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Building Resilient Organizations through Change, Chance, and Complexity
David Lindstedt
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eBook - ePub
Building Resilient Organizations through Change, Chance, and Complexity
David Lindstedt
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About This Book
A must-read in the wake of COVID-19, this book unpacks the nature of resilient organizations and how they prepare for unpredictable, complex, and profound change.
Organizations that do not adapt and evolve die. To date, however, it has not been at all clear how to build a resilient organization. That puts us all in the unenviable position of trying to ready our organizations for an increasingly uncertain future without the proper guidance to do it. This book introduces 14 elements of resilience that consistently emerge in organizations that have thrived amid adversity and volatility. Resilience is not about determination, grit, cybersecurity, or teams of resilient individuals; resilience, it turns out, is often confused with robustness. Readers will discover how resilient organizations build and employ a distinctive combination of crews, capital, culture, and leadershipâand, cruciallyâhow to adapt these combinations for their own organization.
Senior business leaders, consultants, entrepreneurs, students, and professionals will appreciate this book's practical, approachable, and engaging guidance, including insights by leaders from Health Care for the Homeless, The Ohio State University, NBCUniversal, retail stores, and more.
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Chapter 1An Introduction to Crews
DOI: 10.4324/9781003295242-2
12,165 online courses
âDonât go, Mommy, donât go!â
It is March 1, 2020, and Liv Gjestvang, Associate Vice President for Learning Technology at The Ohio State University, is about to get on a bus to leave for a conference. She will be gone for a few days, and her young daughter is tugging at her sleeve, pleading with her not to leave.
Just at that moment, Gjestvang receives a text from her colleague. âDo not get on bus. Conference cancelled due to COVID.â
Gjestvangâs brain now spins, wrestling with two big problems at once. What does a COVID virus mean for the tens of thousands of students at the university? And, more immediately, how in the world do I head back home with my daughter without her thinking Iâve just given in to her demands?
One thing became very clear very fast: The university was going to have to terminate in-person classes, at least for the foreseeable future.
Fully online classrooms were becoming both pedagogically better and more available, thanks to new technologies, but there was a long way to go. Timothy Lombardo, EdD, was an instructional designer at The Ohio State University for six years leading up to the start of the COVID outbreak. He saw a big advance in remote learning in the mid-2010s due to the proliferation of cameras and microphones in every laptop and cell phone. The technological tipping point was the combination of
having a stable system at home with cameras, microphones, and internet, having software like Skype and Zoom available for mass gatherings, and platforms for asynchronous pulls like Slack, Teams, or an LMS [learning management system] where you can keep in contact with your instructors and your colleagues so you can still have that social interaction.
Yet, Dr. Lombardo estimates that in early 2020, only around 15% of all courses at Ohio State were available online in some fashion.
By late March of 2020, just three short weeks after Liv Gjestvang returned home from the bus stop with her thankful daughter, almost every course, 12,165 in all, was available online. In fact, in response to COVID by the end of calendar year 2020 the university had:
- Conducted more than 40 virtual online instruction training and support workshops with more than 20,000 digital views
- Coordinated the move of 10,000 pieces of furniture and applied over 20,000 safety stickers
- Created both the nationally acclaimed1 campus-wide COVID dashboard and the Ohio State health reporting mobile app
- Distributed iPads, laptops, and mobile hotspots free of charge to faculty, staff, and students who needed them
- Equipped all classrooms with cameras and microphones; tested the rooms for proper air quality and circulation
- Expanded online support hours from 40 to nearly 85 hours per week
- Launched keep teaching, keep learning, and keep working websites and maintained them daily to support all faculty, staff, and students
- Launched virtual tech tutors, direct-to-home shipping, and contactless curbside support
- Offered training for mental health and wellness content, including information about student emergency financial and support resources
- Transitioned over 12,000 courses online for virtual deliveryâtwice! (once each semester)
This was an extraordinary achievement, especially given the difficult circumstances and extremely compressed timeline.
Reflecting on these initial weeks dealing with COVID, Gjestvang notes:
Whatâs really interesting to me is that anyone you would have asked, including those of us who support faculty in making these kinds of transitions, would have said it would not be possible, that we could never have done what we did. Even if someone had told me youâll be in a situation where there will be no other alternative than to have every course go online within weeks, I would just have said,Thatâs not possible. There is no way thatâs possible.What I think is really interesting looking back at this now is to ask,What are the things that makes something impossible become possible?
Making the impossible possible
How was all this possible? Naturally, every instructor had a vested interest in continuing their instruction, as did the administration, but the communication, coordination, legal, logistical, pedagogical, and technological challenges were enormous. And yet Ohio Stateâs story mirrors so many other stories not only about dealing with COVID, but dealing with any complex, threatening, unknown, and potentially disastrous situation. By examining Ohio Stateâs story, as well as other stories in this book, we get a better understanding as to what it actually takes to build and leverage organizational resilience.
To begin with, leadership at all levels of the university began gathering folks together in February, one month before the realities of a global pandemic started to set in, asking âwhat if?â questions. What would happen if the coronavirus became a pandemic? What if we had to shift some percentage of our research and teaching online? What if we had to close our doors for several months? Leaders at other big universities were asking the same questions, and cross-institutional networks began to form within and between universities. Gjestvang specifically notes âthe importance of being connected to those national conversations and then having relationships and contacts with people whom you can quickly pull together.â
In the first week of March, Gjestvang and others pulled together a small response team. In the coming days, more people joined the team, from all levels, regardless of rank or title. It was collaboratively organized and informally managed. People came and went as needed. Tasks, duties, and responsibilities changed in response to the demands of the day. Several such teams (or what we will refer to in this book as âcrewsâ) sprung up and interacted to share ideas, information, outcomes, strategies, and the like. No one had to get formal permission, restructure reporting lines, or change their titles. Employees largely self-selected and self-organized when needed to achieve the most critical outcomes for the day.
One of the things these crews were able to do was to come to consensus about how to prioritize and measure the work ahead. They decided they should give extra attention to the largest classes, those lecture-hall-type courses of hundreds of students. From a numberâs standpoint, this would provide the biggest bang for the buck. They also decided that they would promote a straightforward message about what they wanted all instructors to accomplish at minimum, namely, maintain a syllabus, grades, and assignments in the central learning management system (called âCarmenâ), and use Zoom to conduct classes. They called this the âCarmen Key 3 + Zoomâ message. These simple instructions were essential, for while there were countless potential actions that instructors could take to further their transition to online learning, the university focused on simple instructions for an achievable outcome. This outcome was also easily measurable. Either instructors had enabled the three most critical materials in Carmen, or they had not. And either they had launched Zoom for instruction, or they had not. Gjestvangâs team provided regular, daily reports to deans and chairs, showing them exactly which courses had complied with the Carmen Key 3 + Zoom strategy and which were in need of additional support. There was not time to make these reports look pretty; they were simple Excel spreadsheets, and they got the job done.
In order to support employees during this strange and challenging time, leaders loosened expectations around performance management goals. âThat actually did create this kind of invigorating space,â Gjestvang reported, âlike weâre diving into solve this [specific] set of problems, and it was really focused.â And if all this wasnât hard enough, instances of âZoom-bombingâ soon cropped up, so a new crew had to come together with compliance, legal, security, technical, and other representatives. Day by day and, eventually, week by week, various crews worked to manage different sets of problems, trying different approaches, learning from the results, combining and recombining with unique sets of individuals, and sharing information within their many interconnected lines of communication.
Naturally, culture played a big role in working together to solve problems. Educational institutions have a significant advantage in this area: They are used to collaboration inside and outside of the organization. Higher education entities are quite comfortable in identifying, creating, and sharing knowledge and best practices with colleagues, businesses, and the public. This was particularly helpful when spinning up the Keep Teaching and Keep Learning websites. These websites proved essential in guiding faculty and students as they adapted to the pandemic. The frame and functionality for these websites was repurposed from an existing business continuity and emergency preparedness site at Indiana University. Indiana University shared content with Ohio State, and Ohio State expanded the content to address the challenges of teaching, learning, and working online. Ohio State then shared their developments with other universities, including back to Indiana University. Examples such as this one demonstrate the utility of a culture that allows people to collect and share information with each other across formal and informal networks.
Culture is crucial. Gjestvang leveraged and adapted Ohio Stateâs culture to help create a psychological space for care and experimentation. During times of great uncertainty, it is important for people to be able to admit when they do not know something, ask for help, care for colleagues, have frank discussions and disagreements, fail, and be vulnerable. Gjestvang pointed out that, âthese are the kinds of words that you hear people talk about that are critical to high-functioning leadership and teams, but that are hard to really achieve.â It was an intense and stressful time for everyone, with kids at home, health concerns, nursing home quarantines, restricted movement, and the like. Gjestvang reflected:
We were starting meetings with a lot of appreciation; there was humor, connection, all of the elements we know that we need. There was often a moment at the end of the meeting to say,We know there is a lot coming at everyone; take some time, take a walk today.That kind of humanity was really important in keeping everybody feeling positive and engaged and safe. But I also think it led to a better product, because those same kinds of cultural elements really translated into the approach to the work too, and shaped the ways we asked faculty to support students.
Gjestvang and others worked to establish an environment of what she came to think of as âorganizational braveryâ where it was entirely acceptable to identify issues, raise problems, admit failure, and generally be human.
It was cool to see how the whole context of the way that our entire team was working together was normalizing. Get it done. Do your best. Name it when itâs hard. Name it when you donât know what to do. Thatâs okayâweâre here for each other.
When interviewing her more than a year later, Gjestvang wonders whether and in what ways they could, and should, go back to their old ways of working before COVID. Hierarchical reporting lines, recurring meetings, traditional organizational structures, and typical performance management sound increasingly less appealing. How many of the changes that increase engagement and benefit resilience can be kept, and how many will revert to pre-COVID habits? There is a strange sense of loss here, a loss of intensity and the sense of universal dedication to a common purpose. The gifts of care, grace, and understanding slip away a little more each day. For better and worse, there may be no going back to the way things used to be.
Crews
Liv Gjestvangâs story is a fascinating one, and the journey taken by The Ohio State University to adapt to the rapid and monumental changes brought by COVID is equally captivating. The narrative highlights many of the elements of a resilient organization, including: Leveraging information, relationship, and resource capital; creating crews that are able to achieve the unexpected then dissolving them when finished; an experimental culture composed of dissimilar individuals; and leaders who both empowered and cared for their employees. While Gjestvangâs account highlights many of the elements of a resilient organization, elements that are helpful to keep in mind as we will revisit them in more detail in the chapters to come, it draws particular attention to the importance of âcrews.â
Crews are ad hoc collections of individuals who come together, act, then dissipate. They are not established teams or official committees. To deal with the realities and impacts of the global pandemic at Ohio State, individuals came together, worked to solve related sets of problems, then returned to their regular duties. They were united by purpose and common interest. By and large, people joined and left as made sense to themselves and the rest of the individuals in the crew. Crews were made up of many different types of people from many different roles, and not chosen because of rank along hierarchical reporting lines. Ohio Stateâs COVID response exhibits many examples of the critical use of crews as they solved problems as diverse as compliance reporting, equipment distribution, physical distancing, training, website design, and even Zoom-bombing.
Importantly, crews often act in opposition to past practices and the status quo. Crisis situations repeatedly demonstrate that effective actions and successful solutions are often very different than proven practices. Ohio State crews tried different approaches to classroom furniture layouts, communication messages, reports, signage, software, technology, templates, and hundreds of other little experiments. Some experiments succeeded and some failed, but employees strived to discern what actually worked to solve problems in the face of rapidly changing situations. We can subdivide crews into different types.
Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs: Resilient organizations change, whether in taking advantage of an opportunity or in reacting to an unpredictable event. They must sometimes make dramatic alterations to their assumptions, business models, objectives, people, procedures, processes, and the like. Two important and often interconnected mechanisms for such necessary evolution are: Finding and exploiting new external opportunities for expansionâandâfinding and exploiting improved approaches to internal operations. Ohio State was able to shift from a brick-and-mortar institution of learning to a fully online university in a matter of weeks. The overall success was enabled in part by crews that focused externally and intensely on students (for the business analogy, think âcustomerâ) in tandem with crews that focused internally and passionately on creating the new practices and procedures for faculty and staff to adapt to studentsâ needs.
Contrarians and red teams: The most successful crews have at least one person who serves as an iconoclast. Such ...