My second chapter is well underway. Horray! I’ve done the first part (of five) of the literature review, or to give it it’s actual title – as recommended by my new favourite saviour, John Biggam – the chapter entitled “Issues and Related Literature Review”.
Section one of this chapter, which is basically an essay on my chosen topic, is subheaded ‘What is organisational resilience?’ This should be easy, right? Just choose a definition? Yes, it should be. But part of my hypothesis is that no-one has really nailed this down yet. The good news is that a lot of academics agree with me so it’s not as dodgy a conclusion as it sounds! However, I had to come up with something… so I made my own up.
That’s not actually true, of course. The section winds its way through some of the existing definitions, points out where they fall short and then offers my own version! As noted, a large chunk of it actually belongs to Comfort, Boin and Demchak from their book Designing Resilience. They took the same sort of journey to come up with their definition. However, I wanted to incorporate some thinking by Liisa Valikangas (via her book The Resilient Organisation) and Jim Collins (who’s written about How The Mighty Fall).
The result is as follows:
What do you think? Does it work for you?
[p.s. I'd love to post the section here for you to critique but, as you know, the whole TurnItIn thing will probably already be an issue because of the excerpts I am posting. For example, did I steal the definition from this blog? Well no, because it's my blog, but TurnItIn doesn't know that! Though in this particular case, it won't find it... if you look carefully, the definition is an image... I've just cut and paste it from the page to try to prevent this problem happening!]
David Hart
July 25, 2011
I believe that resilience is derived from the Greek meaning to bounce back or some such. My Greek was never that good to be honest. It started me thinking what about a strategy that meant you could bounce forwards as a result of a catastrophic event too?
No answers yet though.
)
CN
July 25, 2011
Neal
July 26, 2011
Happy that your definintion covers most of the bases. However, my particular ‘thing’ with regard to resilience is recovery. I Believe that resilience is mainly about being placed to withstand adverse effects, internal or external, but part of that relates to the ‘what after’. You’ve survived the impact; the processes you had in place have ensured most of the key structures still exist to carry on. However, organisationally, are you able to pick yourself up and find the ‘will’ (so many different aspects to that) to get everything working again?