 So welcome, welcome, everyone, to this launch of our latest book, Building Resilient Organizations. I'm Tairo Asan, the director of Brightline at the Project Management Institute, PMI. We are really thrilled today to have collaborated with Finkerstutti on our six book, starting with strategy at work that we released in 2017. And then we move on to the Chief Strategy Officer and the Transformation Playbook, Transformation Beyond the Crisis. The one from last year was Perpetual Transformation, and this year we have Building Resilient Organizations. We are really thankful to all authors who generously contributed and shared their insight there. Without them, this book won't be. And we also want to say big thank you, of course, to the amazing team who worked tirelessly on making the book reality. And as you will see over the coming months and years, we seek opportunities to have many authors running as in interactive sessions like the one today. And as noted in the forward by Pierre LeMond, our president and CEO at the Project Management Institute, coach in the ever evolving work of work. Understanding and achieving resilience has never been more important. We hope that Building Resilient Organizations will enable you to embed transformation and resilience in your organization and of course. So for today's session, I'm really pleased to welcome Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Fingers 50, who will moderate this session. We will line up of four distinguished speakers, experts, executives and book contributors. Stuart, whenever you are ready, the floor is yours. Thank you and thank you to Brightline for working with Fingers 50 over the last few years. We're really delighted to finish the sixth book in the series, Building Resilient Organizations. And thank you, first of all, to everybody for joining us today from throughout the world. It just shows you what a riveting and important subject resilience is and how multifaceted it is. I think that will be really brought to the fore today in our discussion, because we have four of the contributors to the book and there are 21 contributors to the book. So thank you to all of those. And I see some of them have joined this session as well. So we have four great contributors to the book joining us today. And our emphasis will be on practical application of their ideas. How can you really make resilience a reality in your organization? So today we are joined by Chris Clearfield. Chris is the co-author of Meltdown. His contributions to the book was entitled Building Resilience by Leading Change. So welcome to Chris. We are joined by Gudrun Johns-Dottir, who's the Chief Strategy Officer of Recuvik Energy. Gudrun's fantastic contribution to the book focused on organizations as resilient living systems. We are joined by Susie Kennedy from the UK, who's a leadership coach, founder of KBA Solutions, an expert on change leadership and leadership development. Her contribution to the book was entitled Resilient Leadership. And finally, but not least, we have Carsten Lins. Carsten is the founder and CEO of Blue Gain and the author of Radical Business Model Transformation. Carsten's contribution to the book was about why learning organizations are resilient. So what I'm going to do now is go to each of the four contributors today to just get their basic take on resilience, what it means to them. So first of all, let's do it in alphabetical order and let's go to Chris Clearfield. Chris is the co-author, as I said, of Meltdown, a really excellent book, winner of the Finkus 50 Strategy Award in 2017, or is it 2019? I think it was 2019. I think it was... Sorry, Chris, I have lost track of time. There's a brilliant quote at the start of your contribution to the book. You say, resiliency is the ability to change course in response to pressure and potential catastrophe. It's not a single strategy. They're shifting attitude and capabilities. It requires a willingness to change even in the face of great success. I mean, it seems you're saying it's multifaceted, but it's actually working against human nature and human nature is not to do when you're successful, not to do a great deal more. Right. And I think when you're successful, it's to recognize that whatever you're doing right now contributes to your success. So whatever strategy you're doing right now has worked to get you to this moment in time. And so I think for me, there's kind of two implications of that. I mean, one is that paradoxically, we get to start change by actually appreciating even if we want to go in a new direction, appreciating so deeply just what is now and the value that that provides for us because it's gotten us to where we are. But then the flip side of that, of course, is that even though we've survived to this moment, that's not a guarantee that as conditions change, as crises happen, as the world changes, it's not a guarantee that we're well set up for the next step in the next moment. And so to me, that's where resilience as a spectrum of things that comes into play with really change at the center of it, as you said. There's a line you use. You talk about moving from solving technical problems to solving sociotechnical problems. Can you unpack that for me? Yeah. So, you know, I think a lot of leaders, a lot of leaders that I work with and I tend to work with people in more technical, you know, finance, engineering, even safety, law. So these are folks that have a deep technical expertise in their field. But then as you get promoted in your leadership journey, the problems you have to solve, they're no longer technical problems. I mean, they might have a technical element of them or a technical component of them, but really, they are problems that are kind of, you know, people, process and technology. And so if you are in a situation where you would like to lead, you know, create a meaningful change in your organization or even in your team, changing to doing things in a different way that is supportive of the new environment that you're in, you really have to start by letting go of some of those tools of expertise and problem solving in order to be able to actually have the impact and to influence stakeholders beyond the kind of, you know, the narrow sphere of what you ultimately control, which, you know, your ability to control people can get compliance, but that sort of decays very quickly in space and time. So you've really got to learn to lead people on a journey and think of yourself more as a guide than as somebody who's providing solutions. You talk about creating possibilities rather than imposing answers. Yes, because look, the problems that are left are all complex problems, right? And this is kind of what we, where we start meltdown with. But the problems that are left are complex problems. They're not problems that have easy answers. And so if you show up with your kind of, you know, your hammer and your answer tool belt, then you're just going to keep reproducing the same conditions that lead to whatever challenge you're facing now. And so I think that, you know, the age of the kind of monolithic solution where leaders at the top of an organization come up with a plan, come up with a strategy and push it out. I think those days are really, they're numbered, if not over. And so I think the opportunity, again, is to think, OK, well, what do we want to try so we can go out and try things at a scale that's appropriate, knowing that we're going to fail, but knowing that our goal is really to learn something and to use that learning as, you know, information to take to inform the next step in our journey. In your article in the book, you mentioned the British poet, John Keats, the romantic poet and his notion of negative capability. Yeah, can you tell me how John Keats negative capability applies to the 21st century organization? Right, it's not an obvious connection, is it? But it's it's really the ability to. I mean, so Keats is brilliant, right? And Keats talks about it in the sense of the ability to sit with the discomfort of not knowing in order to let things emerge, basically. And Keats' argument is that this is what Shakespeare did so brilliantly. This is what, you know, the kind of brilliant, and I think he put the brilliant men of letters do. They're able to be with the problem and sit with it and feel it and be with the discomfort of it without immediately having to kind of break the symmetry and get to an answer. And I think that, you know, we spend our whole. I mean, certainly our whole schooling, our whole careers, most of our careers in our schooling being, you know, OK, here is a well packaged problem. Now come up with an answer and sort of produce that answer, right? And we get rewarded when we get that answer right. So that habit is very, very strong enough. But again, if if if you you believe that the problems of today are kind of beyond the ken of any single person to answer, then a lot of what we have to do is sit with the discomfort of not knowing the answer and sort of as leaders, hold ourselves back as our as our teams as we shepherd everybody through the process of discovery and experimentation. And so so much of what we do. And I know some of the other folks we have on the panel today have written about this and think about this. But so much of I think what's important to being resilient and to leading change is the ability to manage your own discomfort and the ability to manage your own reactivity. And because if you if you show up with your reactivity, then that gets in the way of building relationships and influencing people and finding out what what's up for others and being curious about others' experiences. And so it's kind of, you know, it's it's I think remarkably important, but also something that that we don't necessarily spend a lot of time on as leaders, we don't necessarily spend a lot of time kind of building our our, you know, we a lot of us self manage very well. But but we do that sometimes by suppressing our feelings rather than being able to be with them and to be with that discomfort. So it's the relationship between personal and organisational resilience is really interesting. Yeah. Because I think the assumption and my assumption, I think the association of resilience has been in the business sphere has been about organisations rather than individual resilience. Right. And I think, yeah. And also, I think some of the way we talk about resiliency in an organisational sense is, you know, the ability to, I don't know, withstand a shock with standard disruption to bounce back. And that is certainly part of it. But I think there's a kind of a foundational element that is just, you know, even as an organisation, being able to admit to people that you don't know the answer, being able to admit, you know, to have a senior leader come out and say, we're going to, you know, we're going to try this, but we don't know if it's going to work. I mean, that's a very, that's a very powerful stance if it's also married with the ability to get input from people and co create and create psychological safety and, you know, all of these kind of fundamental things that are part of the work of creative problem solving. But but it also really starts with that. Our ability to manage ourselves as leaders and to not not jump to conclusions and not kind of push on, you know, just push on answers. Chris, thank you. Thank you. We'll come back to you in a minute. Just a reminder, please send in your questions. I don't see the questions are starting to come in. We'll come we'll come around. I'll come around to those shortly. But next, I'd like to introduce Goodran, John's Dante, who's the chief strategy officer of recubic energy in Iceland. She's also just about to finish a PhD on ownership strategy. And Goodran's got some a couple of slides to share with us to give her take on on resilience. Goodran, over to you. Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here with you today. Like you mentioned, I am a chief strategy officer at Reykjavik Energy and I'm also a chairwoman for Vader utilities, which is the largest utility company in Iceland. And with my experience, it comes that I have strong opinions on how a clear vision and a strategy can create resilience. If you take a look at the next slide, I'm very fond of a very fond of this because in the Chinese language, the word crisis is composed of those two characters and where one represents danger and the other opportunity. But in order to turn a threat into an opportunity, organizations need resilience. I actually I have defined or read about resilience as being the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. But I think that thinking about it in this way, it implies reactive thinking. And it is my belief that organizations must put focus on constantly adapting through resilience and being proactive. So that means to constantly challenge the equilibrium because no challenges that means stagnation and it can contribute to the decline of innovative ideas. But this, of course, it requires a culture that embraces challenges and strong leadership is required to implement the thinking and the behavior to perceive crisis as an opportunity. And if we take a look at the next slide, it's just a beautiful picture that we have from Regivik Energy. So the focus at Regivik Energy, it has been on applying governance to support the strategy execution management and the process that we have implemented and we've named it strategic corporate governance. It entails continuous revision of strategy policies, our objectives and goals. So it entails appointing a one person responsible for each policy that is in effect within Regivik Energy. And this person is responsible for abiding to a yearly revision plan, revising the policy, its objectives and goals, while being also accountable for the outcome. And this party meets with the board of directors yearly to go through the revision and it rests with the board, of course, to confirm the revision. But with this focus on corporate strategic management, the organization is able to respond quickly to changes in the external as well as the internal environment through its strategies and policies and therefore to adapt the strategy execution plan towards the vision of the organization. And this has made Regivik Energy adaptable and flexible. So responding quickly to change and challenges. And this has indeed contributed to the resilience of the company. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gudrun. It seems to me what you're doing at Regivik Energy is kind of trying to achieve a balance between flexibility and control. And governance is normally seen as all about control. But what you're creating is kind of dynamic governance. Yes, definitely. Is that a fair understanding? It is a fair understanding. And I think that, of course, flexibility is really important, but with some degree of control. But the flexibility is very important. And like I said, the disruption of the equilibrium, because we are going to be stagnant if we don't if we don't embrace challenges. I mean, historically, resilience has been associated with equilibrium. And I've already said that there is a human desire for equilibrium. Yes. Which makes your approach difficult. Yes, that's true. It makes it difficult, but that means, of course, that you have to work with the culture of the company. That's really important. And you need leadership that, like Chris said, is able to say that they don't know the answer and that is able to get all of the employees with him as a leader in order to create new ideas, embracing those challenges. And it's a cultural change. And what stage are you at with the strategic corporate governance? Where is it in its evolution? I would say that we are at the point of challenging the equilibrium. We are at the point of challenging stagnation. And we are at the point that we are disrupting, like I said, the equilibrium and constantly trying to do that through this strategic corporate governance. We are constantly challenging what we are doing and where we are going. Does that make Reykjavik energy an uncomfortable place to work? That's a great question. But no, I wouldn't say so because we have a very strong leadership at Reykjavik energy and we have a very strong leader that does, in fact, does, in fact, say that he doesn't really know the answer. But he gets the people around him working with him on finding the solutions. So he is able to admit that he's wrong and he doesn't know the answer. So that's a very strong leadership, in my opinion. Yeah. So is leadership built around creating long term resilience but willing to upset the apple cart and disturb the equilibrium along the way? Yes. And you were an expert on ownership strategy and I know the ownership of Reykjavik energy is, I mean, there's a variety, there's three different owners. How does that complicate things? Actually, it makes things easier. If you're intent on implementing an ownership strategy, it has actually helped us with the governance part because we have to abide to the rules or the vision of the ownership strategy. And with the implementation comes this strong long term focus. But with the processes that are accompanied, the implementation of the ownership strategy, the process of constantly challenging all of those strategies, but always within the long term vision and the corporate governance that comes from the ownership strategy. Thank you, Gudrun. It's always good to get a practitioner's viewpoint of these issues because it can be mean resilience is a theoretical issue. So it's really good getting your view. So thank you, Gudrun. Our next contributor is Susie Kennedy. Susie is a leadership coach, founder of KBA Solutions, expert on change leadership and leadership development and her contribution to the book is about resilience leadership. Well, welcome, Susie. So resilience, I mean, you argue that resilience is a strength that leaders can develop. Indeed, Stuart. In fact, my piece is really all about the very practical side if you like the behavioural side of building resilience. And so when I talk about resilient leadership, by that, I mean the ability to develop one's own resilience. To prepare for future crisis and to help teams thrive in these challenging conditions. And so our approach in terms of putting together the piece was to draw on the research which we've been conducting for the whole of the Covid period in the UK local government senior managers to establish how they had dealt with with with with the crisis and also to take lessons from professional but country ski guide and author Rob Coppolillo on how in leading and high uncertain high consequence environments, how they build resilience for crisis. Well, let's let's take those in order. Talk about it. Well, let's let's talk about the ski guide manual. So so it's a ski guide manual. I mean, basically what you're taking, interpreting as a kind of a guide to to resilience. Well, actually, what was very interesting and all happened kind of by mistake, falling over the ski guide manual. But what what amazed me was when I looked at the early chapters, the actual reason why I was interested in this was because Rob Coppolillo had quoted Amy Edmondson and the importance of psychological safety among teams, Carmen for decision making. So there was a real connection, if you like, between our world business and, you know, this guy that takes people up mountains and skis and down the other side. But what was particularly important from a resilience point of view, of course, that preparation is absolutely critical because it can be a life or death situation, notwithstanding the fact that it's recreational. But they have a particular risk management framework that they use for preparation. And it was really when I when I read through the preparation and the thought process, I thought, well, this is exactly what our leaders will be doing and should be doing in preparation for the next crisis in order to build up resilience. Yeah, I thought it's worth quoting what the the the advice was. So stay fit and healthy, track the seasons, conditions, practice, rescue, learn about avalanches, become an expert navigator, investigate route options, find compatible partners and get your gear ready. And I quite like to get your gear ready as advice to all organizations. Actually, but very interesting. What he goes on to say a little bit later on is that, you know, we often spend more time selecting on new pair of skis than we do building and focusing on the skill that we need to be able to keep ourselves alive. And, you know, it's a it's a more interesting thing to do. So I thought those lessons were particularly particularly important. I mean, there are a number of little gems there as well. He tells a story about one of the guys, a guy called Tom Murphy, who says by way of building psychological safety in the group, they have this kind of rule, which is everyone has a voice. Everyone has a veto, which means basically if somebody at the back calls it when they're half way up a mountain, they have to actually agree that they all go down. So that allows people that very simple rule allows the shy person at the back that doesn't think they can ski terribly well to actually say, I'm really uncomfortable. So I like that very simple explanation of how they're doing little things to build psychological safety in an uncertain dangerous environment. And you quote Peter, this is Peter Drucker quote in your piece about a person can perform only from strength. And the emphasis of your work is is about developing those personal strengths to create organisational strength. Yeah, absolutely. You know, so I suggest the starting point in building resilient leadership is to actually do a little audit of, you know, what is my resilient strength? How well do I cope with crisis? And I kind of went to Jared Diamond for some advice on this in his latest book, Upheaval, how nations cope with crisis and change. He describes 12 factors, which crisis therapists, according to crisis therapists, make it more or less likely that a person will deal with and be successful in coping with with with with crisis. And he goes on to talk about how nations cope against those trial factors, but they're relevant for all leaders. For example, Diamond says that of one of the factors experienced of previous personal crisis, if a person has coped successfully with the previous crisis, they will have greater confidence to cope with the next one. That's exactly what we find in our research in local government too. So, so, you know, there's a neat kind of trial factors that that we could use as leaders to look at that and think, well, you know, how well am I coping on that front? How flexible am I personally? Have I done a, you know, a kind of proper, honest, self appraisal of where I'm at as far as coping with with crisis and it goes on. So I think that's particularly that's particularly important as a starting point in the journey. So it's a question of capturing those experiences within the organisational culture to build resilience. Yeah, and you know, I think, I think within the organisational culture, then those issues of psychological safety, of course, which can make it easier or easier or more difficult to be able to build that resilience. But there's other practical things that can happen, I think. Like, you know, creating a flexible and adaptable workforce, thinking, well, how can we more easily redeploy people? Are we recruiting people in for individual skills when actually we should be recruiting for a learning mindset? And are we building the skills of curiosity and creativity and just tapping into what Chris was talking about a little earlier on about being uncomfortable with discomfort? You know, for me, that's the cure, increasing curiosity bandwidth, especially on deprivation sensitivity, so we can feel, you know, appreciate that we need to feel uncomfortable. So I think the greater the psychological safety in the organisation, then we have a greater chance as well of being able to create flexibility and adaptability. Thank you, Susie. Your mention of learning leads me perfectly on to our final guest this afternoon, who is Carsten Lins. Carsten's contribution to the book was why learning organisations are resilient. So Carsten puts learning centre stage in the creation of resilience. Carsten, welcome. And let me pick out some important things that I kind of saw in your article. First one was treating resilience as a means rather than an outcome. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah, thanks, George. And thanks for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the book, first of all, and now sharing a bit of the thoughts behind, you know, the contribution. I mean, let's put ourselves into the shoes of a leader. So we see a world of nested crisis. We, if you look at the economic uncertainty index, which is constantly above 300. So we live in a world where the severity, the frequency of changes and the persistence of these abnormal crisis situation is steadily increasing. So this leads us, of course, to the topic of resilience. But what does that now mean for a leader? Many leaders we're working with, Susie is working with me, it's now, now I have to work on resilience, right? That's a natural, you know, now I have to work on resilience, I have to do something with resilience. But then easily we can misinterpret that and mean, you know, resilience is a mean, but resilience is the outcome. It's been like agility, you know, that I'm very much into leveraging digital technology for the sake of driving business or social impact at scale. And agility has the same connotation. Agility is an outcome, but you can only reach it over a certain period of time, a longer journey, when you basically by relatively rigid principles, and this leads to agility, it's counterintuitive. And the same holds true for resilience, we were talking today about it. It's the question is, you know, what are the means to drive that, but not to misunderstand resilience as a means because this has quite a downside. And we love to talk about resilience in a positive way, you know, it's the major competence of the day. Everyone is longing for resilience. But what does it mean? If we treat resilience as means, we can easily end up with toughness. So that has two downsides, you know, from an integral perspective, it means like we're much too tolerant for adversity. So we stay too long in the toxic environment as an employee, for example, with the boss that you don't want to have, or for an organization, we're stretching organization beyond what is really feasible, what is really, really doable, we're burning out organizations. So once again, if you treat resilience as mean, you run into substantial risk of reducing both leadership, but also organization effectiveness. And this is why I would strongly argue that resilience must be an outcome to be regarded as an outcome that we can reach after a certain period of time after going through a journey. And I would suggest four elements that we could use as a means to reach this outcome of resilience. The first one is exactly to your point, you already said during the introduction, it's about leading and learning with an infinite mindset. So it's really like treating business as it is an infinite game and not a finite game. So not focusing on competition, not saying, you know, I want a benchmark because you never get better than a benchmark. If you over overly focus on on your competition, you defocus innovation for your customers. I think Jeff Bezos said that wonderfully all the day. So but if we treat it think in the long term, think business treated as as it is, it's an infinite game. It's not a finite game. The ideas to stay in the game. Then we have a very good mental model to to as a lever one to to drive resilience forward. The second one, I think it's think in terms of strategic options. So my PhD thesis I really looked into the concept of real options. So kind of building flexibility, building flexibility, strategic options by hatching a portfolio of strategic options or real options. And the good thing is there is an asymmetry. On the one inside, you basically can create profits. But but at the same time, you're also basically reducing the losses. But as you don't have to execute these flexibility options, you have an asymmetry. So you're ending up in a better shape. If you're basically hatching your portfolio right, nevertheless, you should not have too many of these flexibility options because they mean organizational slacks, so to speak. And because otherwise you're running out of resources sooner or later. So there's also a trick to hatch not too many of these strategic option beds. Then we looked very much along the lines of our theoretical business model transformation into the option of transforming into more resilient business models and a clear outcome of our research is if the more you move into what we call inclusive business models, be platform business models orchestrating digital ecosystem, big solution or outcome based business model, they add up and they pay towards the goal of building resilience. And last but not least, we feel like if we want to basically drive our organization towards the goal of, you know, also sensing organizations, which is an important prerequisite of reaching this outcome of resilience, then digital means can help quite substantially if we're literally artificial intelligence, for example, graph based networks, this does not only apply to sensing organization along the supply chain where I think it's more state of the art already today. But if we extend that and basically we build a sensing organization in all aspects of the value chain or network, I think we have four levers which help us to drive and hopefully reach this ultimate goal. I would say it's the goal that we're aiming for for resilience. So kind of in a nutshell, I would say we have to look at the means that drive us to resilience, but we should not basically mix it up and say resilience is a means, but it's an outcome. This is why learning organizations is a pivotal. At a practical level, Carsten, when you go into organizations and talk to them, what are the things you advise them to start doing to build their resilience? What can organizations start doing a very practical level to build their resilience? From a business model and an operation model perspective, it's quite easy because typically organizations run their business models as a portfolio of business models. So in a few cases, you really have one business model in which the entire organization follows. So fundamentally, you're managing a portfolio of business model, business model types. And we would suggest that you have a certain level of your business models which are more resilient than others. And we have clearly laid out which are those and platforms, distribution, outcome-based business models, definitely with their recurring revenue streams, with their stickiness in the customer engagement, they have been proven, they've proven to be also during the COVID-19 crisis more resilient. We've seen that. So shifting your business model strategically, your business model portfolio, sorry, strategic towards more, these inclusive business models definitely pays towards the goal of reaching more resilient, more resilient, more resilient, more resilient business models. And that's one of the most important things that you can do for yourself in your organization. In the operations models, that's interesting. I mean, we all apply already today what is really good for resilience. I mean, in a crisis mode, I mean, we do everything perfectly. We say, you know, we have a small team, you know, they're well networked in the organization. They're executive leaders, you know, they can make decisions. We do everything right. It's not doable in the long term. It's it's not doable because you overcome it for a crisis situation, but it's not a sustainable approach. But if you now bring in digital technologies and basically have sensing with the help of AI sensing operating models, you can basically take the idea of such a crisis model with a small central team and basically embedded and make it an integral part of your operating model of the organization. So these are two examples of what you could do specifically. Thanks. Thanks, Carsten. So please send in your questions for our four experts we have gathered together today. We've got a question from Ferdinando. How can we measure resilience in an organization? Chris, would you like to have a go with that? Is it a good idea to measure resilience? Can you measure resilience? Is my question no, that's my answer. My answer is I don't know. You know, there's certainly narrow places where like I think of my background in finance, right? I mean, there was a movement after the financial crisis to make less bad assumptions about how bank balance sheet and assets would respond to shocks and do a better job of kind of modeling that. And so that's sort of a way of maybe modeling resilience, but that's also just such a narrow slice of things. You know, when we wrote Meltdown, András Tilček is my co-author and I, we really decided very explicitly not to take a kind of quantitative measurement-based approach because part of the nature of complexity is that the whole point of it is that it's in the details and that you can never know all the details. And so part of me wonders if resilience is the same thing here. I mean to build off what Carson said a moment ago, I mean, in a sense the organization's results what it's doing every day over the long term. I mean, that's the ultimate measure of resiliency in some sense. But I don't know if that's satisfying for Fernando because it's kind of, I just elaborated on, I don't know. Yeah. But I think that's the difficulty with resilience, isn't it? That you want to you want to know that you're seven out of ten on some resilience quotient and therefore you're reassured about the future. But I think Gudrun's point from her work at Reykjavík Energy is that it's got to be, it's dynamic and happening all the time. There's no, there's no single measure. Gudrun, did I represent your views accurately there? It is a measure of resilience useful or possible? I would think that no, it's not feasible to have some kind of measurement for resilience because it's so, it's on many levels, like we've been going through here. We have leadership resilience, we have organizational resilience, etc. So I think that if you're going to measure it, you're going to have to have a lot of measurements measuring different things. So I don't think that a quantitative measurement is no, not feasible. Sagan has made a point. Could there be a way to understand where an organization is on the journey? And that seems to me a more realistic take on it. Instead of a definitive measure, you've got some sense of where you are in making sense of these issues. I mean it goes back again to the question is it a means or is it basically an outcome? So the question initially asks the question about an outcome KPI or OKR, which I would say is quite difficult as also the other panelists said, I think basically measuring progress on the way towards this ultimate goal of resilience. I think it's more feasible. So kind of what is your percentage of recurring revenue streams in your portfolio of business model, for example, you know, are you hatching strategic bets? Are you building R&D partnerships? I think it's something at least you can qualitatively assess and help also the organization to guide it in the right direction because ultimately we still remember the days where we said organizational slack is a bad thing. Just think about this statement in the context of resilience. It's just wrong, right? You will never get towards resilience if we say organization slack is a bad thing. But we had a time where it said there should not be any organization slack in an organization because we're super 100% efficiency driven. So I think just having an indication what is right, what is wrong I think gives good guidance to an organization and in times of extreme uncertainty in times of nested crisis I think this guidance is definitely needed from our perspective. I think I hope it's all Susie. Yeah, no, I think just out into that about measuring on the journey I think it would be possible to create some indicators that would and there would be indicators that would let you understand how resilient the organization was and where it could move towards and there might be soft behavior indicators if you look at people you might have some measure of the extent to which you feel your workforce is adaptable and flexible you might have some indication as to how clear the organization is directionally and with purpose might be other simple indicators around how leaders are behaving are they looking after themselves are there strong networks happening within the organization are teams functioning well or is there total burnout some of these things I think it would be possible I'm also applying towards the Jared Diamond approach of what he's done is look at the what crisis therapists say or the factors that influence of course an individual's ability to cope with stress but that has applied that to nations so in the same way that he's applied that concept to nations you could apply the same to organizations I'd say I want to throw my lot in with Susie there and just say I'm kind of with you when I think about it it's like I'm thinking about oh are you a logically safe organization is it an organization that provides support to its leaders and its leadership team do leaders have coaches all of these things are they taught to be curious is curiosity and questioning supported or is it squashed I think there's this whole it's almost like if you want to think about resilience the way to do it is to focus on the process the kind of superstructure rather than sort of thinking that you're going to be able to measure the outcome of resilience because even that it's like well what are you resilient to what kind of shocks are you resilient to but I really like where you're going and I think I share your sort of human centered focus on that how are people behaving I think we need to get together Chris incredible thank you to Charles Summerin for his comment Charles says in a VUCA world the dynamics of resilience is an outcome of human behavior I think is an outcome of existential trust inherent in organizations about it no resilience can occur I think we're coming to an agreement with that or am I wrong Chris I just have a little trouble just parsing it I think it's probably just me I guess I'm not quite sure what the existential trust bit means but I think the idea that there are certainly kind of human behavioral prerequisites to building a resilient adaptable system is part of thing Sir Gunn says maybe we need a resilience maturity guide or model something that's not overly prescriptive Goodrun that sounds a little bit like what you're trying to achieve Yes it definitely sounds like this question is actually related to the book chapter that I wrote and I do think that trust I agree I don't exactly understand the existential trust or is it just the level of trust within the organization that exists at that point in time but I think the resilience is an outcome of human behavior and like Susie was talking about you need strong leadership but are you working with the employees are you working with the leaders do they have some mentors do they have someone coaching them etc so yes trust is very important but it's never inherent in organizations trust is not it's not a constant and it's also we're unable to measure trust and the constancy thing is an interesting element in I think it goes back to what Susie said something about capturing people's experience and knowledge because people leave organizations and so how does that impact the resilience integral to an organization there's a comment from somebody in the Q&A box what could be some of the possible leading and lagging indicators related to organizational resilience Karsten I think you've kind of talked about that to some extent yeah before that if I may I can because it my brain is ticking so with the trust thing I'm struggling with that a bit to be honest potentially I'm the only one because I mean for me if you have psychological safety you have a very good foundation to build a resilient organization also learning organization which the point I tried to make earlier trust and especially existential trust for me sometimes has this connotation of being a family we all trust each other we're all together in this and so on this sometimes stands in the way of really having contradictory views and viewpoints and this is definitely negative for building a resilient organization an organization that is resilient basically is really good in dealing with the contradiction it's just the opposite so when the existential especially underlining the existential trust stands in the way of dealing with contradictions then I would not agree so this is just kind of food for thought for now you're asked about kind of leading and lagging indicators now I have the easy question right I mean I tried working on that I know I tried elaborating a bit on that I mean it's I mean I would always say you know on the personal level I think what Susie said I would would fully subscribe I think we can extend on that a bit in more dimensions on the organizational level I think it's slightly different from my perspective is very much going into the dimension of you know making sure the organization is learning that has something to do with this failure culture things are not focusing on the failure so it's really not moving forward what we always thought it's really about learning fast so the winning organizations are learning fast as a core and meta competence and how to basically bake that into OKR so KPIs leading and lagging indicators I leave that to others same with the business models where I started elaborating a bit on the you know portions of the revenue coming from recovering revenue streams for example that would be even a leading indicator not only lagging one I think we have to think that through more thoroughly but I would assume potentially it's a good opportunity for the next book I don't know that might be something to further elaborate on because the collective wisdom of this group I think should be able to bake something together Hadja makes a point should be focus on organizational culture to assure organizational resilience and I think we're in agreement with that aren't we Susie you're on mute Susie most popular words in the last two years right wait you double clicked you're back on mute sorry I'll say this quickly in case I mute myself again I was looking at the Q&A from say again as you were just talking can you repeat again should be focused on organizational culture to assure ourselves of organizational resilience one in the same I think absolutely absolutely so the organization culture will enable the organization to be resilient otherwise you know thinking about organization culture which you know is extremely supportive helps people to reflect on how well they're coping with particular challenges you know organization culture that for example does a team diagnostic to understand the extent to which the conditions are available for the team to be a high-performing team and then invest in that all of those things will certainly make up to the kind of measures thing that's going to make an organization more resilient versus the organization which has people working from eight in the morning to three and four in the morning sometimes I have a daughter in investment banking and you do wonder you know how much resilience is there if people are working in that way so culture and resilience I think culture drives the resilience and probably some vice versa Michael McCann makes a point isn't resiliency boiled down to the organization's ability to continuously monitor and assess and other external internal factors which will trigger changes to the defined strategy and key objectives to offer organizations don't treat changes or trends as impactful to the current outcomes organization yeah I just got a jump because that's kind of going back to the question about the ski guide you know in the same way that the guys prepare they'll track the conditions to be able to assess what the other one on Swiss is going to be later in the season and in the same way certainly one of my recommendations is that people should be conducting doing a pest and scenario analysis just knowing what's coming up at them but I think it's not just doing it it's the way they do it if you do it with all stakeholders and with diverse thinking styles you're going to be in a much better place to plan and prepare for what's coming at you so I agree very much thank you but I want to I just want to add something to that because I think that and I think about this a lot in my work like leaders and I'm where the time starts I'll keep this short I think leaders in general are under supported in their ability to say I don't know they're under supported in their ability to lead with curiosity and I think there's a there's a real need for that there's a real need for organizations to embrace the not knowing is fascinating there's a real need for organizations to embrace that and to support their leaders in being able to embrace that kind of all up and down the line we're running out of time so it'd be good to get a final word from you all about what you what people really need to understand about the resilience what do people misunderstand what they really need to know in a few lines Carsten? Yeah, treat resilience and as an outcome not as a means and I think along the lines of what we just discussed it's really along the lines of the idea of HECL in the 80s but now the digital capabilities are in place to achieve that build an organization which is sensing responding adapting and then I think we're on a good journey towards a more resilient organization Goodran what do people need to understand about resilience do you think? I think it's a little bit like we have mentioned before I think it's the culture that includes leadership so I think that should be a strong focus Suzy final word Building on that I think individuals should remember that they can strengthen their own resilience as a starting point And Chris you get the final word you can quote from Keats if you want What should people take away about resilience? Well, I guess I'd like to say that I think if you want to start in a place curiosity is a great place to start and it's one of my favorite parts of my work which is teaching leaders and working with leaders to support them as they shift from this answers mindset to a curiosity mindset Chris, thank you very much thank you Goodran, thank you Suzy thank you Karsten, really appreciate you joining us today the four contributors are all contributors to the new book from Brightline and Finkus 50 called Building Resilient Organizations it doesn't provide every single answer you need to know about resilience we're going to take a smorgasbord of inspiration practice and great ideas to start you thinking about resilience thank you everyone for joining us today a final word to you Tairou thank you so much and thank you all for a great session that we just had I mean it was amazing hearing from you and thank you also to attendees who shared questions and comment and so on getting there is resilience really doesn't happen overnight so it will require strategizing resilience actually in the face of challenges organization may have to reimagine organization will have to go through crisis and understanding how to withstand the crisis and we heard culture leadership people I mean the notion of curiosity coming in and what I would add is the numbers though are very dire like about 70% of transformations are still failing and we know we cannot rest on our laurels we cannot just leave it and just stand still and that's why PMI for Brightline will continue to bring to the forefront cutting edge insight as well as sharing best practices as well and as we go through transformations really it is and it became perpetual it is our hope that the insight that are in the book and the generosity that we got from many of the contributors people will be able to take them and be able to apply them and be able to create organizations that are delivering value and organizations that are resilient so thank you so much for that and I want to also reinforce that you can secure a copy of the book for the link we provided the book is available in PMI bookstore it is also available on Amazon and Bands and Nobles and there will be also available in the hard copies as well so please stay tuned stay tuned because we will continue to bring more sessions to you for the Brightline Transformation Talks until then until next time yeah really appreciate it have a great one