, and how they work. Note 1 Elizabeth Redden. “How Transparent Is Your College COVID Dashboard.” Inside Higher Ed. October 8, 2020. www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/ 10/08/many-colleges-publish-covid-dashboards-theres-no-uniform-standard- public-reporting, viewed 10/9/2020.
- 26. DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-3 Chapter 2 The Nature of Crews We’re putting a crew together Think of the crew from your favorite heist movie. They are not an established team, nor are they a committee or a workgroup. They do not have a charter. They are not meant to stay together. A crew is a group of people who come together for a specific purpose, work to achieve that purpose, then disband (perhaps while watching a large fountain spraying water in time to dramatic music by Debussy). Crews captivate us. From the original Seven Samurai to the Magnificent Seven, from The Dirty Dozen to Ocean’s Eleven, we are fascinated with crews. Crews are a significant part of our collective culture. Perhaps it is the contrarian nature of crews, the plucky group of rebels pitted against the incalcitrant establishment that makes them especially beloved. Perhaps it is their similarity to the deep myth of the “Hero’s Journey” as outlined by Joseph Campbell that imbues them with such meaning. Or maybe what makes them so valuable is the simple ability to get things done in short order. Regardless, the ability to assemble and mobilize crews is an essential component of resilient organizations. In times of great disruption, common, habitual, regular, and usual responses will not adequately address the situation. This is because the status quo is designed to keep the organization functioning as it is, not as it must evolve to meet significant challenges. Past successes are not indicative of future solutions in a new environment. And the application of best practices will not only be inadequate, but they will also likely make the situation worse. What is required is a group of people who are willing and able to challenge the status quo in order to identify, test, and implement new solutions. As Eggers and Barlow urge in their work, Resilience: It’s Not about Bouncing Back, when dealing with new and significant events, “at some point, we will need to mobilize people to solve adaptive challenges... We will need to mobilize people to think and act in ways that they may never have done and may not want to.”1 In the hope of discovering emergent solutions for complex situations, the
- 27. 14 The Nature of Crews organization cannot rely on preexisting teams and everyday processes. Resilience will require crews. Innovation and resistance If the typical behaviors, objectives, processes, responses, and thinking were enough to solve the problems brought to bear by significant disruptions, organizational resilience would not be needed in the first place. Dramatic change in the environment requires change in the organization’s operations. As J. Peter Scoblic argues in his article, “Learning from the Future,” “in order to survive and thrive over time, organizations need to both exploit existing competencies and explore new ones... The problem is that those two imperatives compete for resources, demand distinct ways of thinking, and require different organizational structures.”2 The formation and mobilization of effective crews does not just happen, and it does not often happen easily. Changing to meet the unknown requires the willingness to embrace the likelihood of loss. Most people like the future to be predictable. They like to work today in mostly the same ways that they worked yesterday. They prefer existing processes that provide established products and services to familiar customers. As Bower and Christensen assert, because managers are evaluated on their ability to place the right bets, it is not surprising that in well- managed companies… managers back projects in which the market seems assured. Risk is reduced— and careers are safeguarded— by giving known customers what they want.3 In particular, human beings are hardwired to avoid loss whenever pos- sible. But response to dramatic change will often require loss. Few eco- nomically rational actors will make decisions that are likely to prove detrimental to themselves and their departments, even if only in the short term, and even if it will benefit the organization as a whole. As experts Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas summarize simply: “[C] onformance severely hinders the quest for resilience.”4 For these reasons and more, crews are needed to drive change, and they need to operate outside of normal silos and reporting lines. While there were many truly brutal and horrific stories from the events of Hurricane Katrina, there were also stories of creativity, heroism, humanity, and kindness. One of those stories is of that of Hancock Bank in Gulfport, Mississippi, whose employees stood in front of forty of the branches knocked offline, operating from card tables, under tarps, and out of mobile homes, and offered
- 28. The Nature of Crews 15 $200 in cash to anyone who would sign a slip of paper with his or her name, residence, and Social Security number. Not just Hancock customers—anyone.5 This unconventional, almost unthinkable approach proved to be good business. According to Zolli and Healy, 99.5% of the people who received the cash paid it back, and Hancock Bank gained 13,000 new accounts within three years.6 The bank’s “strong, shared social values; its trust in its community; and its empowered adhocracy of employees and stakeholders... fed its ability to rapidly flip... into a completely new mode of behavior, in which the normal rules of operation were suspended.”7 Effective crews must often act in opposition, or at least outside, of the organization’s historically accepted parameters. They must be willing to innovate despite existing culture, prevailing wisdom, and standard oper- ating procedures that warn them not to. Again, it is important to note that promoting change often means challenging existing leadership, the very people who pay salaries, divvy out bonuses, and control promotions. As Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky summarize, no one who tries to name or address the dysfunction in an organ- ization will be popular. Enough important people like the situation exactly as it is, whatever they may say about it, or it would not be the way it is.8 David Denyer at the Cranfield School of Management reminds us that, when organizations encounter problems that regular procedures cannot solve, “most organizations respond by bolstering preventative control by adding new safeguards, reinforcing barriers and redoubling training efforts but rarely engage in fundamental changes to the adaptive innov- ation or mindful action aspects of resilience.”9 Being a dissenter is risky. Challenging the status quo is riskier still. The right stuff What kind of people with what kind of personalities are ideal for crews? McKinsey & Company analysts Alexander et al. suggest that such people should be creative problem solvers with critical thinking skills who are resilient and battle tested. They should also be independent and open to a range of different perspectives. Best of all, they should be willing to say what needs to be said, and to make tough, even unpopular, decisions...10
- 29. 16 The Nature of Crews Think of it this way: Crews may be the very last entity standing between the organization and obsolescence. In deeply challenging situations, it is likely that one or more crews will be responsible for the decisions and actions that might allow the organization to pivot and evolve. The crew will be best served if at least one member has a natural proclivity for independent thinking and the courage to speak up.11 In her book, Intrapreneur: How Leaders Ignite Innovation, Break Bureaucracy and Catalyse Change, Irena Yashin- Shaw lists the following qualities of intrapreneurs (a specific kind of crew we will discuss in detail in Chapter 3): • Action takers • Change agile • Collaborators • Creative • Determined • Growth oriented • Iconoclasts • Influential • Opportunity finders • Resourceful problem solvers • Risk takers • Trend spotters12 Such a list is not to suggest a complete catalog of necessary traits; it is offered here both as a way to begin thinking about the kinds of people who might be a good fit for crews and as further examples of the noncon- formist nature of crews. Other thought leaders highlight similar qualities and skill sets. One collection of researchers at a European Union Joint Research Center recommends looking for strategic designers, user experience designers, service designers, artists, business correspondants (sic.), software engineers, the organization’s most creative old foxes… mavericks, trouble makers… a mixture of bright young people as well as some experienced people, some academics and some strategic designers… [and] ones who care enough to speak truth unto power.13 We get comparable suggestions from Bryce G. Hoffman in his book, Red Teaming: [I] t is essential to include men and women with good analytical and critical thinking skills, close attention to detail, and the ability to
- 30. The Nature of Crews 17 think outside the box. They need the confidence and assurance to challenge the status quo, as well as the self- awareness required to recognize their own biases and limitations. They should also be intel- lectually honest and able to resist the pressures of organizational politics.14 Salvation will not come from the status quo. It will come from creative, dedicated, and divergent actors. What other use of an organization’s finest employees could be more important than crews? As Hoffman states succinctly: “Whatever you do, make sure you populate your red team with some of your best and brightest employees.”15 Self-selection; self-organization “Researchers agree that resilient organizations are not managed by hierarchy. Rather, those organizations rely on decentralization, self- organization, and shared decision- making.”16 This quotation represents a key conclusion of Stephanie Duchek’s academic research into the nature of organizational resilience. Regardless of how the entire organization is structured, crews should assemble outside of regular reporting lines. They form for a specific purpose and need a collection of individuals working outside of traditional channels to achieve that purpose. They must work quickly to adapt to significant change. They cannot be constrained by normalbureaucracy.Theycannotbemicromanagedandremainsuccessful. As Zolli and Healy assert in their book, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, crews utilize a “…loosely affiliating, self- organizing, networked, and self- specializing dynamic…” where “…small groups are not bound together via traditionally strong command- and- control structures, but by ad- hoc, redundant, and informal social connections...”17 Crews must work together, with other teams, and with the organization at large in creative ways so that solutions might emerge from collaboration and experimentation. Regardless of whether the members of the crew were initially and specifically selected or whether they self- selected from the beginning, a successful crew will be allowed to go where the problem takes them. This means that crews cannot be saddled with a specific punch list of tasks and deliverables. As we will see later, not only are the many problems that result in deeply complex situations themselves unpredictable, so too are the solutions to those problems. Leaders are best advised to establish the broad direction of travel and guiding principles for the work to be done and not try to command, control, or micromanage their efforts. Expert Liz Keogh recommends an approach whereby “we nudge in directions that are ‘better’ instead of demanding fixed outcomes. We allow change to emerge, trying multiple parallel interventions, instead of pursuing ‘best
- 31. 18 The Nature of Crews practices’ that might not be best for the context.”18 This is the way the most successful airline, military, and sports teams operate, namely, with a small number of specific objectives, an outline of the rules of engage- ment, and the authority to make decisions and act in the field as best they see fit. As Denyer summarizes: In an increasingly complex and dynamic world, Organizational Resilience calls for leaders to be able to direct and coordinate change, but to do so without specifying solutions, or creating “top down” visions and targets that might alienate the very people who can develop solutions to emerging challenges.19 Individuals who must work together to solve problems in adverse and complex situations need guiding principles that inform them in general terms what they can do, what they cannot do, and what their overall objectives are. They do not, and cannot, be burdened with a detailed list of instructions on how to act. They must be allowed to self- organize, self- direct, and go where the problem leads them. Teams or crews? The research is inconsistent as to whether some crews should be established as permanent teams within the organization, or whether they should disband after achieving their goals. The Ohio State narrative offered an example of a crew that could conceivably be either temporary or permanent, namely a group tasked to think through “what if?” scenarios. This group might exist as a team that regularly scans the envir- onment looking for signals of significant change among the noise, pro- viding “what if?” scenarios to leadership. “Most likely, there are people in your organization who are plugged tightly into the future and under- stand well the not- so- sanguine implications for your company’s business model,” write Hamel and Välikangas. “You have to find these people. You have to make sure their views are not censored by the custodians of convention and their access is not blocked...”20 Establishing an official “what if?” team might provide a steady stream of information, better weak- tie networks, divergent thinking, and a set group of individuals who could be mobilized for rapid analysis. As Bello et al. maintain, “many of the world’s most successful companies... [a] re able to repli- cate the success by building dedicated teams that can evaluate ideas, identify leaders, provide specialist expertise, and otherwise support new initiatives.”21 Perhaps organizations should therefore consider establishing several typesofpermanentcrews.TheCynefinpublication,ManagingComplexity (and Chaos) in Times of Crisis, recommends that organizations establish
- 32. The Nature of Crews 19 six different “permanent and focused crews.”22 The six suggested crews are as follows and are included here less as a recommendation and more as items for example and consideration: • The probing crew: This crew has a special talent in creating people- centered scenarios to explore novel concepts with the intention of transforming them into usable, tangible proposals and prototypes. • The wrecking crew: [This crew] is there to war game decisions looking for possible unintended consequences, and then monitor for both the expected and unexpected occurrences. They then create recommendations to mitigate any negative effects, but also to rap- idly amplify unexpected positive results that might otherwise be missed. • The journaling crew: [This crew is] in place for real- time capture of lessons as they are learned, together with ideas for innovation… Making this data available for peer- to- peer information flows during the crisis is also critical. It is a part of distributed decision- making to create such flows. • The continuity crew: While the crisis is consuming the attention of our key decision- makers, this is the time for their deputies or for the more experienced members of the crew to take over the day- to- day business of the organization insofar as it continues. • The data analytics crew: Data informed decisions are key in a crisis but conventional departments need to keep day- to- day operations running… [This crew] can also activate and synthesize weak signal detection using human sensor networks. • The healing crew: [This is] …a crew with organizational develop- ment and personal health specialists that include some of the cynics from the organization to help… [T] his crew will allow us to create a powerful decision support capability but will also allow us to carry our employees with us on what will be a difficult journey. And yet, the danger in establishing any crew as a permanent team is that they could become part of the status quo, eventually unable to produce the alternate thinking necessary for resilient adaptation. A team can easily calcify and become stale over time. Crews are likely to become part of the status quo at some point, thus removing their special abil- ities as dissenters, iconoclasts, and pivoters. Bryce G. Hoffman in Red Teaming is insistent that red teams (crews) should never be made a per- manent fixture of an organization and should always disband after they have achieved their objectives.23 One critical reason Hoffman offers for disbanding crews is the tension and strain that mounts as they continue to operate against the establishment. Crews make employees and leaders of an organization better
- 33. 20 The Nature of Crews by pushing them harder, by asking difficult questions, and by challen- ging the status quo. If these things were easy, they would already be doing them. But they are not easy, and because of this, it is easy for a red team to find itself at odds with the rest of the organization.24 Further, working on a crew is often exhilarating but exhausting. Crew work should be a sprint, not a marathon. Hoffman recommends that a “red team should be used strategically and selectively… You should never allow your red team to become an internal police force... Nor should you exhaust your red team.”25 As Hoffman concludes neatly: “The art of red teaming also depends on knowing when to stop.”26 So which approach is correct? Should organizations establish some crews as permanent teams? Or should crews be forced to dissolve once their objectives are accomplished? While the question has not yet been debated in academia or research, the likely answer is, “It depends.” It depends on factors such as: The crew’s overall purpose, its goals and objectives, the degree to which it needs to operate independently of established silos and departments, the amount of dissidence needed (and the amount of dissidence the organization can tolerate), the intensity and urgency of the situation, the risk of calcification, the balance between risk and reward, other sources of available networks and information, and so on. Perhaps it will seem fitting that the proper balance between innovation and status quo in a complex environment cannot be specific- ally predicted ahead of time. Nonetheless, executives need to pose such questions to themselves and determine the degree to which they should establish mechanisms and capabilities that allow for the creation and mobilization of crews in the first place. As with all other aspects of organizational resilience, this should be a conscious and deliberate undertaking. While some crews can be assembled organically and “out of thin air” as it were, the conditions must be right within the organization to improve their chances of success. Not only do capital, culture, and leadership have bearing on these conditions, but the purposeful design for formation and utilization of crews must exist as well. The cost of crews Crews are vital components of responses that lead to flourishing in the most difficult of circumstances. Crews should most likely be limited in size; Hoffman recommends between 5 and 11 people.27 But as we see time and time again, resilience does not come cheap. If nothing else, moving an employee to a crew, even temporarily, means that the employee is not performing their regular duties for their regular job. This may be especially costly to the organization if the best and brightest individuals
- 34. The Nature of Crews 21 are the ones cherry- picked for crews. There is also overhead while per- manent or semipermanent teams lie effectively dormant until the time comes when they are needed. Nassim Nicholas Talib, whose thinking we will discuss in detail in later chapters, compares such organizational cap- abilities with the natural world: Living systems are messy and complex, and they operate in ways that are less than perfectly efficient... Encoded within each one are a diverse array of latent tools and strategies that are only occasionally, if ever, called upon it. Carrying around this menagerie of rarely used but useful mechanisms imposes a real cost...28 It takes resources not only to form crews, but to create the conditions under which they can succeed. The price of investing in resilience can be high, and likely perceived to be even higher. As many commentators have pointed out, most recently Dan Heath in his 2020 book Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems before They Happen, it is maddeningly difficult to measure the value of preventing a catastrophe that never takes place. Transition This chapter outlined the nature of crews in a general sense; now we must examine a handful of specific types of crews to gain a better understanding as to their nature and benefits, as well as how to prepare and incorporate them into the organization. Organizations should review and consider each type of crew, both those mentioned above and those in the coming chapters, in order to determine what kinds of investments to make in the foundations of resilience. Notes 1 Jennifer Eggers and Cynthia Barlow. Resilience: It’s Not about Bouncing Back. Best Seller Publishing, 2019. p. 16. 2 J. Peter Scoblic. “Learning from the Future.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. p. 104. 3 Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen. “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. p. 51. 4 Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas. “The Quest for Resilience.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. p. 32. 5 Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Free Press, 2012, p. 274. 6 Ibid. pp. 274– 275. 7 Ibid.
- 35. 22 The Nature of Crews 8 Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Harvard Business Review Press, 2009. p. 17. 9 David Denyer. Organizational Resilience: A Summary of Academic Evidence, Business Insights and New Thinking. BSI and Cranfield School of Management, 2017. p. 19. 10 Andrea Alexander, Aaron De Smet, Sarah Kleinman, and Marino Mugayar. “To Weather a Crisis, Build a Network of Teams.” McKinsey & Company Organization Practice White Paper, 2020. p. 3. See also: Jennifer Eggers and Cynthia Barlow. Resilience: It’s Not about Bouncing Back. Best Seller Publishing, 2019. p. 201. 11 We will see the importance of this trait again, especially in Chapter 17, “A Culture of Dissimilar Individuals.” 12 Irena Yashin-Shaw. Intrapreneur: How Leaders Ignite Innovation, Break Bureaucracy and Catalyse Change. Self- published, 2018. p. ix. 13 Joint Research Centre, the European Commission, and Cynefin Centre. Managing Complexity (and Chaos) in Times of Crisis: A Field Guide for Decision Makers Inspired by the Cynefin Framework. European Union, 2021. pp. 26– 27. 14 Bryce G. Hoffman. Red Teaming. Crown Business, 2017, p. 107. 15 Ibid. p. 110. 16 Stephanie Duchek. “Organizational Resilience: A Capability- Based Conceptualization.” Business Research 13, (2019): 215– 246. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s40685-019-0085-7 viewed 2/ 7/ 21. p. 23. 17 Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Free Press, 2012, p. 66. 18 Liz Keogh. “It Doesn’t Get Happy; It Doesn’t Get Sad.” Cynefin: Weaving Sense- Making into the Fabric of Our World. Dave Snowden and Friends, 2020, p. 226. 19 David Denyer. Organizational Resilience: A Summary of Academic Evidence, Business Insights and New Thinking. BSI and Cranfield School of Management, 2017, p. 25. 20 Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas. “The Quest for Resilience.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. pp. 26–27. 21 Jason Bello, Shaun Collins, Ralf Dreischmeier, and Ari Libarikian. “Innovating from Necessity: The Business- Building Imperative in the Current Crisis.” McKinsey Digital, April 2020. p. 5. 22 Each bullet point in this section is a direct quotation from the following source but do not appear together in toto. All italicized text appears in the original text as a different font type. Joint Research Centre, the European Commission, and Cynefin Centre. Managing Complexity (and Chaos) in Times of Crisis: A Field Guide for Decision Makers Inspired by the Cynefin Framework. European Union, 2021. pp. 26– 27. 23 Bryce G. Hoffman. Red Teaming. Crown Business, 2017. p. 123.
- 36. The Nature of Crews 23 24 Ibid. p. 231. 25 Ibid. p. 238. 26 Ibid. p. 216. 27 Bryce G. Hoffman. Red Teaming. Crown Business, 2017. p. 107. 28 Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Free Press, 2012. p. 17.
- 37. DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-4 Chapter 3 Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs Prayer for the dead In the movie Other People’s Money, Danny Devito plays Lawrence Garfield, a corporate raider who buys out failing businesses then strips out and sells off their assets until they are fully dissolved. The leaders of one of the companies that Garfield has targeted for liquidation try to stop him, arguing that they have hard working employees with a long, albeit declining, history of success. During a speech at the shareholder meeting to vote on the acquisition, Garfield neatly discloses the inevitable outcome: You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best [expletive] buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that com- pany? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let’s have the intelligence, let’s have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.1 Past success is no guarantee of future results. Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs This chapter explores two distinct crews that have a predefined pur- pose: Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Entrepreneurs are concerned with finding and establishing new business (broadly defined) outside of the organization. Intrapreneurs are concerned with finding and establishing new ways of conducting business inside of the organization. Both are important in building resilient organizations. Leadership should consider establishing these crews as permanent or semipermanent teams, while keeping in mind the caveats and warnings from the previous chapter, or
- 38. Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs 25 at least carefully consider ways in which to build a culture to foster entre- preneurial and intrapreneurial initiatives. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that only about 31% of small businesses stay in business longer than ten years.2 Restaurants, as most of us know, fair far worse, though perhaps not nearly as bad as the 90% failure rate typically stated.3 In order to stay successful and productive, organizations must continually change. Externally, they must find new customers, markets, and technologies. Internally, they must not only strive for efficiencies but also look to new offerings, products, services, and ways of operating. We will look at both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs in turn. Entrepreneurial crews “Organizational resilience occurs when organizations create, invent and discover unknown markets.”4 —AnnetteTowler Business building is a key element of organizational resilience. Organizations must evolve to survive. Such evolution may require small or large changes, but change is required nonetheless. Loss is inevitable and part of effective resilience practices requires finding new ways to address inevitable losses, ideally before significant losses occur. The status quo will not be sufficient to see the organization through the crises, disruptions, events, and incidents that impact us all with increasing fre- quency and shock. A plethora of existing resources already explains how to go about building new businesses; what is important for this chapter is to establish why entrepreneurial crews are so essential in building resilient organizations. Resilient organizations must dedicate a concerted effort to seek out and establish new lines of business. For the purposes of this chapter, we can think of “business” in its widest sense, encompassing new customers, markets, offerings, products, services, and the like for any type of organ- ization. McKinsey & Company found that, “companies that prioritize business building tend to grow faster than their peers, respond with greater resilience to volatility and economic shocks, and... see more success.”5 Researchers noted that business building was a successful endeavor before COVID, but the global pandemic “accelerated and intensified that trend.”6 Put bluntly: “Business building is no longer a choice: it is an essential discipline that lets incumbents counter disrup- tive challengers and sustain organic growth.”7 This is a crucial discovery, because organizations do not often consider expanding services in the midst of dealing with the impacts of a significant event. But, as we will see, that is exactly what a resilient organization does.
- 39. 26 Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs What is business building? It is not mergers and acquisitions. In fact, the McKinsey research judges mergers and acquisitions as being both too costly and too risky, and suggests that they are to be avoided espe- cially when working to enhance resilience. Business building for the purposes of this chapter can be thought of as: The deliberate and organic growth of new or existing areas of an organization into new or existing markets with new products and/ or services. Business builders are those organizations, or, more often, those parts of an organization, that launch new businesses that can be brought back into the larger organization to spur growth and enhance the chances of continued evolution. Entrepreneurial crews design, conduct, and learn from experiments to regularly adjust their organization’s investment strategies. Resilient business builders “constantly test their new businesses’ products, services, and business models to spot problems early, while there’s still time.”8 As Humble et al. explain the process: First, we stop using detailed planning as a way to manage risk. Instead, we find customers and run cheap experiments to discover if our proposed business model product is actually valuable to them. Second, rather than creating only one plan, we iterate by running a series of experiments in order to discover a project /market fit, since we expect that in conditions of uncertainty our first idea is very unlikely to bear fruit.9 In conjunction with these experiments, effective business builders identify and carefully watch key performance indicators (KPIs), monitor data, and kill underperforming and low- value initiatives quickly.10 High-value initiatives that show early promise should be further supported. Low- value initiatives that tie up resources should be eliminated as soon as the KPIs indicate that success is improbable or that the anticipated value will not be realized. Perhaps surprisingly, individuals on entrepreneurial crews are not likely to be popular with the rest of the organization. As Bower and Christensen explain: Companies... can create new businesses to replace the ones that must inevitably die. To do so, companies must give managers of disruptive innovation free reign to realize that technology’s full potential— even if it means ultimately killing the mainstream business.11 This is why specialized crews are needed, constituted of the right individ- uals with the right skill sets who are not only able to devise and execute meaningful experiments to probe the market for new offerings, but who are willing and able to stop work on initiatives that show little promise of
- 40. Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs 27 breakthrough achievements and who may even be the ones to cause the death of major lines of the existing business. Interestingly, the most successful organizations regularly work to build several businesses. Resilient organizations learn the best practices for business building itself, through the careful experimentation of building new businesses. The benefit is even greater if the organization has a port- folio of new products and services, as the portfolio approach provides diversification of investment, revenue, and risk. Furthermore, successful business builders plan for scale. Researchers discovered that the lions’ share of revenue was not only gained by building new lines of business, but also by the ability to scale those new businesses. Organizations that could not effectively and efficiently scale did not reap nearly the same benefits as those that did.12 It should be noted, of course, that the problem of how to scale, and quickly, is a challenging one for any organization under any circumstances. The culture, processes, and procedures that work for a $2 million company often do not work well for a $20 million company, and again for a $200 million company. Thus, the cycle of experimenta- tion and learning necessary to find breakthrough business is also needed to scale that business through many iterations. For these reasons and more, successful businesses often establish an entrepreneurial team dedicated solely to business building. Such teams help other teams or crews in their journey to launch, scale, and achieve profitability for the new business. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to run a startup like a giant corporation. Part of the challenge involved in entrepreneurial business building is the fact that the culture, processes, procedures, and other ingrained characteristics of the existing organ- ization should not be ported over to the new business in most cases. The trick is to leverage the existing resources, relationships, and cap- ital for the new business without bringing the bureaucratic and cultural baggage with it. Many commentators, researchers, and writers strongly suggest that an independent team be established to run the new business. McKinsey & Company maintains that, the heart of success in business building is to manage these challenges successfully and to identify a person who is committed and entrepreneurial— someone with extraordinary drive and sales instincts, as well as a willingness to challenge orthodoxies when necessary.13 Business builders must have a host of necessary business skills, ask the difficult questions, and also possess the unique ability for “overturning assumptions and innovating in the spaces left when an old assumption is removed.”14 Business builders are often iconoclasts, and entrepreneurial crews must be willing to challenge the status quo. Times of crisis are times
- 41. 28 Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs of change, and successful organizations will employ successful business builders who understand what the changes may mean to the business, its customers, and the marketplace. These countercultural individuals are willing to eschew the establishment, taking early steps to innovate and seek opportunities to change existing practices to best take advantage of new opportunities emerging from the situation. In sum: “Business builders recognize the world is changing and the rules are being rewritten. This is one of the most important elements of business building. Disrupters rethink assumptions to identify creative opportunities.”15 The cost of entrepreneurial crews Needless to say, all this can be an expensive proposition. McKinsey & Company analysts, looking at very large organizations, note that the cap- ital (cash) expenditures alone can be $100 million per business, or more.16 Once launched, new businesses require the resource capital necessary to operate for the many months (or years) required to become profitable. Successful new businesses launched by larger companies dedicated 20– 80 (or more) people to each new business,17 in addition to the overall capital expenditures. We might well imagine that these 20– 80 people are some of the best and brightest of the organization, thus taking them away from other potential uses for their time and talent. Further, researchers suggest that the more successful business building teams were those that found and hired entrepreneurs from outside, thus allowing the organization to purchase specific skills and information not found inhouse.18 The acqui- sition of individuals from outside the organization is an added expense.19 These costs help explain why existing organizations may well have a significant advantage over newcomers in the arena of startup competi- tion, as they “possess talent, funds, market insights, intellectual property, data, and other assets that can give their new businesses a decisive edge over stand-alone start-ups.”20 All this requires a “lasting effort,”21 and such an effort is costly. This does not mean that only the largest organizations need to invest in business building and entrepreneurial crews. Significant change is coming. It is always coming. Resilient organizations dedicate them- selves to meeting that change head on. Whether as a crew or a more dedicated team, organizations must consider ways to look for entre- preneurial opportunities. Because the reality is: If your organization is not actively seeking new avenues of business (again, broadly defined) in areas related to what it does now, rest assured that someone else will. As Steve Forbes stated at a May 2021 conference on navigating the impacts of COVID: “Organizations left to themselves... tend to become inward looking; we see this in businesses all the time, and then you get upended by an entrepreneur doing something entirely new, doing something so
- 42. Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs 29 much better.”22 Investigating and building new lines of business is exceed- ingly difficult. Entrepreneurial crews are needed in order to provide the organization a better chance of discovering and capitalizing on value, especially in preparation for the inevitable losses involved in significant change. Intrapreneurial crews “For the corporation to live, it must be willing to see business units die. If the corporation doesn’t kill them off itself, competitors will.”23 — Bower and Christensen We may typically think of intrapreneurs in one of two ways, either as helpful trainers who provide new skills and professional development or as efficiency experts hell- bent on squeezing the last drop of productivity out of every process. But the intrapreneurs of resilient organizations are neither of these. Intrapreneurs are not interested in improving the status quo, nor are they interested in increasing efficiencies that will likely lead to increased fragility. Rather, they are looking for radically new ways for organizations to pivot, restructure, transform, and otherwise change to provide new value. If being a successful entrepreneur is hard, being a successful intrapreneur is possibly harder. Change will likely be seen as a threat to those who support established processes and may cause real losses to departments and individuals. Resilient organizations know that their business strategy or business plan is never fixed in stone. The business plan can only serve as the broad direction of travel. As thinkers McCrone and Snape write: “In today’s cli- mate we can no longer reliably consider strategy a noun— a written tome describing a pathway through a prescient future, but must consider it a verb— discovering ways forward and leading employees and the organ- ization...”24 Intrapreneurs are those individuals or crews who take on the challenge of recreating and improving the organization from the inside. Instead of looking externally for new sources of value, they look intern- ally for new functions, processes, services, and ways of working that can significantly increase value. But how many organizations have committed resources specifically to discover and exploit such value on a regular basis? Hamel and Välikangas conclude that this is indeed a frequently overlooked advantage. “While virtually every company has some type of new- product pipeline, few have a process for continually generating, launching, and tracking novel strategy experiments...”25 Internal innov- ation can prove just as valuable as external business building, and it is worthy of consideration and investment. Improvements inside the organ- ization may lead to new products and services that benefit the organiza- tion as well as its customers, stakeholders, and stockholders.
- 43. 30 Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs But, in a familiar refrain, we must note that changes, even beneficial ones, almost inevitably challenge established ways of working. We know from our previous discussions that most human beings do not like change, especially if it entails long-or short- term losses. This makes the work of intrapreneurs very challenging. Bryce G. Hoffman reminds us that “most organizations... are hierarchical, and hierarchies have a hard time taking a critical look at their own strategies and plans. Hierarchies tend to encourage compliance and reward conformity, rather than encouraging questions and rewarding innovation.”26 If you have read Drive by Daniel Pink, you know that traditional businesses have historically motivated their employees with simple rewards and punishments; conformity and efficiencies were rewarded, while deviation and variation were punished. As Eggers and Barlow summarize somewhat ominously: When facing an adaptive challenge, an organization that is not aligned, or has not built resilience, will do anything it can to main- tain the status quo. Group- think is powerful and the magnetic forces pulling towards the status quo can defy logic and reason in the quest to avoid the work required to create real change.27 Intrapreneurial crews are needed because change is hard. If the improve- ment of individuals, units, and organizations were not so challenging and problematic, it would happen naturally. Organizations should establish intrapreneurial crews, empower them to do their work, and provide them with senior leadership support. A single person working independency will more than likely face serious antagonism, opposition, and even out- right hostility. Even if the change will directly benefit a department, resist- ance is the probable response. This is true even for the most successful units in an organization. As Hoffman notes, “successful units also tend to resist red teaming [intrapreneurs]. They think that because they have been successful in the past, they know what it takes to be successful in the future.”28 Crews are often composed of disruptors and iconoclasts. Intrapreneurial crews are no exception. Their work is naturally in oppos- ition to the established practices of the organization. But their work is essential for change, reinvention, and evolution. The cost of intrapreneurial crews Resilient organizations invest in the work of intrapreneurial crews. As with everything else in building resilient organizations, this investment does not come cheap, and for many of the same reasons that entrepreneurial crews do not come cheap. In some ways, we can see intrapreneurial crews as the upstream feeders and potential partners for entrepreneurial teams. Internal innovations are a key source of new inventions, products, and
- 44. Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs 31 services. The internal groups that are the source of potential innovation and revenue should not be closeted away like the occasional skunkworks; they should be incorporated into and supported by the organization.29 It takes a lot of experimentation, analysis, tracking, and work to bring a new product or service to market in a new marketplace.30 If innovation is the lifeblood that keeps organizations alive, and if intrapreneurial crews are a key to innovation, then organizations need to invest and support intrapreneurial efforts. Transition There are many different kinds of crews, each of which may prove bene- ficial. Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are two such crews, so important that the organization may wish to (carefully) establish them as semi- permanent teams. Internal innovation and new lines of business are almost always necessary for an organization to survive; they are most assuredly necessary for an organization to flourish. As Humble et al. summarize nicely: organizations survive and grow in the medium and long term by balancing the ability to continuously explore potential new business models with effective exploration of existing ones. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of a truly adaptive and resilient organization is that it con- tinually disrupts its own existing business models in search of future opportunities and new markets and customers.31 These two types of crews do not often arise organically or haphazardly on their own, at least not the most successful ones. Organizations need to pay attention to their needs, and mindfully determine the right kinds and constitutions of crews required. Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are two such likely candidates. Contrarians and red teams are two more. Notes 1 Norman Jewison, director. Other People’s Money. Warner Brothers, 1991. 1hr., 43min. www.imdb.com/title/tt0102609/characters/nm0000362, viewed 1/18/21. 2 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Table 7. Survival of Private Sector Establishments by Opening Year.” Including 2020 data. www.bls.gov/bdm/ us_age_naics_00_table7.txt, viewed 6/23/21. 3 Jeff Grabmeier. “Restaurant Failure Rate Much Lower Than Commonly Assumed, Study Finds.” September 7, 2003. https://news.osu.edu/restaur ant-failure-rate-much-lower-than-commonly-assumed-study-finds/, viewed 6/23/21.
- 45. 32 Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs 4 Annette Towler. “Organizational Resilience: What Is It and Why Does It Matter during a Crisis?” CQ Net, December 12, 2020. www.ckju.net/en/dos- sier/organizational-resilience-what-it-and-why-does-it-matter-during-a-crisis, viewed 2/16/21. 5 Shaun Collins, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Upasana Unni. “Why Business Building Is the New Priority for Growth.” McKinsey & Company. December 2020. p. 1. 6 Ibid. p. 2. 7 Matt Banholzer, Markus Berger- de Leon, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Erik Roth. “Building New Businesses: How Incumbents Use Their Advantages to Accelerate Growth.” Leap. McKinsey, December 2019. p. 2. 8 Shaun Collins, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Upasana Unni. “Why Business Building Is the New Priority for Growth.” McKinsey & Company. December 2020. p. 3. 9 Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly. Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. O’Reilly, 2015. p. 50. 10 Shaun Collins, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Upasana Unni. “Why Business Building Is the New Priority for Growth.” McKinsey & Company. December 2020. pp. 4– 5. 11 Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen. “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. p. 61. 12 Shaun Collins, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Upasana Unni. “Why Business Building Is the New Priority for Growth.” McKinsey & Company. December 2020. p. 5. 13 Ibid. p. 7. 14 Jason Bello, Shaun Collins, Ralf Drieschmeier, and Ari Libarikian. “Innovating from Necessity: The Business- Building Imperative in the Current Crisis.” McKinsey Digital. April 2020. p. 2. 15 Ibid. p. 3. 16 Matt Banholzer, Markus Berger- de Leon, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Erik Roth. “Building New Businesses: How Incumbents Use Their Advantages to Accelerate Growth.” Leap. McKinsey, December 2019. p. 2. 17 Shaun Collins, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Upasana Unni. “Why Business Building Is the New Priority for Growth.” McKinsey & Company. December 2020. p. 8. 18 Matt Banholzer, Markus Berger- de Leon, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Erik Roth. “Building New Businesses: How Incumbents Use Their Advantages to Accelerate Growth.” Leap. McKinsey, December 2019. p. 5. 19 Shaun Collins, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Upasana Unni. “Why Business Building Is the New Priority for Growth.” McKinsey & Company. December 2020. pp. 8– 9. 20 Matt Banholzer, Markus Berger- de Leon, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Erik Roth. “Building New Businesses: How Incumbents Use Their Advantages to Accelerate Growth.” Leap. McKinsey, December 2019. p. 2. 21 Ibid. p. 5.
- 46. Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs 33 22 Steve Forbes. “Leadership in a Time of Critical Events: A Conversation with Steve Forbes, Chairman & Editor- in- Chief of Forbes Media.” COVID-19 The Road to Recovery. Everbridge virtual conference, May 26, 2021. 23 Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen. “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. p. 61. 24 Steve McCrone and Ian Snape. “Cynefin and Strategy.” Cynefin: Weaving Sense- Making into the Fabric of Our World. Dave Snowden and Friends, 2020. p. 258. 25 Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas. “The Quest for Resilience.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. p. 32. 26 Bryce G. Hoffman. Red Teaming. Crown Business, 2017. p. 234. 27 Jennifer Eggers and Cynthia Barlow. Resilience: It’s Not about Bouncing Back. Best Seller Publishing, 2019. p. 240. 28 Bryce G. Hoffman. Red Teaming. Crown Business, 2017. p. 234. 29 Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas. “The Quest for Resilience.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. p. 32. 30 Hamel and Välikangas estimate that it will take over 100 innovative experiments a year for large corporations to find new profitable offerings. Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas. “The Quest for Resilience.” On Organizational Resilience. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2021. p. 32. 31 Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly. Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. O’Reilly, 2015. p. 39.
- 47. DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-5 Chapter 4 Contrarians and Red Teams Groupthink and complacency On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger suffered a horrific explosion. The news could provide neither answers nor explanations in the immediate days following the explosion, able merely to display the now- iconic images of disaster from the then- little- known CNN 24- hour news station. Eventually we would hear about the O- ring that failed, and for years afterward, the Challenger disaster would be touted as a cau- tionary tale of “groupthink.” The dangers of groupthink were not exactly new in 1986. Following World War Two, nations looked to identify the causes of the Nazi’s genocidal programs, and, later, Stalin’s atrocities. Stanley Milgram’s experiments in the 1950s at Yale University in which participants will- ingly shocked individuals to their apparent (and completely fake) death at the urgings of an authority figure “proved” that the average individual could not stand up to authoritarians. Similar conclusions were drawn from Solomon Asch’s experiments in 1951 with subjects succumbing to peer pressure when attempting to accurately report on the comparative length of a line. For at least the next 50 years, United States’ culture, in particular, wrestled with the paradoxical needs to stand up against authority while remaining obedient to governmental institutions. And, in like fashion, organizations continue to wrestle with the tension between embracing transformation and supporting the status quo. Groupthink may be dangerous, but so too is the wholesale abandonment of the estab- lishment. How might an organization begin to balance these two needs? The novel thinking of contrarian crews can help address this problem. Contrarian crews are best used when formed and mobilized to challenge habitual approaches, assumptions, and patterns of thinking. Complacency is part of human nature. When things are going well, most of us prefer to assume they will continue to do well. Groupthink is also part of human nature. We are social creatures, and we put a
- 48. Contrarians and Red Teams 35 bigger premium on conformity and cohesion than most of us would like to believe— particularly in large organizations, where staying on the right side of internal politics is often the key to job security and promotion.1 The above quotation comes from someone who has thought a great deal about contrarian crews, Bryce G. Hoffman. Hoffman was so interested in the concept that he successfully lobbied to be trained, as a civilian, at the United States Army’s Red Team University in Fort Leavenworth. He wrote the book Red Teaming based on his training and subsequent business experiences. Let us briefly examine Hoffman’s techniques and conclusions; creating and supporting contrarian crews may well be a secret key to the ability of an organization to continually renew itself. “Red teaming makes critical and contrarian thinking part of your company’s planning process...”2 The term “red team” is said to date back to the Prussian army and its use of war gaming techniques. One group of soldiers would serve as confederates and try to thwart the plans of another group of soldiers, looking for flaws, gaps, and weaknesses in the Prussian tactics and strat- egies. These war games would be played out with wooden blocks, and it is said that because the Prussian army wore blue uniforms, the opposing army would be designated with red wooden blocks. Since the days of the Prussians, red teaming has been a way for one group of people to try and disrupt the plans of other groups in a controlled manner, and to make strategic improvements based on what they learn. The goal of a red team, whether in business, first responders, the mili- tary, or sports, is to come up with “what if?” scenarios to challenge the establishment and throw them off their game. The objective of red teams and contrarian crews is not to be right all the time, but to identify and play out potentially devastating scenarios. What if we had to move a majority of our 12,000+courses online? What if the US Government makes it illegal to own cryptocurrency? What if China harnesses the power of quantum computing before NATO? Asking “what if?” questions, considering possible outcomes and alternatives, then making recommendations for adaptation is a powerful antidote to the potential for groupthink and the inertia of the status quo. When I caught up with Marcus Dimbleby, a vice president and partner within Hoffman’s Red Team Consulting group in their London office, on a Zoom call in April 2021, he had just finished facilitating a pre- mortem for a large company. In this, Dimbeby and I have common ground; I have also used this technique with critical projects. A pre- mortem is an exer- cise where the facilitator asks a product, project, or strategy team to
- 49. 36 Contrarians and Red Teams consider all the ways in which their initiative could fail. The facilitator can have the team imagine that it is, say, six months from now, and their work has failed so spectacularly that they have ended up in the news. The participants’ job is to identify the most likely reasons why that future failure happened. The group runs through the responses, votes on them, analyzes the top causes in more detail, then brainstorms ways to counteract these potential problems. (Note: There is also an exercise that is the reverse of this, namely the “pre- parade” where teams identify strengths to be leveraged.) This is an excellent example of the potential low- investment, high- reward use of contrarian crews. Marcus Dimbleby was one of the first people with whom I had talked who emphasized the need to limit the life of red teams. There are sev- eral reasons for this, of course, many of which were covered in previous chapters. As Hoffman notes in the book, “red teaming is most effective when the red team has permission to question the unquestionable, think the unthinkable, and challenged everything.”3 The longer a red team exists, not only are they more likely to be folded back into the establishment, but the opposite is also a possibility— they can grow to be hated by the rest of the organization.4 But if an organization is heading into a proverbial battle, whether launching a new service, taking on a large project, looking to acquire a new firm, assessing a disruptive technology, or attempting to be the first to market with a new product, a red team can prove invaluable. While contrarian crews can be helpful any time a plan of action needs to be challenged, they are especially valuable in times of momentous change. One group of analysts notes that, there is a pattern to the types of innovators that emerge from a crisis, linked to the types of assumptions that they overturn. Overturn an assumption, and the opportunities that emerge form the nucleus of a new company archetype for innovation.5 Crisis situations require divergent thinking. Complex and chaotic challenges require dissenters who can critique and challenge the ways the organization usually gets things done. The organization will need to mobilize crews of divergent and diverse individuals who can brain- storm, experiment, innovate, and learn about the dramatic changes in their immediate future. Dimbleby called it the idea of the “break glass team,” crews that would be ready- to- mobilize on very short notice to tackle difficult situations with divergent tools and techniques. What if we’re wrong? Here again we see the familiar refrain of the tension between the need to maintain the status quo while always looking for ways to evolve it.6
- 50. Contrarians and Red Teams 37 Efficiency and the fragility it engenders remain at odds with contrarian crews and the potential for resilience they create. According to some analysts, cognitive biases, groupthink, and habits that reinforce the estab- lishment contribute to the failure of an estimated 70% of all organiza- tional change initiatives.7 Organizations should mobilize an assortment of “what if?” crews on a regular basis, asking questions and running scenarios designed to think more constructively about unlikely yet impactful scenarios. Someone should actively challenge established assumptions and wonder what would happen if the organization is wrong in its outlook and assumptions. Authors Zolli and Healy suggest that “what’s needed is an inclusive way of thinking about various possible, probable, and prefer- able futures and their implications.”8 Eggars and Barlow remind us that, “the types of challenges people face in today’s world... Require solutions that involve thinking differently— radically differently— than we have ever before.”9 Organizations need to collect and analyze data, information, and narratives from a number of divergent sources in an effort to confront biases, groupthink, habits, and the status quo. Complex situations call for small, parallel experiments designed to probe the environment and make sense of the outcomes. If resilience is required, then so too will contrarian crews. Hans Rosling sums it up this way in this passage from Factfulness: [C] onstantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new informa- tion that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, dis- agree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world. I have been wrong about the world so many times. Sometimes, coming up against reality is what helps me see my mistakes, but often it is talking to, and trying to understand, someone with different ideas.10 Transition Every crew is, by nature and to some degree, a contrarian crew, and at least some of their members must embody contrarian tendencies. Cynics, dissidents, iconoclasts, and mavericks are all welcome— as long as they understand the proper bounds of their role in relation to the support of the organization. Contrarian crews themselves must also properly balance the tension between innovation and status quo. All this is cru- cially important because, as Shane Snow argues in his book Dream Teams: Groups that have a lot of cultural similarity stop searching for better solutions once they have solutions that work… Seven out of ten
- 51. 38 Contrarians and Red Teams American employees in companies with strong values hush up when their opinions are at odds with those of their superiors, according to research by the University of Southern California professor Warren Bennis. Requiring adherence to strong values, in other words, promotes organizational silence.11 Organizations, like people, are resistant to change and inclined to support the status quo. But change is nonetheless required. It is improbable that the mechanisms that can most effectively create the conditions for stra- tegic change will appear by themselves. Their existence and efficacy must arise from the right combination of culture, individuals, and leadership. Contrarian crews and red teams may prove essential mechanisms in building resilient organizations. Chapter 5 will wrap up the discussion of crews by bringing together a number of ideas from all chapters on crews as we revisit the work of The Ohio State University in early 2021. Notes 1 Bryce G. Hoffman. Red Teaming. Crown Business, 2017. p. 5. 2 Ibid. p. 50. 3 Ibid. p. 106. 4 Ibid. p. 231. 5 Jason Bello, Shaun Collins, Ralf Dreischmeier, and Ari Libarikian. “Innovating from Necessity: The Business- Building Imperative in the Current Crisis.” McKinsey Digital, April 2020. p. 3. 6 C.f., David Denyer. Organizational Resilience: A Summary of Academic Evidence, Business Insights and New Thinking. BSI and Cranfield School of Management, 2017. p. 24. 7 Jennifer Eggers and Cynthia Barlow. Resilience: It’s Not about Bouncing Back. Best Seller Publishing, 2019. p. 240. 8 Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Free Press, 2012. p. 270. 9 Jennifer Eggers and Cynthia Barlow. Resilience: It’s Not about Bouncing Back. Best Seller Publishing, 2019. p. 24. 10 Hans Rosling. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World— and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Book, 2018. p. 186. 11 Shane Snow. Dream Teams: Working Together without Falling Apart. Portfolio Publishers, 2018. p. 171.
- 52. DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-6 Chapter 5 The Recurrence of Crews A return to The Ohio State University Earlier, we saw how The Ohio State University was able to move from a few hundred to a few thousand online courses in just a few weeks. Part of the way they were able to accomplish such a remarkable feat was to create and mobilize crews. The individuals in these crews often self- selected and self- organized, setting their own daily objectives to achieve overarching goals. The members had to think beyond the normal, established, historical way classes had been taught for the last few centuries. They had to experiment with novel ways to get faculty, staff, and students on the same page and moving forward toward full remote teaching and learning. Entrepreneurial crews helped everyone to think differently about what students needed to continue learning and how they consumed content. Changes along these lines might not only lead to improved matriculation during COVID but also accelerate engagement, registration, retention, and tuition numbers in the future. Intrapreneurial crews helped departments to think differently about the way they managed their work and how they measured their outcomes. Changes along these lines might similarly lead to improved engagement, learning, registration, retention, and tuition in the years to come. Folks cast a wide net to obtain information from many different places but were also able to centralize the most important information for con- sistency, simplicity, and ease of access. These groups of people were “crews,” not teams, subcommittees, or official workgroups. They were not bound by hierarchical structure, titles, departments, or even the constraints of normal performance management; they were motivated for months on end by the challenges they faced, the inherent value they provided, and the meaning they derived from serving tens of thousands of students.
- 53. 40 The Recurrence of Crews Are crews really so important? It may seem strange that a book on building organizational resilience would begin with and spend so much time on an analysis of crews. After all, the nature and necessity of crews is not often brought to the fore when reading about resilience. However, there is something vitally important and ordinarily hidden about resilience that is more clearly disclosed when considering crews. While we cannot yet get a full picture without the information in the rest of this book, we can at least begin to see why crews are so important and what they say about the nature of organiza- tional resilience. • Specific deliverables v. broad direction of travel: The solutions to problems that are the result of dramatic change and deep complexity are unknowable in their specifics. When first confronted with these situations, no one can know what actions will bear fruit, and which will die on the vine. Successful solutions require deliberate trial and error; they will emerge with experimentation if they emerge at all. They will also require thinking differently than what the status quo instructs. The best an organization can do is to establish a general direction and overall objectives, recognizing that solutions may require alterations to the established order. As such, it will not be ingrained committees, but crews that are an organization’s best chance to find innovative ways to solve knotty problems in a vola- tile world. • What is v. what if? Most people by nature are concerned with understanding the way things are. Life is often challenging enough on its own just to figure out what, exactly, is happening on any given day in the office. But only by moving from considerations of what is to what could be will organizations be prepared to take advan- tage of change and opportunity? Asking “what if?” questions is a key strategy for resilience, and crews are the ones best positioned to critically ask and answer such questions. This is especially so during times of great disruption. Complex and chaotic challenges require innovators who can imagine different ways that the organization could operate to achieve different objectives. It can be threatening to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” Moreover, it may require crews of divergent individuals committed and empowered to think up mul- tiple potential pathways through the encroaching forest. • Working in the business v. working on the business: Patty Azzarello in Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking your Life differentiates between working “in” and working “on” the business. The former involves work to produce clear deliverables within established parameters while the latter
- 54. The Recurrence of Crews 41 involves work to enhance and evolve an organization. Committees, departments, teams, and the like generally function within standard operating procedures and hierarchical lines. Crews, however, operate outside of the normal constraints of the status quo. They stive to find ways to transform the organization, sometimes for the parts and sometimes for the whole. Entrepreneurial, intrapreneurial, and con- trarian crews can self- organize and self- direct themselves in innova- tive ways for innovative solutions. The more that effective solutions will lead to substantial losses within the organization, the more that crews will be needed. Building a resilient organization means laying a proper foundation within the organization where it is not unusual for crews to form, where individ- uals from different areas, backgrounds, circles, interests, ranks, and ways of thinking regularly come together to work on the business. Resilient organizations invest their capital to build a culture of experimenta- tion and encourage leaders to empower, mobilize, and leverage crews. Crews address both everyday complex problems and situations of sig- nificant change. This will be the norm for organizations that can survive for decades in a VUCA world by continually creating and implementing innovative solutions to complex problems. To purposefully build resilience, organizations must consciously con- sider what kinds of crews to prime, when to launch them, and when to disband them. Better yet, organizations should create the conditions in which crews could organically form, self- select, self- organize, self- direct, and then disband. In order to keep pace with the volatility of an ever- more- rapidly changing world, resilient organizations will need to employ entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial crews that focus on business building for new improvements, innovations, products, and services for new and existing markets. They will need dissenters, iconoclasts, and red teams to help achieve the proper balance between innovation and the status quo. Most organizations do not transform without resistance, often- times digging in their heels at precisely the time when significant change is most required. Leaders and executives must purposefully work to build the capabilities that allow for appropriate conflict, difference, disagree- ment, and opposition to strengthen the organization. Otherwise, sizable upheavals will come from competitors and damaging trends will nega- tively shape the future of the unprepared. Losses are part and parcel with dramatic change. Transformation is not a “one- and- done.” Evolution is a continual process that can be fought or embraced. This is an important lesson learned from the examination of resilient organizations. Resilient organizations build in the capabil- ities and mechanisms that will allow them to evolve as their environ- ments change. They welcome change. They are able to affect the delicate
- 55. Random documents with unrelated content Scribd suggests to you:
- 56. A LEGEND OF ST. NICHOLAS Nicholas heathen apparel aching jeweled suddenly sniveling kindred banquet anguish vanished giant
- 57. The tales of good St. Nicholas Are known in every clime; Told in painting, and in statues, And in the poet’s rhyme. In England’s Isle, alone, to-day, Four hundred churches stand Which bear his name, and keep it well Remembered through the land. And all the little children In England know full well This tale of good St. Nicholas, Which I am now to tell. The sweetest tale, I think, of all The tales they tell of him; I never read it but my eyes With tears begin to swim. There was a heathen king who roved About with cruel bands, And waged a fierce and wicked war On all the Christian lands. And once he took as captive A little fair-haired boy, A Christian merchant’s only son, His mother’s pride and joy. He decked him in apparel gay, And said, “You’re just the age To serve behind my chair at meat, A dainty Christian page.” Oh, with a sore and aching heart The lonely captive child Roamed through the palace, big and grand, And wept and never smiled.
- 58. d ept a d e e s ed And all the heathen jeered at him, And called him Christian dog, And when the king was angry He kicked him like a log. One day, just as the cruel king Had sat him down to dine, And in his jeweled cup of gold The page was pouring wine, The little fellow’s heart ran o’er In tears he could not stay, For he remembered suddenly, It was the very day On which the yearly feast was kept Of good St. Nicholas, And at his home that very hour Were dancing on the grass, With music, and with feasting, all The children of the town. The king looked up, and saw his tears; His face began to frown: “How now, thou dog! thy sniveling tears Are running in my cup; ’Twas not with these, but with good wine, I bade thee fill it up. “Why weeps the hound?” The child replied, “I weep, because to-day, In name of good St. Nicholas, All Christian children play; And all my kindred gather home, From greatest unto least, And keep to good St. Nicholas, A merry banquet feast.” The heathen king laughed scornfully:
- 59. The heathen king laughed scornfully: “If he be saint indeed, Thy famous great St. Nicholas, Why does he not take heed To thee to-day, and bear thee back To thy own native land? Ha! well I wot, he cannot take One slave from out my hand!” Scarce left the boastful words his tongue When, with astonished eyes, The cruel king a giant form Saw swooping from the skies. A whirlwind shook the palace walls, The doors flew open wide, And lo! the good St. Nicholas Came in with mighty stride. Right past the guards, as they were not, Close to the king’s gold chair, With striding steps the good Saint came, And seizing by the hair The frightened little page, he bore Him, in a twinkling, high Above the palace topmost roof, And vanished in the sky. Now at that very hour was spread A banquet rich and dear, Within the little page’s home To which, from far and near, The page’s mourning parents called All poor to come and pray With them, to good St. Nicholas, Upon his sacred day. Thinking, perhaps, that he would heal Their anguish and their pain,
- 60. And at poor people’s prayers might give Their child to them again. Now what a sight was there to see, When flying through the air, The Saint came carrying the boy, Still by his curly hair! And set him on his mother’s knee, Too frightened yet to stand, And holding still the king’s gold cup Fast in his little hand. And what glad sounds were these to hear, What sobs and joyful cries, And calls for good St. Nicholas, To come back from the skies! But swift he soared, and only smiled, And vanished in the blue; Most likely he was hurrying Some other good to do.
- 61. RAPHAEL OF URBINO I physical admiration torrent Urbino brilliancy inferior fresco Apennines Raphael of Urbino is called the prince of painters. And a true prince he was in physical beauty, in graciousness of manner, in kindness of soul, and in power to command the love and admiration of all people with whom he came in contact. It would almost seem that the gentleness of St. Francis himself had fallen upon him, for Raphael, too, was born among the Apennines near the old town of Assisi. The rugged mountains still rise hill upon hill to the distant blue sky. Assisi, almost deserted, may still be visited, and you may stand in the very house where Raphael was born. You will find it on a steep hillside in the little town of Urbino. Urbino is built upon a jutting mountain cliff beneath which is a rushing torrent. In the far distance one may see on a clear day the blue Mediterranean. Urbino was once a prosperous town over which a powerful duke ruled, but now it is a quaint village whose one treasure is the house on the steep hillside. Raphael’s father was Giovanni Santi, a painter of some ability. His mother was the daughter of a rich merchant. Raphael was born April 6, 1483. No shadow fell across the path of the child until he was eight years of age. Then a great sorrow befell him. His mother died. His father, anxious that the child should not miss a mother’s care, married again. His stepmother treated him with all tenderness, and
- 62. thus the child grew strong and beautiful in the bright Italian sunshine and the loving atmosphere of home. He had few companions besides his father and mother. He played much in his father’s studio, and like Angelo learned in babyhood to use the tools of art which later would bring him renown. In 1494, while the boy was still young, his second misfortune came. His father died. Raphael was left under the guardianship of his stepmother and his father’s brother, a priest. For a time nothing was done toward his further education. But an uncle who seemed to realize that the lad had unusual genius for painting at last gained permission to send him away to a master. He was placed under the instruction of Perugino, who, it is said, remarked, “Let him be my pupil; he will soon be my master.” Raphael remained in the studio of Perugino at Perugia nearly nine years. Other students were with him who afterwards became great artists. A master like Perugino would often receive many orders for pictures or frescoes which he could not execute alone. So the less important work would be left to students. This not only aided the artist, but it made it possible for students to show their power. If a young man had unusual talent, he was sure to seize this opportunity to show his ability and attract the master’s attention. Raphael’s earliest work was done to assist Perugino. After the death of Perugino, Raphael returned for a time to Urbino. Here he painted for the reigning duke St. George slaying the Dragon and St. Michael attacking Satan. Both of these pictures are now in the Louvre gallery at Paris. But Raphael wanted especially to see the pictures of Angelo and Leonardo, whose fame had spread to the most remote valleys of the rugged Apennines. So with a letter of introduction to the ruler of Florence, Raphael in 1504 started upon his travels. His letter, he knew, would insure him a welcome in Florence at least.
- 63. As he walked through the streets of this beautiful city he felt like a fairy prince in a land of magic. Now he stood beneath the bell tower which Giotto had designed, now he passed the wonderful bronze gates which Ghiberti had cast, and now he studied the pictures of Leonardo or Angelo which were in all the brilliancy of fresh color. New ideas crowded upon him, new inspiration roused him. He was sure he could do more, much more, than he had ever dreamed of doing before. Eagerly he began to paint, and within a few months three Madonnas were marked with his name. A fresco painting of the Last Supper, which was probably executed by him this same year, was discovered on the wall of a convent dining room in 1845. He had been gone not quite a year when he returned to Urbino to complete some work which he had before undertaken. The influence of Florence was seen at once in both color and form. He was a finer artist. All that northern Italy could offer, Raphael had now seen. But the art of Rome excelled the art of Florence. Angelo was at that very time hard at work upon the ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo in Milan had amazed Italy and the world by his Last Supper. He, too, was soon to be in Rome. Hither, in 1506, Raphael went. A young man of handsome, courtly appearance and gracious manners, with many friends and no enemies, fortune truly favored him! The Pope received him gladly and soon commissioned him to decorate the hall of the Vatican. Two of the greatest artists of any age were now working almost side by side, Michael Angelo and Raphael of Urbino. Often one or the other would stand by his rival and watch his brush. Yet neither ever spoke. Each admired the other and each was known to defend the other under the attacks of inferior artists. II
- 64. steadily influence devout favorite probably festival sleeves conception Raphael worked steadily in the Vatican hall. Perhaps the most pleasing of these frescoes is the one which shows the Church in heaven and the Church on earth. The fresco is divided into two sections. The upper one shows the Almighty Father in the midst of angels. Below Him is Christ enthroned, with the Virgin and St. John the Baptist. Beneath the throne is the Dove of the Holy Spirit. In the lower fresco appear St. John, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory. At No. 124 Via Coronari, near the St. Angelo bridge, is the four- story house where Raphael lived during his first four years in Rome. Raphael was admitted in 1514 into the Fraternity of the Body of Christ, and his many Madonnas of rare beauty were doubtless inspired by his devout spirit. During his stay in Rome Raphael set up a studio to which many students flocked. They loved him both as friend and master, and he was untiring in his efforts to instruct and inspire them. He was commissioned by the Pope with the task of making certain decorations for the Sistine Chapel. They were to take the form of tapestries with which the chapel would be adorned on great festival occasions. There were ten of these, all telling some Bible story in the life of Christ or one of His immediate followers. The last of the series is the Coronation of the Virgin. It shows Christ on his throne crowning the Madonna. The Father and the Holy Spirit are seen above and St. Jerome and St. John the Baptist below. As yet nothing has been said of the painting by which the name of Raphael is best known, the Sistine Madonna. It was painted in 1518 for the Benedictine Monastery of San Sisto at Piacenza. In 1754 it was purchased by Augustus III, Elector of Saxony, for forty thousand dollars. It was received in Dresden with great rejoicing, and the
- 65. throne of Saxony was moved to give it a suitable place. It is now in the Dresden gallery. Another favorite is the Madonna of the Chair. This shows the Madonna, seated, holding the child. “The dress of the mother is light blue; the mantle about her shoulder is green with red and willow- green stripes and a gold-embroidered border; her sleeves are red faced with gold at the wrists. A grayish-brown veil with reddish- brown stripes is wound around her head. The child’s dress is orange colored; the back of the chair is red.” Such is the description given by Grimm. At the time of his death Raphael was putting forth every effort to finish his noble conception of the Transfiguration. It is now, as he left it, in the Vatican. On the night of Good Friday, April 6, 1520, at the age of thirty- seven, Raphael died. In his beautiful home, where the people of Rome might do him honor, the unfinished Transfiguration beside him, in the midst of lighted tapers, he lay in state until the body was carried to the Pantheon. In the procession also was carried the great picture.
- 66. LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home— Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet, I do not ask to see The distant scene—one step enough for me. I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that Thou Shouldst lead me on. I loved to choose and see my path, but now Lead Thou me on! I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, Pride ruled my will: remember not past years. So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on, O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile. —Cardinal Newman.
- 67. PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, who also stripped him: and having wounded him went away leaving him half dead. And it chanced that a certain priest went down the same way: and seeing him, passed by. In like manner also a Levite, when he was near the place and saw him, passed by. But a certain Samaritan being on his journey, came near him: and seeing him was moved with compassion. And going up to him, bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine: and setting him upon his own beast brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two pence, and gave to the host, and said: Take care of him: and whatsoever thou shalt spend over and above, I at my return will repay thee. Which of these three in thy opinion was neighbor to him that fell among the robbers? —Luke x. 30-36.
- 68. Painting by Plockhorst The Good Samaritan
- 69. CONNOR MAC-NESSA—AN IRISH LEGEND siege tourney falconry anxious relief anguish tranquil crucify chieftain emerald generous vigorous
- 70. Loud roared the din of battle, fierce, Bloody and wild, With Ulster men and Connaught men The field was piled. Connor Mac-Nessa, Ulster’s King, In the mad fray Wounded to death and well-nigh spent And dying lay. A Druid came with healing balm Of herb and leaf, He poured it in the gaping wound, To give relief; The wound was healed, “Yet,” said the leech, “Beware, my Liege! Of war’s alarm or battle fray, Sally or siege; “No more o’er mere and fen with thee, Oh! noble king, Brave Knight and Lady fair will strive For bittern’s wing; No more thou’lt ride thy prancing steed After the doe, No more thou’lt tilt at tourney brave ’Gainst gallant foe; “For thee the fireside’s tranquil calm, Lest sudden rift Of wound break forth and cause thy death In anguish swift!” Quiet and calm, in war or peace, No more to roam, Connor Mac-Nessa, Ulster’s King, Abode at home.
- 71. One day, when woods were green and fair, And hearts were light, Swiftly the gleaming mid-day sun Grew dark as night; Black portents unto Erin fair It seemed to bring. “What means this, mighty Druid?” asked The anxious king. “Far, far away, across the sea,” The Druid said, “Jesu, the Christ, upon a cross Bends low His head. Their King upon the shameful tree, With mocking cry, And scornful gibe, the cruel Jews Now crucify.” King Connor cried, “What crime had this Man done, I pray?” “But to be good were crime enough For such as they, My King,” the answer came. “He was To death enticed, Then broke His tender, loving heart, This fair, white Christ!” A generous flush o’erspread his cheek, Mac-Nessa sprang Quick to his feet; his quivering voice In anger rang. “Ah! wicked deed! Ah! poor, white Christ! They murder Thee! Why didst thou not unto the King Of Erin flee? “Thy battles he would fight to death
- 72. Thy battles he would fight to death, Poor, guiltless One, Ulster’s great chieftain ne’er could see Injustice done!” Then dashed he from the hall and seized With vigorous hand His keen and sharp-edged clevy— A wondrous brand! Under the turquoise sky, upon The emerald turf, His anger raged like foaming crest Of frothy surf. He hacked and hewed the giant trees With his keen sword. “Thus would I slay Thy foes, poor Christ, With blood out-poured!” Then quickly his forgotten wound Sprung gaping wide. He reeled and fell: “I go to Thee, Oh! Christ!” he sighed, For the King Christ he loved unseen, With flowers bespread, Connor Mac-Nessa, Ulster’s King Lay cold and dead! —M. F. N.-R.
- 73. THE MARTYRDOM OF BLESSED JOHN FISHER message persuasion signify lieutenant apparel infirmity scaffold occasion forehead infinite tyrant solemnity It was very late in the night when the sentence was pronounced, and the prisoner was asleep. The lieutenant was unwilling to disturb his rest for that time, and so did not awaken him, but in the morning before five of the clock he came to him in his chamber in the Bell Tower, and found him yet asleep in his bed. He awakened the good father, and explained that he was come to him on a message from the king. Then, with some persuasion, he said that he should remember himself to be an old man, and that he could not expect by course of nature to live much longer. Finally he informed him that he was come to signify unto him that the king’s pleasure was he should suffer death that forenoon. “Well,” answered this blessed father, “if this be your errand, you bring me no great news. I have long expected this message. And I most humbly thank the king’s majesty that it has pleased him to rid me from all this worldly business, and I thank you also for your tidings. But I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, when is mine hour that I must go hence?” “Your hour,” said the lieutenant, “must be nine of the clock.” “And what hour is it now?” said he. “It is now about five,” said the lieutenant. “Well, then,” said he, “let me by your patience sleep an hour or two, for I have slept very little this night. My rest has been very
- 74. much broken, not for any fear of death, I thank God, but by reason of my great infirmity and weakness.” “The king’s further pleasure is,” said the lieutenant, “that you should not talk much. Especially you must not say anything touching his majesty, whereby the people should have any cause to think ill of him or of his proceedings.” “For that,” said the father, “you shall see me order myself well. For, by God’s grace, neither the king, nor any man else, shall have occasion to mislike my words.” The lieutenant then departed from him, and so the prisoner, falling again to rest, slept soundly two hours and more. After he was waked again he called to his man to help him up. Then he commanded him to take away the shirt of hair (which he was accustomed to wear on his back) and to convey it secretly out of the house. Then he bade him bring a clean white shirt, and all the best apparel he had, as cleanly bright as possible. While he was dressing himself, he appeared to have more curiosity and care for the fine and cleanly wearing of his apparel that day than had ever been his wont before. His man asked him what this sudden change meant, since he must know well enough that he must put off all again within two hours and lose it. “What of that?” said the father. “Dost thou not mark that this is our wedding day, and that it is necessary for us to use more cleanliness for solemnity of the marriage?” About nine of the clock the lieutenant came again to his prison. Finding him almost ready, he said that he was now come for him. “I will wait upon you straight,” said the father, “as fast as this thin body of mine will give me leave.” Then he turned to his man and said, “Reach me my fur cape to put about my neck.” “Oh, my lord,” said the lieutenant, “why need you be so careful for your health for this little while? Your lordship knoweth that it is not much above an hour.”
- 75. “I think no otherwise,” said this blessed father. “But in the meantime I will keep myself as well as I can, till the very time of my execution. I have, I thank our Lord, a very good desire and willing mind to die at this present time, and so trust of His infinite mercy and goodness He will continue this desire. Nevertheless, I will not willingly hinder my health for one minute of an hour. Indeed, I will prolong the same as long as I can by such reasonable ways and means as Almighty God hath provided for me.” Then, taking a little book in his hand, which was a New Testament lying by him, he made a cross on his forehead and went out of his prison door with the lieutenant. He was so weak that he was scarce able to go down the stairs, and at the stairs-foot he was taken up in a chair between two of the lieutenant’s men. These carried him to the Tower gate to be delivered to the sheriffs of London for execution. When they were come to the farthest wall of the Tower, they rested there with him a space; and an officer was sent on before to know in what readiness the sheriffs were to receive him. As they were resting here, the father rose out of his chair, and stood on his feet, leaning his shoulder to the wall. Then, lifting his eyes towards heaven, he opened his little book in his hand, and said, “O Lord, this is the last time that ever I shall open this book; let some comfortable place now chance unto me whereby I thy poor servant may glorify Thee in this my last hour.” Then he opened the book, and the first thing that came to his sight were these words: “This is life everlasting, that they may know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. I have glorified Thee upon earth, I have finished the work Thou gavest me to do.” Having read these words, he shut the book together and said, “Here is even learning enough for me to my life’s end.” The sheriff was now ready for him. So he was taken up again by certain of the sheriff’s men, and, guarded by many armed men, he was carried to the scaffold on Tower Hill, otherwise called East
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