The Resilient Organization

Abstract

Both academics and practitioners have recently discovered resilience as a core topic of interest. Resilience is widely viewed as a potential solution to the challenges posed by crises and disasters. The promise of resilience is an organization or society that absorbs shocks and ‘bounces back’ after a disturbance. While the idea of resilience is increasingly popular, empirical research on resilient organizations is actually quite rare. This article explores whether a relation exists between organizational characteristics, processes and resilience. Building on the insights of high reliability theory and crisis research, it probes this relation in two organizations that experienced deep crises: the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) and National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA).

Key Words:

• Resilience
• high reliability organizations,
• crisis management
• CAISO
• NASA

Acknowledgement

We thank our reviewers who provided us with probing comments that helped us improve this article.

Notes

1. For an extensive literature overview, see De Bruijne et al. (2010).

2. ‘Load’ is the demand for electricity and ‘generation’ is the electricity to meet that load, both of which must be balanced within mandated periods of time, or otherwise service delivery is interrupted as the grid fails.

3. See Mensah-Bonsu and Oren (2001) for a detailed analysis of the causes of this crisis.

4. In thirty-eight instances, CAISO operated with 1.5 per cent or less operating reserves. The regulatory standard was to have at least 7 per cent.

5. Within the organization, the crisis exerted a price on the part of the operators in terms of burnouts and divorce, according to Jim McIntosh, then the CAISO's director of grid operations. CAISO later faced a court case because of the excessive overtime demands that its employees had been subjected to during that period.

6. An O-ring is a commonly used seal in machine design. In the shuttle, O-rings were used to prevent gases from escaping from the Solid Rocket Booster.

7. A few selected sources include Murray and Cox (1989), Vaughan (1996) and Logsdon (1999).

8. In the words of one famous NASA character (‘Mad’ Don Arabian): ‘If anybody does anything technically that's not according to physics, that's bullshitting about something, I will forever be death upon them’ (Murray and Cox, 1989: 361).

9. Ironically, Thiokol engineers complained about the overly conservative design mentality of the involved engineers. As one Thiokol engineer explained his objections against the continuous prodding of NASA: ‘You take the worst, worst, worst, worst, worst case and that's what you have to design for. And that's not practical […] All those worsts were put together, and [Marshall] said you've got to design so that you can withstand all of that […] and you just can't do that or else you couldn't put the part together’ (Vaughan, 1996: 99).

10. The CAIB discovered that the CRATER software was, in effect, not designed to perform this type of analysis nor were the Boeing engineers performing the analysis sufficiently qualified.

11. For instance, a focus on recovery resilience might well benefit from a study of emergency management structures in the US such as the Incident Command System (ICS) and the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which appear much less relevant for our study of precursor resilience (see also Boin, 2010).