Resilience Means Anticipating Chaos, Not Just Surviving It!

By Hubert Saint-Onge

This article on individual and organizational resilience is the fifth and last of a series on dealing with an external environment with high turbulence and ambiguity.

We first focused on how to read a highly turbulent and unpredictable business environment by revealing the hidden patterns of market dynamics with tools such as "sense-making", a powerful way to uncover hidden market patterns. The second and third articles showed how the Emergent Strategy framework integrates the 'strategy development' and 'strategy execution' cycles with learning connectors, bridging the two cycles. This learning elucidates market dynamics and generates insights that dynamically reshape strategy.  

The fourth article explores how learning during execution catalyzes strategic evolution and innovation in unpredictable environments.  The Emergent Strategy framework challenges the traditional top-down approach by integrating strategy development with execution, treating them as a continuous, adaptive loop. It uses real-time learnings from the execution phase, such as customer feedback or market trends, to continuously refine and sharpen overall direction with rapid experimentation, learning, and constant adaptation. The fifth article focuses on how all of this can be achieved while reinforcing the resilience of individuals and organizations to learn, develop, and grow as they apply new frameworks and processes in challenging times. This last article on resilience is woven through the framework outlined in the previous articles' sense-making and learning activities, which contribute significantly to building resilience.    

These articles represent a comprehensive guide for individuals and organizations to thrive amid ambiguity and uncertainty.

Introduction: Defining resilience as a dynamic capability.  

Economic shifts, technological disruption, and geopolitical instability characterize today's volatile world. Resilience is the capacity to withstand, adapt, and recover from disruptions, personal stress, or organizational upheaval. It is not a static trait but a dynamic capability, shaping an ongoing adaptive process that enables individuals and organizations to anticipate, respond to, and recover from disruptions in changing environments. Unlike most other static capabilities, dynamic capabilities support adaptation.

This article explores resilience across two dimensions: individual and organizational. For individuals, it entails emotional stamina, adaptability, and proactive problem-solving. It involves structural flexibility, a strong culture, and strategic foresight for organizations. These two dimensions are interwoven and reinforce one another.

 Today, resilience is less about rigid structures and more about fluid adaptability. For individuals, resilience is adapting well to adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of tension, such as family or personal relationship problems, serious health problems or situations, and job or financial stressors. In this case, resilience means "rebounding" from a challenging experience: coming out well and in better shape. The traditional view of individual resilience was bouncing back from crises, while the modern perspective goes beyond grit to include emotional agility, cognitive flexibility, and purpose-driven drive.  

Organizational resilience has traditionally been seen as the capacity of organizations to absorb changes and disruptions, both internal and external, without affecting profitability. All organizations face crises and adverse events, and each responds in a particular way to the environment. A more contemporary view is to develop adaptive capabilities, such as agility in decision-making, flexibility in resource allocation, and the ability to pivot quickly in response to changing market conditions. These capabilities allow organizations to anticipate, pivot, and strategize to grow through volatility. Organizations can reap extra benefits from unforeseen and adverse circumstances by developing rapid adaptation processes. Some consider resilient organizations to be getting more vigorous because they see a crisis as an opportunity to survive, while others, less resilient, are fading.

The New Normal of Cumulative Complexity

Understanding the concept of cumulative complexity empowers us to navigate the compounding, self-reinforcing effects of market changes over time. What initially emerges as incremental advancements—particularly in technology, supply chains, or global networks—interact and amplify one another over time. These changes build on prior developments to create cascading impacts across interconnected systems. For example, breakthroughs in AI, cloud computing and IoT advance individually and converge to accelerate automation, data sharing, and cross-sector dependencies. Minor disruptions in one domain ripple outward to magnify systemic complexity and unpredictability. With the emergence of more powerful technology, our business environments rapidly become more interdependent and increasingly complex.

In the broader external environment, waves of abrupt changes build on one another because of the intrinsic levels of interdependence propelled by volatility stemming from interconnected issues amplifying disruptions and ambiguity in the social, political and business environments. Socio-political polarization and climate-related disasters add to this picture. Taken by storm, organizations apply siloed responses to multifaceted problems only to worsen the situation. The adaption challenges continue to become demanding, highlighting the need for proactive resilience. Businesses and societies face a dynamic where the adaptation required is no longer linear but exponential. This places unprecedented pressure on the resilience and strength of organizations. Here's a scenario illustrating the cumulative impact of disruptions on organizations operating in a complex environment:

New tariffs are being applied to exports to the US from a Canadian manufacturing company. It is unclear what customers' reactions will be to increased costs. Clients are cancelling long-planned projects because of cost increases or market unpredictability. The unstable order stream severely affects the global supply chain and interferes with the operations of several global plants and their on-time delivery. Overlapping disruptions with cumulative complexity amplify the stress and uncertainty experienced by employees. As their resilience is put to the test, several teams turn inwards and operate in siloes which in turn further degrades company performance.     

Resilience-aware leaders would recognize that this downward spiral needs to be addressed by:

a)    Bringing the team together to assess the situation and build shared resolve to realize what they would aspire to achieve working together ideally;

b)    Building trust and team coherence to achieve the turn around;  

c)     Supporting the well-being of individual team members as required;

d)    Helping team members to shift from passively feeling victimized and to rekindle commitment;

e)     Prioritizing activities and allocating work accordingly;

f)     Partnering more closely with other functions in the country and globally to address challenges as they encounter them;

g)    Changing the team's tone from negative to positive by celebrating every win, however small.

As our business environments become more complex, the only way to protect businesses from the inevitability of cascading disruption is to urgently and proactively embed practices that build long-term resilience in their organizations. Proactive resilience is not just a suggestion; it's necessary in today's rapidly changing and interconnected world.  

The essential enablers for building and preserving resilience.

Several key principles in recent years have emerged from the significant body of work on what ensures greater resilience.

a.     A strong sense of purpose: A sense of purpose beyond oneself motivates one to persist through adversity. When individuals connect their efforts to a larger personal or organizational mission, they are inspired to navigate setbacks with clarity and commitment. This sense of purpose is not just a nice-to-have; it's a crucial element in building and preserving resilience.

• A sense of purpose provides a strong foundation for resilience. When individuals connect their efforts to a larger mission, whether personal or organizational, they gain the motivation to persist through adversity. Finding meaning in hardship helps people "bounce forward" rather than merely recover. For organizations, aligning teams with a shared purpose fosters collective grit, enabling them to navigate setbacks with clarity and commitment.  

b.     Confidence: When people feel confident taking risks and expressing ideas, they aren't afraid to fail and can better adapt to rapid, cumulative change.

• Psychological safety contributes significantly to resilience. Resilience thrives in psychologically safe environments where people can take risks, voice concerns, and admit mistakes. This openness reduces the fear of failure, encouraging experimentation and learning. 

c.      Cognitive flexibility:  Flexible thinking and being open to re-evaluating one's beliefs fosters adaptability and allows individuals and organizations to pivot when faced with challenges.

• Individuals and teams need the ability to rethink and revise assumptions as events unfold constantly and more is discovered about previously hidden patterns. It is essential to cultivate a "rethinking muscle," where individuals and teams regularly question strategies and adapt.

• The ability to reframe challenges, such as seeing a loss as a pivot point rather than a dead end. This mindset turns despair into opportunity. Resilient organizations prioritize agility over rigid plans, treating uncertainty as a catalyst for innovation.

d.     Adaptive Leadership and Culture: A resilient culture is one in which adaptability, learning, and innovation are embedded in the organizational DNA.

• Such a culture encourages employees to embrace change and view challenges as opportunities for growth. They are confident they will be supported even though their valiant efforts might not succeed.  

• Adaptive leaders with strong convictions can pause to examine evidence shedding light on new market patterns and pointing in a different direction than the one they were previously committed to pursuing. They can suspend disbelief long enough to listen to other points of view, reflect on them, and explore different pathways to their ultimate goals. They can hold onto both drive and exploration at once.    

e.      Strong social connections: A strong sense of community and support is key to overcoming perceived adversity.

• Collaborative networks contribute to enhancing adaptability. Both individuals and organizations need strong relationships to bounce back from stressful experiences or dead-ended pursuits and re-engage without hesitation because they feel unconditionally strong support from those around them. Because of these experiences, resilient individuals seek and offer help freely, creating reciprocal relationships that buffer stress. For organizations, fostering collaboration builds trust and shared responsibility, ensuring no one faces crises alone

Intentionally putting in place proactive resilience mechanisms.

Proactive resilience builds adaptive capacity by preparing to handle challenges before they emerge using planned approaches and processes rather than just reacting. This approach to resilience is underutilized but critical in today's volatile world. An example of a proactive resilience strategy was NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, which anticipated planetary defense by studying how to deflect asteroids. Even if it was ultimately canceled, it exemplifies strategic foresight.    

Here are examples of these practices:

a.     Implementing anticipatory practices: Institutionalizing foresight tools such as scenario planning and horizon scanning to identify future risks and opportunities. For instance, Shell has used scenario planning to predict societal patterns and energy transitions. The Singapore government uses foresight teams to prepare for geopolitical risks and economic shifts. Although human judgment remains critical, AI and data analytics have shown that they can identify patterns before humans notice them.

b.     Adopting highly effective change management practices: Creating an environment that enables flexibility by maintaining high resilience through any change implementation. People learn to trust that change initiatives will be managed in a manner that enhances their confidence and effectiveness. For instance, employees trust that they will be consulted about the change process and that their input will be considered.

c.      Being ready to manage disruptions as they emerge: Proactively preparing and communicating the effective governance, roles/responsibilities and ways of formulating contingency plans to meet adversity and disruptions before they arise. Google's Project Aristotle estimated that teams that discuss potential risks are more likely to avoid crises.  

d.     Recognizing and rewarding adaptive behaviours: Organization members should exercise self-initiative when they need to acknowledge a client's points of view and, if appropriate, consider it.

e.      Leadership modelling: Leadership plays a crucial role in quickly modelling adaptability and setting the tone for the rest of the organization when encountering adverse conditions. Mental models play a key role: curiosity, openness to feedback, comfort with finding meaning in undefined situations, vague pattern signs, and ambiguity. McKinsey's research on decision-making biases warns that overconfident leaders often dismiss risks, while humble leaders are more likely to consider 'black swan scenarios.' It also stands to reason that humble leaders are more likely to seek diverse perspectives and question their assumptions: both attributes are critical for spotting weak signals of disruption. Leaders who admit they "don't know everything" create cultures where early warnings are surfaced, not suppressed. Interestingly, McKinsey surveys also indicate that teams led by humble leaders are 30% more likely to allocate resources to long-term resilience.

f.      Building stakeholder coalitions: It is helpful to develop proactive stakeholder coalitions that include suppliers, clients, and industry advisors to share intelligence on market trends and potential market developments. Taking advantage of the interdependence between those involved may open entirely new but relevant vistas in the future.

The possible outcomes of building resilience

It is crucial to distinguish between reactive resilience (coping after encountering adversity) and proactive resilience (preparing for challenges), where teams anticipate potential failures and devise contingency plans. Resilient organizations that confidently face the future are better equipped to take on challenges in times of ambiguity.  

Strategic Foresight:

Resilience makes strategic foresight possible by providing the foundational strength that enables proactive adaptation. It's less about prediction and more about preparedness. It creates the mental space needed when disruptions and ambiguity put organizations under severe pressure.

a.     Experienced leaders who sense that the organization supports them will take a systemic and disciplined approach to anticipating, exploring, and preparing for multiple possible futures. They will identify and analyze weak signals of change using trend analysis and scenario planning tools.    

b.    Teams that foresee where things can go wrong will be more alert to recognize what is happening and ready to apply effective recourse. For instance, 'premortem' exercises can be helpful in this regard.

c.     Leaders in these organizations will be better able to assess different future developments and ensure that the strategies they are considering are robust across various scenarios.

Emergent strategies and structures:

The organization transforms itself with the environment, developing new techniques, structures, and capabilities to parallel the evolution of the fast-changing marketplace.

a.     Beyond catching up, it adopts new perspectives, assumptions, structures, and processes that will allow it to keep pace with the market leaders. Sense-making and real-time learning from execution generate the insights that make this possible. Staying on top of market developments will avoid the loss of confidence that comes with not knowing what is happening in the market.    

b.    Renewed capabilities allow the organization to develop and execute strategies at the forefront of the new directions emerging in the market. These organizations then have the potential to transform themselves by adopting new perspectives and building new approaches to the market. A resilient organization can not only learn from its experience in the market but can ultimately shape it. As a result, this organization can disrupt its competitors and outpace them. When this happens, resilience becomes a strategic business asset. 

Conclusions

Resilience is often seen as something to reach for when experiencing difficulty, whether as individuals or organizations. The point of this article is to show how vital resilience is to the health and success of individuals and organizations. It is not a passive trait but a dynamic capability that helps to anticipate, withstand, adapt to, and recover from disruptions. Resilience is the foundation of true strength, allowing individuals and organizations to face challenges and emerge stronger.

The interplay between individual and organizational resilience is crucial in turbulent times. The strength of an organization's resilience depends on the vitality of both these dimensions. With the organization's support, individuals must learn to remain resilient through reversals to gain the insights and the strength to overcome challenges.  

For individuals and organizations, resilience makes the difference between collapsing under pressure and emerging stronger. As a dynamic capability, resilience allows bending under pressure but prevents breaking. Learning to be resilient is fundamental and best seen as existential.