Building Resilience
As the world is imagining increasingly more of a future that is more resilient, we brought together excellent academics and practitioners to reflect on their experiences and research on how resilience can be built. Check out below our reflection session on our "Building Resilience" podcast sponsored by Organization Design Community, and make sure to hear insights shared by our guests.
The Log of Resilience
Resilience Alliance (www.resiliencealliance.org) is a highly influential organization in resilience research, which offers great perspectives and insights into resilience. One feature to be found on their website is the Threshold Database, a database documenting more than 71 socio-ecological and 32 ecological systems, their attractive states, and influential factors leading to resilience or lack of it. Interestingly, the phenomena documented range spatially from local to global and temporally from days to centuries. We see that most of the systems are related to fisheries, forests, and farming, which play a crucial role in the world economy and are relevant for sustainability.
However, once we enter the social realm, such a database is difficult to find. Anybody willing to get informed about social instances where an organization has demonstrated resilience needs to go through great efforts to have a general overview of the world of resilience out there. This Log is created to offer a dataset of observations of resilience. Throughout my research, I came across many works which offer many examples of organizational resilience. Below you can find a developing table. Currently, all examples are presented as they are in the corresponding works; additional information will be collected later.
For a full interactive model of my literature review, visit orgresilience.pythonanywhere.com.
Organization | Shock | Impact | Mechanism | Referred in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Fedex | - | - | Every evening, 20-25 aircraft in the domestic system fly to Memphis with 60% capacity to recover "at risk" cargo | Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) "Managing the Unexpected" |
Nokia | 2000 Supplier facility destroyed by fire | Competitor Ericsson lost $400m | Search for alternative supplies | Fiksel (2015) "Resilient by Design" |
L Brands | 2002 PMA-ILWU Dispute - West Coast Port Lockout | Loss of sales $1b per day for US companies | Daily calls with associates, shipping ahead of schedule, rerouting products, airborne freight | Fiksel (2015) "Resilient by Design" |
DHL | 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland | Air cargo shipments grounded for several months | Shift airplanes towards southern hubs, use truck delivery, stay in contact with customers | Fiksel (2015) "Resilient by Design" |
GM | 2011 Fukushima tsunami | Competitors needed two months to resume production | Focused war rooms set up, 118 problematic components identified, search for alternative supplies | Fiksel (2015) "Resilient by Design" |
Cisco | 2011 Fukushima tsunami | - | Focused war rooms set up, decision-making centralized, communications with customers | Fiksel (2015) "Resilient by Design" |
Fedex | 2012 Hurricane Sandy | - | Rent fuel tankers due to limited commercial gas stations | Fiksel (2015) "Resilient by Design" |
Nestlé | Climate change | - | Cooperate with local coffee farmers | Fiksel (2015) "Resilient by Design" |