Focus on strategic choices through resilience
Resilient organisations are able to maintain or restore their structure and function under extreme pressure as they absorb the disruption. They can respond quickly to feedback and in a flexible way convert and distribute knowledge and resources without losing their identity,6 while still delivering bottom line results. In short, resilient organisations are able to navigate in a “VUCA world”, which is characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity as well as attention and readiness for this world.7
Roger Martin, who is one of the world’s top management thinkers, has described strategy as an integrated cascade of choices at corporate level, sector level and individual brand level. In an unpredictable world, it’s only by continuously making choices and acting on them that we can be productive, see the way forward and focus on what’s important.8 So, how would you describe your organisation’s decision-making process? And what is the level of quality of the choices you make? These are key questions that need answers and a focal point if you want to build a resilient and productive organisation.
As a manager, you make many important choices every day, by yourself and with others. The concept of “social resilience” is a new and unexplored concept we are discussing and working with in practice. It’s about the ability to collectively be able to adapt to changing circumstances through effective choices. It’s a social capacity that requires strong relations and a constructive, common mental framing of reality. If you are to accept reality as it is, you need to look at it clearly and not let your interpretations get disrupted by negative, fixed and distorted thinking patterns. It may prevent you from making good, strategic choices.
Thinking traps and mental resilience
To support strategic choices, it’s a good investment to train your mental resilience which is to support these choices. Based on the cognitive part of the research on resilience,9 we know that the following three factors come into play before we make choices:
- Adversity (the situation or event)
- Beliefs (thoughts)
- Consequences (feelings and behaviours)
According to the ABC model, our actions are not a direct consequence of the situation but of how we interpret the situation. Therefore, it’s first and foremost about identifying challenges and secondly about identifying the thoughts and feelings in the situation, and what is going to influence the individual person’s choice. Here you can ask yourself or others the question: “What am I/are you thinking right now?”
The answer can guide you in your search for thoughts that connect A (if this happens) with C (I will make this choice). Once you get into the right mindset, you can begin to influence the B-C connections and thus the mental resilience and capacity. The challenging part of the approach is the thinking traps that each of us risks falling into when we reduce complexity by taking automatic, mental shortcuts in our thinking.10 Typically, there are eight thinking traps we all fall into – and most often it’s the same two or three traps we tend to be most vulnerable to. However, we’re able to build up the ability to make more mentally resilient and realistic choices if we become conscious of the traps.
Thinking traps
- Jumping to conclusions
- Simplification
- Magnifying/minimising
- Personalising (we assume blame/“me thinking”)
- Externalising (we blame others/“not me” thinking)
- Overgeneralising
- Mind-reading (we assume that we know what others are thinking)
- Emotional reasoning
Productivity is about input and output. Once you’re able to recognise thinking traps, you can disrupt them towards a more effective mental output. For example, you can ask yourself: Am I jumping to conclusions? Can you see this from another point of view? These are questions that can disprove the above thinking traps 1 and 2. Thus, you can contribute to changed thinking patterns as the basis for more focused choices.
Seize the VUCA challenges!
Productivity is about being able to make strategic choices throughout the organisation, free of captivating thinking patterns. Thereby, the individual is also liberated. As a manager, you’re off to a good start if you’re working with resilience. However, if you ask us, building resilience in organisations is not something that lies on the shoulders of one person or something you can isolate. Resilience is a concept you can work on at an individual, social and organisational level with multiple meanings. Thus, you build up psychological capital in your business so that it’s strengthened in the best possible way to resist and overcome the challenges you will inevitably encounter in a VUCA world – while being productive.
We wish you all the best!
References
1 Produktivitetskommissionen (2014). ”Det handler om velstand og velfærd”. Final report. http://produktivitetskommissionen.dk/media/165599/slutrapport02042014.pdf
2 Sørensen, O., Hasle, P., Hesselholt, R. R. og Herbøl, K. (2012). ”Nordiske forskningsperspektiver på arbejdsmiljø. Mening, indflydelse og samarbejde”. Nordisk Ministerråd.
3 Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W. H. Freeman.
4 Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press.
5 Resilience Action Initiative (RAI). World Economic Forum 2013.
6 Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R. og Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–ecological Systems. Ecology and Society 9(2), 5.
7 Johansen, B. (2007). Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
8 Lafley, A. G. og Martin, R. (2013). Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
9 Reivich, K. og Shatté, A. (2002). The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles. New York: Random House.
10 Kahneman, D. (2013). At tænke – hurtigt og langsomt. Lindhardt og Ringhof.