Module 9 Building Innovative & Resilient Teams

PRESENTER

Diverse Teams = Innovation?

No-one questions that diversity is a critical

factor in modern organizational

management.

However, research has provided mixed

empirical results when it comes to the

benefits and negative effects of diversity

(or lack thereof).

Scholars have also come up with a variety

of terms to analyze diversity.

Innovation,

creativity,

adaptability

Implementing

and

integrating

disparate

ideas

Heterogeneous

Groups More Likely Less Likely

Homogeneous

Groups Less Likely More Likely

Some general statements

No one-size-fits-all recipe for diversity:

leveraging diversity is still a struggle.

Look at both individuals and their

organizations: we need to analysis and

prepare both to leverage diversity.

Diversity as a proxy for change

readiness: we believe that diverse

organization are more resilient.

Diversity at various levels

Diversity can be spoken about at

three different levels:

Organizational diversity

Program diversity

Individual diversity

Resilience

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Resiliency – the Power to Bounce Back

• Resiliency is about flexibility and adaptation.

• Resiliency can be an organizational design feature.

• Resiliency is about process rather than structure.

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Resiliency in the public sector

• Resiliency – the ability to quickly and effectively deploy adaptive change management strategies – can be challenging for public organizations that face

• Limited autonomy

• Longer change times

The Public Sector should provide a

professional ‘steading hand’ balancing

governments’ tendency to ‘follow the

votes.’

Resiliency vs. Inertia

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Resiliency: adaptive

capacity that maintains

the goals of the

organization as

paramount.

Inertia: rejection of

adaptation in favor of

maintaining (mainly)

process-based

continuity.

Resiliency is an organizational feature in

the same way any agent-based activity is

organizational: 1. It passes through the activity of agents within the

organization;

2. It is affected and affects organizational culture;

3. Leadership is fundamental in fostering resiliency;

4. Because resiliency is about innovation it is

inherently about accepting potential mistakes.

Unpacking Resiliency

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To assess risks, to anticipate their

shocks and mitigate, avoid, or prevent it

To plan and prepare for disruption, in a

fashion that protects the organisation

To adapt or respond to and manage

shocks successfully, hence stopping the

cascading effects of disruption

To recover to a new “normal” state after a

shock

The Capabilities of Resilience

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Resilience is an organizational feature in

the same way any agent-based activity is

organizational: 1. It passes through the activity of agents within the

organization;

2. It is affected and affects organizational culture;

3. Leadership is critical in fostering resilience;

4. Because resilience is about innovation it is

inherently about accepting potential mistakes.

Unpacking Resilience

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Resilience and Risk I Mitigate risk by having

options Not the most varied diet

Resilience is about risk

mitigation and risk

prevention.

A resilient organization is

an organization with

options.

Environmental shocks will

trigger challenges

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Cute, but not resilient

Organizations that encourage risk taking

perform well.

Members of these organization however

must holds values of service, stewardship,

results and honesty.

Resilience however needs tools for an

organization

Resilience and Risk II

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Resilient organizations tend to create:

Redundancy

Reliability™

Anticipation

™Preparedness

™Adaptive capacity

™Learning capacity

Characteristics of the Resilient Organization

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Do a self assessment

How well do you practice resilience? (i.e., how well

have we bounced back, how do we anticipate,

respond, monitor and learn from challenges)

Practice the discipline of emergence

How well do we pick up on early signals of risk? Is

there a program in place for that?

Design metrics that promote resilience

Do we monitor

• Statistics

• Patterns of practice

• Stories

The Tools of Resilience

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Promote situational awareness

Do we have prior-to-action and post-action review

practices? Are they applied consistently? Are the

results of the analysis shared within the organization?

Build the capacity for adaptive learning

throughout the organization

Adaptive problems must be tackled by questioning

our assumptions and change the environmental

conditions that generated them. The latter include

strategy, structure, policy process, culture and

behaviour.

The Tools of Resilience

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