SERVICENOW, INC. As the business world struggles to recover from the pandemic, many executives are focused on building more resilient businesses ahead of the next disruption. According to political scholar Sherry Zaks, business leaders interested in bulletproofing their organizations should also consider the structures and history of armed rebel groups.
Zaks, an assistant professor of comparative politics and political methodology at the University of Southern California, has spent more than a decade studying armed rebel organizations like El Salvador's left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and Mozambique's right-wing Resistência Nacional Moçambicana. Her research focuses on how these movements evolve (or fail to evolve) into legitimate political parties.
Comparing the organizing principles of rebel groups with traditional business principles might seem like a stretch. But organizational theorists have been doing so for decades, Zaks says. Armed resistance movements, conventional armies, and businesses have some fundamentally common structures and interests: All three are hierarchical organizations seeking to weather shocks and outlast the competition.
Now that the pandemic has made resilience a top business priority, organizational theorists are looking at unconventional organizations with renewed interest.
In a recent interview, Zaks explained what large organizations can teach smaller ones about resilience, what smaller companies can teach larger ones about agility, and what armed rebel groups can teach the C-suite about risk management during crises.
(Editor's note: Zaks is married to the author of this article.)
Actually a lot. For the most part, business schools and firms talk about business organizations as though they were the foundational object of study. But organizational theory, as a discipline, has its origins in studying how militaries function. And there's much to be learned by returning to our roots.
For example, if you're interested in organizational resilience, why wouldn't you look to organizations that have the highest stakes? The groups I study are dealing in life and death. Their resilience and the institutions they put in place to facilitate greater resilience can teach the C-suite a lot.
For armed rebel groups, or for tech companies, resilience is an organization's capacity to weather a shock and emerge ready to operate on the other side.
What's fascinating is that these groups are dealing with the same challenges as corporations. These pivots in the boardroom about how to manage the pandemic are moving in lockstep with comparable pivots in the bunker.
Risk management strategies are absolutely crucial. Resilience and agility often hinge on whether the organization has a set of protocols for operating under duress and crisis.
One of my favorite things that I stumbled upon in my study of organizational resilience and flexibility actually comes from the U.S. military.
When we think about militaries, we expect them to be rigidly hierarchical structures. Rank is fixed, the chain of command is fixed-with the sole exception of people on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Takeoffs and landings on aircraft carriers are moments of life or death. The airplane that's landing has to catch the landing cable at exactly the right angle, at exactly the right speed, or else it can't decelerate and there's a chance it might not gain enough speed to relaunch and could crash. When a plane is taking off or landing, the organizational structure on that flight deck flattens entirely. If any single person sees something wrong, that person has full authority to give a veto order on the landing or the takeoff.
This is all part of risk management-deciding what you will do in times of crisis, who can do it, and when. And a crucial and underdeveloped part of risk management for most organizations is giving people the authority to call attention to the risk in the first place.
I think it's important to acknowledge that resilience can take many forms: think about a bear versus a crab. If a bear gets into a fight with another bear, it can take a lot, partially because it's so massive, whereas the same swipe could completely take out a crab. However, if a bear loses its leg, that's a death sentence. But a crab has this unique capacity to regenerate a limb, to say nothing of the fact that it is equipped with a few more limbs than a bear in the first place.
[Read the survey: Resilience and risk management in the digital age]
Larger organizations have three things: resources, personnel, and legacy. They have established institutions: long-standing rules and protocols for how they should be operating. They can afford to bleed because they have more cash on hand and more organizational redundancies.
This explains what might seem to be a paradox: larger companies felt more disruptions, and yet they're more resilient. Larger companies are stirring more pots. So they have more occasions to feel shocks because they're operating in more domains, but for the same reason they also have more opportunities for survival.
Smaller organizations tend to shy too far away from redundancy. Going back to risk management, we don't know what roles or skills might end up mattering to an organization in future crises. A little bit of redundancy can go a long way to weathering shocks, regardless of whether that shock is a global pandemic or a death in an employee's family that causes them to make an unexpected move.
When I talk to people who work with startups, the modal cliché is "we all wear many hats." We see a much denser network of communication across smaller organizations than across larger ones. If you're an engineer at a small company, and you have a friend who wants to come work for the marketing team, the engineer probably knows who to talk to, and the engineer has the credibility to recommend their friend. But imagine trying that at a place like Google. They lack that density in the communication network, and that density lends itself to the creation of an agile organization. If more people know who has which skills, they can be leveraged and adapted to new circumstances more easily.
One of the things larger organizations can do moving forward is having channels through which employees can voice concerns about how the org is functioning: workflows, channels, and communication structures that are missing and should exist. Dense networks of communication are going to facilitate resilience because individuals who know others' skill sets will then know how they might be employed in times of crisis.
The process of dealing with a shock has to be reactive, but resilience is proactive. The left-wing rebels in the Salvadoran Civil War had this principle they embodied called the "spirit of autocritico," or self-critique. This group should have fractured early on in the war: they were actually five separate groups that didn't like each other very much. But the thing that kept them together was this deeply embedded institution of getting together and dissecting what went wrong every time there was a failure. It also meant there were many bottom-up channels to report problems, so even small problems could be identified and solved. Those were never the fissures that cracked.
If you're a bear, you start doing yoga. I want to see bears embracing more flexibility. My favorite quote about resilience came from an article Diane Coutu published in the Harvard Business Review in 2002. "Confronted with life's hardships, some people snap, and others snap back."
Snapping back is about changing shape and then being able to thrive in that new shape. I don't want to see the crabs loaded down in armor and so slow they can be stepped on. They're quick; they were never going to be stepped on in the first place.
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ServiceNow Inc. published this content on 02 November 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 02 November 2021 22:41:01 UTC.
