Oops! Recovering When Sh*t Happens
How effectively you adapt to the unexpected determines your competitive success
«This is repost of a piece I wrote a while back about organizational resilience which, in light of the recent election, I found appropriate for me personally and might be for you as well. The focus is on resilience for businesses, but the core concepts are applicable to anyone charting their own path in service to others. Knowing why we do what we do, sort of our personal business continuity, helps us decide how to move forward after a major setback. Peace.»
Welcome to the Gazebo! Grab a cup of coffee and join me for some tips to help you succeed at the intersection of management, communication, and technology.
This Week’s Summary:
Resilience is an important business concepts (and fun to say).
Business continuity and resilience are related.
Uninterrupted business continuity is a key goal that takes planning.
Sh*t happens that interrupts business continuity.
Resilient companies plan for problems and recover quickly.
Communication is integral to resilience and business continuity
Resilience is an interesting term that rightfully is getting a lot of attention these days. Plus, it’s a fun word to say! Try it. Say, “Resilience.” Wasn’t that fun! You likely feel stronger already. 😊
One definition of resilience is the ability to withstand or to recover quickly from some type of setback. We engineers talk about resilience as the capacity of a material to return to its natural shape after withstanding a stress of some kind. Picture a foam pad that you have been kneeling on returning back to its original shape after you stand up. That is a resilient material. We talk about a person being resilient when they quickly get back to living their normal life after a shock of some kind such as the death of a loved one or a serious illness.
Image created by Ed Paulson using Copilot in Windows. Sh*t happens.
Business continuity is another important concept that is tightly connected to resilience. To understand, let’s first look at a general model of what organizations do.
In their simplest form, organizations run inputs such as materials, money, labor, energy, etc., through some type of process to produce a product or a service, the output. That product or service is then sold and delivered to a customer. When the customer (hopefully) pays, the company uses the money to purchase more materials, labor, energy, etc., and the value production process repeats. Ideally, an organization wants this value producing process to continue uninterrupted to allow for increased efficiency, more reliable operations, and better financial forecasting. This is business continuity.
Business continuity can be thought of as the overall process that an organization uses to produce something of value (the output) and well run organizations want to maintain business continuity to maximize profits.
We all know that if you do something a lot you are more likely to do it in an efficient, consistent, and high-quality way. Modern manufacturing was built on this concept. Think about how great it would be for a manager to come to work knowing that no unexpected events would happen! When I was a production engineer, this was our daily goal: To meet our production targets for the day. Leadership liked this because it allowed them to more easily maintain or even lower product or service costs.
Companies that best maintain business continuity can optimize their efficiency and control costs, making them strong competitors because they can compete on market price and remain profitable.
This idealized picture of business continuity is a great vision but, in the real world, sh*t happens, just like our couple making the omelet. A delivery truck may have an accident which holds up delivery of a key part. Or an employee may get sick. Or the power goes out. Or a major customer cancels an order or, even worse, doesn’t pay for it after receiving shipment. Now what?
The true market champions year after year are those that most efficiently deal with these unexpected events, which I call exceptions. They are exceptions because they do not conform with the normal business continuity process and interrupt the idealized flow. Depending on the severity of the exception its impact can be a minor nuisance all the way up to a potential showstopper. Some of the most stressful words a production facility manager can hear is, “We have a stop order” that halts all production. Business continuity abruptly stops, and the business cannot produce anything of value until the process is back up and running.
From a business management perspective, business continuity and resilience are tied together, and for good reason.
A resilient organization has the ability to quickly address the exceptions that interrupt business continuity and get the value producing machine back up and running. Those that recover most quickly are in an excellent position to become market leaders. It is fairly simple to see why this is so. If your customers cannot buy from you and they need the product or service, they will find someone else to buy from. Once you have lost a customer it can be difficult to get them back. As we talked about back in my November 20, 2023 post, it is much better to keep a customer than to have to win them back or replace them.
Just as the resilient foam pad quickly returns to its normal shape after you stop kneeling on it, a resilient organization will quickly recover from an exception and return to its normal ideal process flow, restoring business continuity. The more quickly it can recover from, or better yet avoid, an exception the better it is for all stakeholders.
This is an important point: Resilience doesn’t happen by accident or by well meaning intentions. It happens from a proactive awareness that exceptions will happen and consciously creating a method for recognizing and fixing the exceptions.
A few assumptions are embedded in this discussion:
That an organization understands the value that it offers its customers.
That there is awareness of the idealized business continuity flow.
That there is some way of recognizing when an exception interrupts the ideal process flow.
That there are resources to apply to resolving the exception.
That there is a way to verify that business continuity has been restored.
Next time, we will dig into the ways in which organizational communication is embedded in each of these assumptions.
Have a great week and thanks for stopping by! ☮
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Ed, you have such a straight-forward, understandable way of presenting concepts so they can be applied in business and other relationships. As usual, it is a pleasure to read your article and get your fresh perspective on how to effectively deal with issues.