A major indicator that you are leading a resilient organization is that you know and create redundancy in critical areas of your organization. Critical redundancies can and should exist in your operation's machinery, knowledge, and skills. While the ideas of "lean...
Last week I wrote about connectivity as a key contributor to strengthening resilience in a living system. When our organizational systems are interconnected and connected to their external environment, they are more adaptive, innovative, and evolving. These behaviors...
Another principle of resilient systems is connectivity, the state of being interconnected. Resilient systems flow. If we wanted to understand a resilient system, we would look for a few things: The patterns the system creates. How the system flows between its...
Last week I started writing about resilience and how learning helps systems and individuals strengthen their resilience. We carry a lot of unexamined assumptions about how to lead organizations. Sometimes these assumptions actually make our systems less resilient,...
Resilience systems are highly attuned to learning. In nature, species and ecosystems evolve with information and feedback. In human organizations and communities, resilience is linked to their ability to seek out information, curate it, and make meaning out of...
I have been reading the resilience literature to create a simple framework that would be easy to grasp while providing a directional heading for our organizations and ourselves. This is the first of a series of blogs that reflect this theme -- building resilience in...
On one of my many trips to Ireland, I traveled to western counties. The green fields amazed me, and the gardens in front of cottages and wild hedgerows were stunning. As I spent time there, I often experienced what locals call “soft rain.” These soft rains are light...
"The moon is always full" is a phrase that comes from a story in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. I was reminded of this story when writing about softness within organizations last week, and I felt it was valuable to revisit Suzuki's ideas once again after...
Organizations often scoff when something doesn’t have a perceived value or purpose in a “lean, mean and profitable” organization. For example, emotional intelligence, empathy, relationships, and building trust are soft skills. They aren’t valued or connected to...
The challenges we face in our lives and our world seem to keep mounting. With each passing month, the list grows longer. As a result, our belief in our capacity to meet these challenges can sometimes be hopeful and, at other times, overwhelming. I believe we are in a...