Excellent thoughts, Dave, thanks. Gonna link back later today and share a similar example to your chef that I use--resourcefulness, cousin of resilience. Best, Mark

Dave

I am sitting in my country house in Ireland on sabbatical contemplating the universe and happened upon this comment about organisational resilience.

Let me add a thought or two.

Organisations today are looking to adopt the principles introduced into successful consulting firms in the early 1990s and franchises more generally. The term I am hearing more frequently is 'industrialising' their business. The common method for this is business process management, which I might add has come a long way from early BPR attempts last decade that went so wrong.

Now I don't want to enter into debate on the application or success of BPM but rather note that as organisations become more networked, as their edges become fuzzier, through outsourcing / the use of contract labour / the increased use of consultants and advisers / and more generally the virtualisation of the enterprise, resilience is more difficult to achieve using traditional command and control methods.

I believe that BPM is trying to achieve greater resilience but in many cases is actually depleting innovation opportunities. Innovation, in service industries in particular, often occurs at the extremities of the organisation, at the service points. I further suggest that organisational resilience will improve if there are pathways for these service innovations to travel from the extremities to the core of the organisation.

Another note on organisational extremities is that they may be outside the formal organisational entity - sitting with the outsourcers, contractors, consultants and advisers.

I had a look at the program of the innovation conference you are speaking at soon and noted that the only person who comes close to speaking about service innovation is yourself. Given the prevalence of the service economy, shouldn't such a discussion take precedence?

Glad to see you enjoying Australia and sorry to have missed you this visit.

regards
Greg Timbrell

Great set of comments Greg, and you are right about the conference. I can think of few better places to have a sabbatical that an Irish house ....

I enjoy cooking, and I use recipe books as sources of inspiration rather than rule sets. Thus distinguishing chefs from recipe users makes sense to me based on my personal experience.

But the separation of stability from resilience does not work so well for me, again based on my personal experience (and perhaps my engineering education). I think I understand the warning about sapping vigor, but I have to throw out my usual working definitions of stability and resilience, and I find that jarring.

I often think in terms of feedback systems. To me, resilience ensures stability. To me, resilience suggests a system's ability to return to a stable state after a disruption.

There are probably a couple of factors implicit in my description. One is the time frame. In my description the time frame is long enough to include temporary, transient disruption. Resilience, then, is a short term contribution to long term stability.

The other implicit factor, I think, is that to me stability can be a neutral, value-free description. Some systems stabilize in healthy, beneficial states, and their resilience ensures that they stay healthy and beneficial. Some systems stabilize in unhealthy, harmful states, and their resilience tends to prolong their sickness. The distinction that matters most to me, then, is "healthy" or "harmful".

In seeking a sustainable human culture, I really want to see a social system that is resilient enough to remain stable in a healthy state.

I guess that's a different perspective on this vocabulary. Perhaps it will be useful if y'all encounter an audience that resists the descriptions presented in item 1.

Cheers

I must admit, that is the first time someone has challenged the stability/resilience distinction and its common in ecology and elsewhere. The substantial point being made (regardless of language) is that if you focus on creating stability (here interpreted in the context of predictability and control) you reduce the evolutionary capacity of the system. However some of the points you raise link to issues such as identity (ie what is the state to which the system returns).

So I don't think you are arguing with the point, but with the language. Understood and will endeavor to make my use clearer in the future.