Agility and resilience

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…if you’re a meteorologist. For most of the rest of us this week, we’re bombarded with words like “MONSTER storm,” slammed with garish-colored maps telling us how bad it will be, and if we venture out too late, we confront store shelves that look like this. I put up an announcement to my students this morning titled, “Agile strategy is no match for Mother Nature,” and have been pondering my choice of phrase ever since. What is the connection between agility and resilience? And how can we use agile habits to make our communities, companies, and institutions more resilient?

Agility can make a difference in a number of ways: in times of calm, before events are even on the horizon; in the midst of difficult, tense events; and in the aftermath as we struggle to get back to normal. Here’s some pointers for building your team’s agility – and resilience.

Before the storm: Building agile habits

When the environment is calm is the best time to build agile “muscles” – and it’s the hardest time to do so, because there is no sense of urgency. Old ways of doing things seem to be working just fine. Agile leaders recognize the opportunity: there is time and often other resources to invest. This can mean training key leaders or the whole team in Strategic Doing, and/or choosing a challenge that’s important but not a 5-alarm fire to use as a platform to begin working in a more agile way, using a Strategic Doing workshop format. If you can’t get others on board, you can still invest in your own leadership development – the question is not if you’ll need the skills, it’s when.

During the storm: Agile teams in crisis

High-performing teams that routinely face crisis situations – first responders, emergency room personnel, and groups that go into an area after a natural disaster – don’t work like teams in “normal” times. They’ve built habits of working together that don’t require filling out forms or stage-gating processes. Yet, it’s far from chaos. There are two keys to that ability: first, they know exactly what’s available – both the skillsets of the people and the equipment or supplies. In other words, they know their assets and thus know what they have to work with. Second, even if they’re not buddies outside of the work environment, they’ve recognized the need for psychological safety – to take interpersonal risks with one another – and act accordingly. They count on one another to bring up issues as they arise so that the team can figure out how to solve them. You don’t have to be a team working in high-risk environments to use both of those skills: rely on the assets you have (even if you have to improvise, putting them together in new ways), and make sure the team members are clear on how to communicate even when (especially when) things aren’t quite working.

After the storm: Learning, reflection, and psychological safety

Those high-risk teams do one more thing that we can learn from: they learn from what’s happened. In the medical world, this process is highly structured, with meetings to examine in detail exactly what went wrong if a mistake was made. This also requires a high level of psychological safety: the team is more interested in learning how to improve than in blaming one another (check out psychological safety guru Amy Edmondson talking about this team habit here).

The payoff: Why agility and resilience go hand in hand

You’ll notice there’s an assumption embedded in the last step: that the situation will come up again. That’s almost certainly the case – or at least something that will call on your agile muscles will arise. If you’ve strengthened them, you will have reduced the risk of harm to your organization and increased the chances that you’ll emerge less battered, if not stronger. Agility and resilience aren’t at odds, they’re a relationship worth exploiting for organizations navigating uncertainty.