BUILDING RESILIENCE A resilient organization consists of resilient individuals, and is supported by damage limitation. Risk mitigation is a matter of operations, process and finance, the resilience of people can be built. What if you could make decisions unencumbered by fear? If you knew you could bounce back from adversity big or small, your decisions would most likely be different. If both you and your company were resilient, you’d take more justified risks and would know how to mitigate them.
• FINANCE • OPERATIONS Safeguards – risk mitigation
Resilience is highlighted when overcoming adversity and people who have survived crucible experiences have come back from the abyss with traits and learning that to an extent can be emulated. The more adversity one’s bounced back from, the more resilience is expressed and with an awareness of resilience comes risk tolerance. In my experience of overcoming a business failure and the fallout therefrom, there are three key components to building resilience, supported by an underlying mindset and organizational culture that are motivational and ambitious and also offer a safe place for justofied risk taking, even when it is less successful than hoped for.
• LEADERSHIP • TEAM – INDIVIDUALS Personal resilience
There are many learnings from overcoming adversity, e.g. and three are most relevant to Resilience: • Perspective: This is a fight, but it’s not a war. Where is failure, large or small on the scale of business events; • Pure decisions: seeing each element of planning without the attached risk and inherent fear, then layering on cmplexzity, and nor vice versa; • Duality of mindset: sustaining two opposing mindsets.
I’ve found that organizations and individuals who apply these are able to unlock growth through taking fear out of planning and replacing it with well placed safeguards, without compromising the wining drive. I am ‘fortunate’ enough to come from the vicinity of a war zone and could not ever have considered business failure to be the greatest possible catastrophe. The perspective that gave me has enabled me to see major and minor business failures differently.
The liberating element of having nothing left to lose on the other hand helped me to identify how to improve decision making. I found the the decisions I made when I looked at the core parameters only, and not politics and hedging were the best I ever made – I also see that in organizations, when they are able to strip their planning to the core. The last point, duality of thinking is the key driver. Being able to see both sides of the coin, the potential for success and its other side and manage to be prepared for both while driving ahead with determination. If this sounds somewhat like Kipling’s poem If – it is. This is also the piece of poetry most often quoted by people who have successfully overcome business adversity.
RISK TOLERANCE is built on
RESILIENCE
RISK MITIGATION
Built on a fundament of
1. Perspective Culture that is 2. Pure decisions
Motivational and Collaborative 3. Duality of mindset
UNDERLYING CULTURE COLLABORATION
The fundament for a resilient organization and its people to thrive is a culture that celebrates controlled and mitigated risk and does not stigmatize less successful attempts. A culture (of) driving ambition and motivation, that supported by connectors such as respect, attention, acceptance is a collaborative powerhouse.
RESPECT EMPATHY
HUMILITY
VULNERABILITY
PURPOSE
MOTIVATION
INSPIRED EMPOWERMENT CREATIVITY LEADERSHIP
AUTONOMY
OWNERSHIP
REALISM
RESPONSIBILITY
ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF UNCERTAINTY
MASTERY
BUILDING RESILIENCE To do anything out of the ordinary – innovation, creativity, growth – we need to conquer fear. Fear is healthy when managed well. Its evolutionary triggers, precursors to fight or flight, were less complex than business. In business, solutions are not binary and uncertainty is the default. The easiest way to learn survival is experience. In the absence of a crucible, some commonalities experienced by people who’ve shown resilience can be used to our advantage.
• Perspective: This is a fight, but it’s not a war. We will survive. • Pure decisions: seeing each element of planning without the attached risk and inherent fear • Duality of mindset: sustaining two opposing mindsets
PERSPECTIVE If we take some steps back, it’s safe to say that on the scale of life’s (challenges) business failure is not the worst. This is much easier to grasp if you’ve experienced more difficult circumstances such as war or loss of loved ones. If you haven’t – there’s the practice of stepping back and taking perspective. Business failure is not death, or war – it is more about money and pride than a catastrophe.
DAILY MEETINGS CHANGE REJECTION PROJECT BUSINESS WAR LOSS FAILURE BUSINESS
PURE, UNENCUMBERED DECISIONS What would you do if you had nothing to lose? Strip the politics and the fear from the decision. What would you do if you were starting from scratch?
DISPLACEMENT
DEATH OF A LOVED ONE
DUALITY OF MINDSET It’s not a coincidence that this is the most often quoted piece of writing by people who’ve survived adversity. Being in the thick of it, knowing it can go either way and still moving towards success - whatever the definition of that may be at that moment - requires reconciling conflicting mindsets, emotions, scenarios. The practice if this kind of mindset dissonance until it becomes default does not detract from motivation, but it does breed the confidence of knowing that adversity, large or small has been prepared for and can be overcome – rather than the riskier approach of ignoring the possibility of failure.
“
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master, If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same.” Rudyard Kipling
This does not necessarily coincide with dualistic thinking, seeing things as either black or white. Duality of mindset does not negate nuance, what it does however stipulate is that one acknowledges the two scenarios at the extreme ends and is able to face the two, one with drive and the other with preparation and mitigation. This inevitably means reconciling polarities within this mindset dissonance, without (for this purpose) blending them into a compromise nuance.
Realism
Optimism
Control
Leeway
Caution
Audacity
Data Vertical Structure
Gut Horizontal Structure
Process
Agility
Security
Freedom
Damage control Stability
Persistence Change
All of the above should be supported by both Culture and Risk Mitigation.
Once we acknowledge the risk and the possibility of an outcome other than full success, we can decide, before emotion and drive take over, how much fall out we are happy to buffer, should the outcome not be what we are striving for – a gambling cut off point. (We gamble to recover our losses …. ). The downside we are happy to take, as a business should be determined outright, at every level. How much and what kind.
Through building individual resilience and risk mitigation in operations, we build the risk that enables us to face planning, decision making and everyday business with less fear.
ABOUT KATARINA SKOBERNE Katarina has seen success from both sides. She is a three time Founder and CEO; her first two ventures succeeded and her third failed, less than a year after she was named one of the 1000 most influential British business people by the Daily Telegraph. Her experience has given her an empathy that helps her support leaders in all situations and has highlighted a resilience that she now endeavors to introduce at every level of business and has become the subject of her research. After twenty years of leadership, she is very happy in a supporting role, and she can still be as hands on as required. Her approach is personal, sometimes provocative, always empowering. Katarina speaks seven languages and has worked internationally. Her last business engaged 13000 professionals in 125 countries. She studied engineering and has spent two decades of her career in media and communications and as a service provider to a number of categories. She is accustomed to working across industries and specializes in facilitating alignment and collaboration within companies. She has seven years of prime time broadcast experience and has spoken at major international conferences. Katarina is an experienced facilitator and coach for both corporates and start-ups, and often works on connecting these two environments
Katarina Skoberne Riverpark Court 22-23 Embankment Gardens London SW3 4LW +44 (0) 7935 869 395 Katarina@KatarinaSkoberne.com
Thank you for your time.