Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

9. The Price of Resilience Contrasting the Theoretical Ideal-Type with Organizational Reality

158 9 The Price of Resilience Contrasting the Theoretical Ideal-Type with Organizational Reality Michel van Eeten, Arjen Boin, and Mark de Bruijne When asked how he had maintained performance in the face of overwhelming adversity, a control room shift manager of the California electricity grid answered: “I have six words: By. The. Seat. Of. Our. Pants.” According to most definitions, the shift manager’s organization had demonstrated remarkable resilience. Yet his experience of resilience differed dramatically from the theoretical descriptions of the resilience process found in this book. When surveying the literature on resilient organizations, one cannot help but notice strong overtones of admiration and praise. Weick and Sutcliffe (2001, 14) claim that resilient organizations have “capabilities to detect , contain, and bounce back from those inevitable errors that are part of an indeterminate world.” According to Kendra and Wachtendorf (2003, 42), resilience means “redundancy, the capacity for resourcefulness, effective communication and the capacity for self-organization in the face of extreme demands.” Sutcliffe and Vogus (2003, 97) define resilience as “the capacity to rebound from adversity strengthened and more resourceful.” References to possible drawbacks of resilience are few and far between. Hill (2000) argues that the view of resilience as a desirable property of institutions is biased toward the Western corporate and public sectors. In a repressive regime, institutional resilience may prevent change when change is desirable. Vickers and Kouzmin (2001) point out that the concept of resilience is used for less than noble purposes. Managers assume and empha- The Price of Resilience 159 size the resilience of their organization and its members to rationalize their interventions and defend themselves against the “trauma” they have caused in the workplace in the name of efficiency, downsizing, and outsourcing. What managers like to see as “warehouses of resilience” are often, Vickers and Kouzmin argue, “crucibles of pain.” All in all, these observed drawbacks do not seriously undermine the overwhelmingly positive image of resilience. It has consistently been portrayed— in this book too—as the hallmark of organizational success when operating under challenging conditions. In short, we have created a normative ideal. This begs the question of whether our understanding of resilience is grounded in the experiences of organizational members who have effectively dealt with acute adversity. In the remainder of this chapter, we are interested to see how the theoretical ideal-type of the resilient organization stacks up against recorded practices in such organizations. We pursue this aim in the context of three large-scale sociotechnical systems that are routinely confronted with setbacks and adversity. These case studies remind us of the intricate interplay between operators and technical systems, which is essential to keeping the lights on and preserving delicate ecosystems. They also enrich our understanding of what resilience entails in such sociotechnical systems and what is needed to facilitate the design of resilient systems. The Organizational Messiness of Resilience In theory, resilience comprises the ability to cope with unexpected adversity outside normal operating conditions; maintain a functioning system in the face of this adversity; and, in the process of coping, develop new skills that increase the probability of successful coping in the future. The question we address here is: what does resilience look like in practice? To answer this question, we revisit three case studies on organizations that demonstrated resilience in the face of unprecedented challenges.1 Each faced adversity beyond what it was supposed to handle and somehow managed to cope with this adversity, maintaining a functioning system and developing new skills and options in the process. Each case also involved interaction between technical and organizational systems, in which the organizations adapted to sudden, unexpected impacts on technical systems and were able to avoid imminent danger. In short, these organizations displayed resilience. The first case study focuses on three U.S. water-management systems (the San Francisco Bay Delta, the Columbia River Basin, and the Everglades ). The organizations managing such systems must seek to reconcile 160 van Eeten, Boin, and de Bruijne reliability requirements for water supply and quality (e.g., to cities and agriculture ) and hydropower generation with new reliability requirements for ecosystem protection and restoration (e.g., saving water-related endangered species or threatened habitat). Their reconciliation forces these organizations to work outside existing organizational structures, procedures, and knowledge. The original study asked how the system managers preserve, restore, and otherwise rehabilitate ecosystems reliably yet at the same time ensure the consistent provision of services...