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Corporate resilience determines if the company can effectively leverage feedback mechanisms, including raw data. It uses internal assets and competencies. It employs strategies and human resources to respond to opportunities, changes, and perceived threats in the environment. It influences if a company is able to achieve & sustain a competitive advantage. As a result, Corporate Resilience is a Competitive Advantage that can differentiate industry laggards from industry leaders.

When corporate resilience is targeted as a competitive strategic imperative, terms such as “business development” are often used. Words like “sales goals,” “business growth,” or “product development” are common. Each of these targets requires corporate agility.

It requires responsiveness to changing customer requirements. They also need relevant and targeted information. Additionally, we need to update existing tooling, processes, and best practices. This is necessary to better meet changing stakeholder needs. Unfortunately, these secondary competencies and strategic assets are less readily embraced within the corporate lexicon with rigid and predictable consequences.

Setting the Foundation

Corporate resilience requires more than delivering more and more products and services. It’s about owning the competencies, tools, processes, information, and other strategic assets needed to keep stakeholders, customers, and employees engaged. It requires a fully integrated and adaptive business model.

This model acknowledges and builds upon the inherent linkages between corporate resilience, profitability, quality, and innovation.

The following essay discusses a few of the more common models used to support innovation, creativity, and resilience. Unfortunately, many of these are executed poorly. This essay will attempt to briefly highlight why this is the case. Suggestions are made at the end of the essay for strengthening corporate resiliency and improving the company’s competitive advantage.

Resilience in Business

Resilience theory examines why some individuals and companies can adapt and bounce back. They do so despite encountering many hardships. Others, however, experience deteriorating performance, morale, and impact. This research explores what skills, resources, and tools are used to strengthen resilience. The findings are then used to inform strategies for working with individuals, communities, and companies (the latter a recent application).

When seeking to strengthen resilience (and corporate agility), a common question arises. Is resilience available to everyone despite varying contexts (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs)? Or does a foundation need to exist to achieve resilience (Herzberg’s Hygiene Factors)? If a foundation is required than what are the skills, resources, tools, and assets needed to begin building resilience?

Resiliency theory can also be extended to governments, cities, and corporations. This helps evaluate economy drivers, business models, and policy options. The goal is to drive economic, business, and social resiliency.

The smallest unit of influence is the individual. However, exploring further the interconnection between the individual and surrounding systems is still necessary. Identifying and understanding these linkages is crucial if the quality of these relationships, and their objectives, is to be sustained.

Limitations of Resilience in Practice

Expecting resilience in every context is a misunderstanding of the research. This is an argument against how the theory is currently applied in practice. That understanding what strengthens resilience for one group is not the same as understanding what limits resilience for another. That resilience is not equally available to every individual, group, or context.

Resilience is not inherently equal for all individuals, groups, and contexts. This question is partially answered at the individual level. It is also addressed at the systemic level. What evades discussion is how do systems contribute or limit resilience. The question is not why individual resilience differs. It is how different systems contribute to various responses in shared contexts.

This argument argues against a ‘one size fits all’ application of resilience theory. It proposes that resilience should not be expected in every situation. That the system has more influence than the individual in determining resilience. Instead of expecting resilience in most (if not all) situations, resilience should be expected to deteriorate under certain circumstances.

In contrast to how the model is often applied, resiliency theory needs to be analyzed at the individual level. It also needs examination at the systemic level. This approach helps to better understand linkages and identify effective public and private policy. Such analysis can effect sustainable improvements. The pros & cons of a ‘one size fit all’ resilience model need to be considered carefully when designing interventions.

In teams, for example, resilience is crucial. It involves facing unethical decision making, ineffective processes, and low-quality resources. Others are unavailable training and tools, and inadequate leadership. These factors can lead to low quality. They also affect productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Some groups will accept these conditions whereas others will strike and seek to unionize or boycott a company. The intervention resulting from this analysis will depend on assigning blame to the individual. It also depends on expanding the analysis to include public and private systems.

The challenge is created by moralizing individual resilience. This occurs when determining ‘good fit.’ It is realized in the policies and strategies that are then suggested. These often target the individual instead of group barriers. Context and institutional barriers that initially limited the development of resilience within that specific context are also overlooked.

Reinforcing Continuous Improvement

A new theory of resilience emphasizes not just pushing through hardship and scarce resources. It is also about enduring stress, learning, and challenges to the status quo. Additionally, it involves sustaining change despite facing multi-systemic barriers. It emphasizes the interdependency between the individual, policy, and systems. This occurs in its identification, evaluation, and effort to implement strategies for improvement.

When combined with change theory, the study of individual and systemic resilience is recognized as an asset. It aids in undergoing self-reflection and learning from past mistakes. It also helps in testing and improving existing products & services. Additionally, it supports continuous improvement at both the individual and systems levels. Resilience is now less about expelling those who buckle under unhealthy pressures. It is more about pulling together shared knowledge and experience. This collective effort aims at pursuing quality across systems.

The goal is to recognize when the current environment is ‘fit for purpose’. Alternatively, it may need to undergo significant change. This transformation aims to achieve relevance, sustainability, quality, and socio-economic resilience. This is less about maintaining the status quo and more about supporting continuous improvement, innovation, and change.

Virtue Signalling in Business

Change management and continuous improvement require a sense of urgency in order to sustain. Without the business case to justify change the environment is more likely to resist alterations to the status quo. The status-quo maintains system-level barriers to achieving resilience. Language supporting the status quo needs to change if a paradigm shift is to occur.

Unfortunately, many of us, including corporations, talk about quality, value, innovation, and customer satisfaction. However, these discussions remain disconnected from effective public policy. Strategy and evaluation mechanisms are also lacking. This weakness is made worse as society increasingly emphasizes value-based statements and optics over critical analysis.

Virtue Signalling represents the language and stories we use to communicate with ourselves, stakeholders, and customers. We express that our products & services deliver better values because of x, y, z. Our process, values, relationships, strategies, and approach align with the highest values expected by stakeholders. They also align with the expectations of employees and customers. The argument extends beyond statements of one’s virtue. It also covers one’s products & services value proposition, corporate ethics, social impact, and sustainability.

Singing to the Choir

The vulnerability of virtue signaling is similar to the vulnerabilities found in the resilience model. The company can ‘sing to the choir’ about shared values, norms, and assumptions all day. However, this will not improve the team’s ability to pursue continuous improvement. It will not help them dominate the industry with an undeniable competitive advantage.

Resilience theory is often used to support the status quo and expel disruptions. Virtue Signalling is similarly more about praising one’s own ‘belief system.’ It targets an existing ‘captured market.’ This approach neglects the effective evaluation or execution of product and service requirements or innovations.

Customer requirements change. This requires companies to engage in internal dialogue. The dialogue should resist the status quo and challenge the company’s dependence on outdated legacy models, tools, and practices. The question that arises is why is this often so hard to do?

Diversity in Business

How diversity initiatives are defined and evaluated is influenced by oversimplified models that emphasize optics over execution. Models of diversity that extend beyond regulatory requirements seek to leverage the perspectives and experiences of a diverse workforce. These perspectives are critical. They help in proactively anticipating and understanding communities and market niches. They also aid in identifying solutions & services viewed as relevant and useful.

Harnessing diversity can disrupt the status quo. This is why such initiatives to tap internally diverse perspectives often follow a structured and programmatic approach. Feedback is solicited quarterly, annually, with pre-scripted survey questions, and evaluated behind closed doors. Outputs are representative of the process, which is visibly structured, narrowed, and prioritized.

Filtered Diversity

Captured markets and customers will continue to purchase existing products and services as long as there are no other alternatives. This is less a decision based on quality than it is about availability (and price). Larger markets and customer groups are served more readily than smaller ones. The motive is profit.

Diversification of products & service offerings is considered essential to remaining profitable and sustainable (in a changing marketplace). However, this is less about the impact and more about scalability.

Diversity of feedback, and its outputs, is structured and prioritized based on profit-based priorities. How can we expect companies to improve internal workforce diversity? How can we expect companies to enhance external product/service diversity? The framework used to gather, evaluate, and report on feedback is pre-scripted.

Emotional Intelligence in Business

How EI initiatives are also defined and evaluated is influenced by oversimplified models that emphasize optics over execution. Emotional intelligence is directly related to resilience and diversity management. It involves understanding and empathizing with others. This information is used to inform and guide best practices and next steps. The group’s ability to use information and feedback to continuously improve is increased. Teams that are unable to share information, communicate, and learn from one another are also unable to perform well together.

Strategic EI

But what is often misunderstood is that emotional intelligence is not about telling people what they want to hear. Its also about finding productive and empathetic ways to share information that people and companies need to hear. This is no fine distinction. Its a big deal, and not always easy to achieve. It requires, among other things, trust and the right corporate culture.

But EI can also be used to ‘game the system.’ To manipulate others. To find the easiest way to get what you want. This includes turning down projects that should be approved. It also involves getting people fired who could continue providing value to the team. Low EI can also be used to justify terminating ‘an asset’, project, or ‘idea’ because someone is triggered. The crucial point here is that diversity management, emotional intelligence, and inclusion (next section) are not the same thing. Managed poorly, these can be more destructive than productive.

Inclusion in Business

How inclusion initiatives are also defined and evaluated is influenced by oversimplified models that emphasize optics over execution. The weaknesses of the diversity (and diversification) and emotional intelligence models can be addressed with the inclusion model. The inclusion model goes further than just soliciting feedback. It sets the expectation that these diverse perspectives and abilities will be leveraged. They will be used to design, evaluate, test, and deliver new products & services.

Profitability remains a central motive, even for nonprofits. However, the model acknowledges that the product and service designs delivered will be more relevant. They will be value-driven, useful, and focused on customer solutions.

Legacy Barriers to Inclusion

But diversity and inclusion face similar barriers. Pedagogical assumptions about what tools, processes, models, education, training, experience, features, and licenses (etc.) are needed will continue to limit the positive contributions of diversity and inclusion until corporate change resilience becomes a normative expectation of all industries and companies.

The above case example breaks free from outdated nonprofit norms. It attempts to use data to drive decisions. It tests hypotheses quickly and learns from past mistakes.

Attempts to support effective-resilience, effective-diversity management, and effective-inclusion deserve acknowledgment but should not be celebrated prematurely. A company signaling that they have these ‘initiatives in place’ does not ensure they are done effectively. It does not guarantee they benefit stakeholders or have the desired impact. But should it?

Corporate Change Resilience as ‘Fit for Purpose’

Effective change management is dependent on the resilience of the corporate culture. Most corporate cultures reinforce homogeneity over heterogeneity. This raises the question of best practices for strengthening corporate change resilience. How can a culture be ‘fit for purpose’?

The fit for purpose is an Agile Model concept. It recognizes that product & service design can not be infinitely perfected. This is because its complexity, costs, and sustainability become near impossible to sustain. The question of purpose, in this context, is often oversimplified. It focuses on the individual user who is self-selected. The individual has the resources or funds to acquire the product or service. But if this model (fit for purpose) is applied to society the discussion becomes much more interesting.

Applied at the society level, the product/service offering begins as a minimum viable design. It focuses on specific individuals, customers, and a limited set of user scenarios. But as more use cases (and profit opportunities) are realized, the feature set grows. Training and support modules attached to the product/service are expanded.

The internal & external competencies, resources, and tools needed to adapt existing product/service offerings is vast. Leaving companies some companies in the past and others charging forward to pave the way to the future. What differentiates laggards from leaders is their focus on excellence. They also show a willingness to address the individual, group, and systemic level barriers that might interfere.

The support of an effective model of corporate resilience is not for the faint of heart. It requires courage, authority, resources, rime, and commitment. Corporate resilience is a continuous improvement initiative. It is ongoing. It requires flexibility. It requires patience. It requires an openness to learning and change. And it requires executive support.

The key to the effective execution of these competencies is a structured and data-driven approach. A generic corporate resilience scorecard is provided below.

Corporate Resilience Roadmap

A documentation and planning tool is provided below to help begin your team’s discussion. This generic tool provides several questions to compare current vs. the company’s desired future state. Refer to research or your Innovate Vancouver consultant to benchmark your responses and identify areas for improvement. 

The innovation training roadmap is just one tool available for strengthening corporate resilience. It involves audits to evaluate gaps within the company’s innovation stack, diversity management plan, inclusion management plan, and additional tools, processes, and policies. The strategies suggested depends on the findings of the audit.

An evaluation of corporate resilience is not isolated to social metrics. It also involves profitability measures as well. Nonprofits and For-Profit companies continue to ignore readily available feedback and miss opportunities to improve their existing products, services, and processes. Until we become more comfortable challenging existing and often ‘sacred’ assumptions, readily available & accessible improvements will remain to be viewed as ‘out of reach’.

Corporate Resilience Scorecard

Innovation requires Corporate Resilience. Without it, opportunities to learn from our customers, stakeholders, and employees will be lost. Corporate resilience is about more than just comfortability with change. It’s about being comfortable making effective and data-driven/informed changes that better serve everyone invested in the company’s performance.

A documentation and planning tool is provided below to help begin your team’s discussion. This generic tool provides several questions to compare current vs. the company’s desired future state. Refer to research or your Innovate Vancouver consultant to benchmark your responses and identify areas for improvement. 

Is your company working on a transformation project? Initiatives to strengthen corporate resilience? Contact Innovate Vancouver to help on your next project!