by Ivonne Herrera
Innovation management and resilience management are hyper-popular moving targets as contexts and organizational priorities change. I would like to share a study we conducted with Christina Hanssen addressing the question: we innovate, therefore are we resilient?
When comparing the organisational drivers and conditions affecting resilience and innovation management fields the well-known rhetoric question of “what comes first – the chicken or the egg?” comes to our minds. We illustrate our findings in the figure below.
In the middle of the figure, we find organizations exposed to fierce competition, fragmented markets, non-linearities, unexpected changes, increased complexity and uncertainty (red colour). In black, we can see drivers that enable either resilience or innovation, and common to both are (amongst others) adapting to the unexpected, common vision and goals, tolerance, trust, improvisation, flexibility, slack, collaboration across roles, and learning. Furthermore, in the grey box, we find organisational conditions that hinder either resilience and innovation, which are (amongst others) control and strict management, strict boundaries and silo thinking, centralisation and standardisation. Both fields also focus on the importance of monitoring both external and internal activities (e.g. technology watch, user needs) to anticipate changes that affect the organisation’s operation and learning from experience (both failures and successes) to better respond and adapt to changes in the organisations and to establish new knowledge. In the innovation field, this is key to achieving sustained strategic and competitive advantages, whereas from a resilience perspective this is key to sustain required operations in both expected and unexpected events. Furthermore, it could be valuable to explore in practice, how organisational conditions identified solely within resilience engineering or innovation management literature mutually enrich each other.
It is tempting to say that innovative organisations, because of their focus on conditions that stimulate creativity, openness and trust, have a higher potential of being resilient, but one could just as easily turn this around and say that resilient organisations have a higher potential of being innovative due to their focus on flexibility, improvisation and slack. Thus, the question of the what comes first, the chicken or the egg, comes to mind: What comes first – innovation or resilience?
To conclude, Innovation and Resilience are now imperatives for organizations to continue business, support operations and remain relevant to market needs and expectations. Hence, we could further support creating working environments where organisational conditions and drivers facilitating both resilience and innovation highlighted in this note are promoted. The motivation to write this note is to highlight that resilience engineering is not solely relevant for safety or security management.