Businesses fail for many different reasons, and often for some combination of these. True causes are seen most clearly post-failure, from the smoking rubble. But these causes are almost always detectable long before the final crash and burn. Signs of trouble are there someplace, but few businesses have any way to spot them. That’s what a resilience process can do.
So much these days seems to be getting out of control. Not just in politics but in businesses and organizations generally. Why, and why now? What has changed – the leaders, or their world? Or perhaps it is the role of leaders that has become very different and unfamiliar. At the least, something very big seems to have happened to leadership in these COVID times, but what?
Shortages of everything is being reported as a catastrophe: we are doomed. But what if this is just a symptom of massive changes underway that are now driven by the COVID black swan? Changes that were inevitable in our way-too-brittle world. If so, this shifts our management context to one of challenge and opportunity. We look here at what to do about the global supply chain mess.
Almost every day now we read about something or other being “unavailable” or “in short supply”. Supply chains are crashing. Many kinds of workers are no longer looking for work despite millions of open jobs. COVID has largely vanished so we are told so shortages must be due to “something else”. What “something”? How do we manage in this terrible mess? Time to worry?
Risk management does not reliably make your business or organization resilient. It aims at reducing the likelihood of and damage from foreseeable and probable risks. Resilience is very different. Resilience assumes that damaging impacts, foreseen and unforeseeable, will occur regardless of our risk minimization efforts. It aims at ensuring that the organization can survive almost anything that comes along, regardless of likelihood, and that it will ultimately succeed and prosper. Very different management objectives.
