Act consciously

Arthouse movies and Hollywood move us all, especially when they retrace eventful crises. A year ago, two remarkable films circulated in Swiss-German cinemas. "Deepwater Horizon" (Director: Peter Berg/Producer: Mike Wahlberg) describes the course of the serious oil well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April 2010.

Critical information on the status of a deepwater well was lost during the handover of two operations teams. In the course of an economic time pressure in the operating team, a defect was overlooked. The result was a massive explosion and ultimately the sinking of the infamous platform.

Safety Efficiency Paradox
The situation may only be comprehensible to insiders such as security managers, but the story could also be used for business studies. - Eric Hollnagel introduces such crises as a "security efficiency paradox", in which security guidelines are not only undermined by efficiency criteria, but are also exacerbated by horrendous investments in security technologies and regulations.

On the "Deepwater Horizon" platform, everything was there: Technology, knowledge, regulations. However, there was a lack of "mindfulness", the ability to properly synchronize technology, operations and actions in a stressful situation. Organisational resilience was "zero" on the drilling platform. Due to the end of the shift, the exhausted team basically did not care whether the safety requirements would really be met in the coming shift.

According to various sources, the total economic damage differs. However, it is said to amount to more than 60 billion US dollars - apart from the collateral damage to people and nature. Not only were there eleven fatalities, numerous injured and traumatised citizens, but in general confidence in the oil industry, and possibly even in the US government, was shaken.

Resilience: a heroic epic?
Ironically, the disaster description "Deepwater Horizon" is considered a flop in cinematic circles, while the heroic story "Sully" is praised by insiders. "Sully" (director: Clint Eastwood, producer: Frank Marshall) describes the chronology of the emergency landing of the commercial airliner US1549 on the Hudson River, New York.

The landing in the middle of New York went only smoothly "over the stage", because the Pi-lot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger immediately after failure of both engines ignored the checklis-te for the emergency procedure, switched on an auxiliary turbine earlier than according to the list vorgese-hence with a "bird strike" to save the US1549. He decided to make an emergency landing not at a nearby airport, but on the Hud-son River.

"Sully", the reconstruction of the maneuver on January 15, 2009 also addresses the investigation process. In contrast to the obviously high resilience of the pilot, it was investigated whether it was legitimate to "arbitrarily" ignore the official procedure after take-off. The successful rescue of all 150 passengers was thwarted by high recourse claims.

The heroic rescue had to be painstakingly justified in the legal aftermath by Chesley Sullen-berger.

Exceeding your authority?
What is behind these two examples? Basically, it's about the question of how far regulated guidelines can be exceeded. People and teams on an oil rig - in an airplane, in a hospital, in a nuclear power plant, in general people in shift operations are instructed to keep order.

This includes the duty to inform the following shift, vice

"Fine signals play a big role in workplace safety."

versa has a right to be informed about facts relevant to the company. For this purpose, the shift leaders are given the corresponding competences. Ignoring important information is by definition an overstepping of authority. However, a positive "transgression" is present in the case of "Sully", in which security guidelines were bypassed arbitrarily.

Every safety-oriented organization should basically have its "hair stand on end". On the other hand, there are observations in high reliability research that the recognition and interpretation of "fine signals" play a major role in occupational safety. Just as pilots use human skills in crisis situations, a High Reliability Organization (HRO) should also always orient itself to the impossible and the unregulated before it "punches through" narrowly defined competencies.

If one does not want to dig deeper thematically, one could simply say that the two examples mentioned above are consequences of the respective security cultures of the companies. However, this does not go far enough in the field of organizational resilience. If one is more interested in the ability of organizations to gain an opportunity (or several opportunities) from critical situations or events, one must proceed more generously.

Resilience as a concept
Organisational resilience is very diverse and difficult to measure and grasp. Whitman/Kachali/Roger/Vargo/Seville (2014) therefore developed a framework as the basis for their resilience benchmark to compare companies. They did this against the background of crisis response and prevention in New Zealand's natural disasters, as earthquakes in particular had hit the regional economy several times.

The researchers have defined three main pillars of resilience: "Leadership and culture", "Adaptation readiness", and "Network use". Within these pillars, there are around 15 sub-aspects, such as "stress testing plans". Depending on the components, see the order, they have to be weighted differently:

• Employee engagement
•  Situational Awareness
•  Stress testing plans
• 'Breaking silos' and
• Use knowledge

Whitman et al. intentionally draw a very broad interpretative framework to show the extent to which resilience can be viewed as a systemic function - with various subtopics affecting organizations and their management. Their benchmark uses questionnaires that now provide global survey data for different sizes of organizations.

The cornerstones of CRM
What can be effectively adopted from such models for resilience management? Corporate resilience management (CRM) should be understood as an integrated overall concept.

The so-called resilience funnel (see graphic on the left) illustrates the collection of concepts. The concepts can be linked to each other in order to be able to react to events of increasing urgency.

Organizational resilience is broadly based in order to capture a systemically complex view of the world without trivializing it. It assumes that diverse failures occur and unforeseen events happen. The approaches emphasize the importance of multiple environmental factors that can lead to critical situations:

The belief that a situation can be positively shaped plays just as important a role here as the ability to consciously "fall forward" - in other words, to be entrepreneurially resilient and flexible.