Resilient systems and organizations

What is at stake can be made particularly concrete at the level of the individual. Individual resilience is the ability to productively overcome setbacks. Resilient individuals turn a crisis into an opportunity! This ability is given to some people, but it does not fall from the sky.

Individual resilience
Individual resilience - or more specifically the "bundle of skills" - can be learned and trained. The following aspects are part of this:

• Emotional regulation and impulse control:
  The ability to deal with emotions intelligently and to guide impulses into controlled channels.
• Cause analysis: The ability to critically analyse and evaluate cause-effect relationships.
• Self-efficacy: The ability and basic attitude of being in charge of one's own destiny and not being powerless to the decisions of others.
• Empathy: The ability to take in the perspectives of others, to empathize and thus to be able to coordinate on a ge￾emotional level.
• Network: The ability to recognize and maintain a wider social network.
• Optimism: The ability to see positive trends in the future.

The sum of these skills can result in increased individual resilience; they are therefore a necessary precondition for being able to turn crises into opportunities. Systematic training is offered by psychologists. However, not much has been achieved at the level of the organizational system.

Organisational resilience
At the superordinate level of the organization or company, the focus is less on individual resilience and more on system resilience. Organizational resilience comprises the ability to absorb stresses and ensure functioning in the face of current adversity, as well as to recover from negative events before the situation can no longer be controlled (according to Kathleen Sutcliffe or Lisa Vä- linkangas). This is a matter of self-organization, learning and adaptation of the system. It is now generally accepted that the following aspects must be covered here:

• Diversity: Organizations increase their resilience by increasing the number of different perspectives, opinions, views within. This can be achieved through "diversity management", which aims to productively combine different genders, languages, nationalities, cultures, professions, etc. within the organization.
• Creativity: Resilient organizations make a lot out of a little; they use scarce resources for innovation. In the company, for example, creativity techniques, systematic innovation management or intrapreneurship programs can be used to build this up.
• Robustness: Organizations are designed to be robust if they succeed in staying in action in turbulent times instead of freezing. In corporate management, the functions of risk management, crisis and continuity management, environmental and health management, and compliance management can work in this direction. Robustness cannot be achieved without clear strategic management.
• Anticipation: Resilient organizations listen for quiet signals that herald change. All functions within the organization for the early detection of market and environmental developments are called for here, i.e. in addition to strategy and corporate development, also, for example, corporate health management or occupational safety.
• Perseverance: The culture of resilient organizations is characterized by perseverance, tenacity and the ability to endure suffering. This is fostered in the organization when productive perseverance is rewarded, tools for staff retention are developed, and the ability to plan for the long term is present and used.

"A resilient organization requires a system and appropriately equipped individuals."

Up to this point, it can be stated that a resilient organization probably needs both: A resilient system and suitably equipped individuals. While psychological instruments can be used at the individual level, this is more difficult at the organizational level.

Tools for managing organisational resilience
As a management approach, ISO￾standard 22316 provides an introduction to the basic concepts and techniques. Organisa￾tional resilience is dealt with here on the basis of nine topics and provided with instructions for systematic management. Unfortunately, the standard remains far too abstract as a concrete management tool.

However, a questionnaire tool developed by the University of Auckland can serve as a benchmarking tool. Here, the aspects "leadership & culture", "readiness for change" and "networks" of the organization are examined on the basis of approx. 80 question items. If this survey is conducted among all decision-makers in the organization, an overall picture is obtained that can be used for further strategic management of the organization.

Identify and address system resilience breaches
For exact event analysis, there are also certain techniques or methods of process and accident analysis (e.g. using Ishikawa diagrams or James Reason's "Swiss Cheese Model"). Particularly noteworthy is the "Functional Reso￾nance Analysis Method" (FRAM, after Holl￾nagel 2012), in which steps of a process are mapped in hexagons and interconnected. This results in a model of a￾nes process, whereby the requirement is to depict the process as the work is actually carried out, and not as someone else has ideally imagined it. A train accident from 2016 can serve as an example here.

On 9 February 2016, two local trains collide head-on on a single-track line in the morning commuter traffic near the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling. The accident claims twelve lives and injures around 89 people. The cause of the disaster was the behaviour of the dispatcher responsible, who was distracted by a Han￾dy computer game and thereby triggered a chain of errors. In a for￾mal process description, this development would never occur.

A FRAM, however, is able to map such a development and ultimately make it possible to work on system resilience. This is exemplified in the model (see Figure 1, from Meissner & Hunziker, 2017). The model shows the processes that are essential to perform￾ten for safe railway operation. It can now be used to identify the mutually beneficial developments of failures and to increase overall resilience through measures.

Conclusions
This paper has made it clear that in order to increase system resilience, at least two levels must be taken into account equally: the individual and the organizational. Certain instruments are available at both levels, although this still needs to be developed further in the case of organizational resilience. The ISO￾standard is not sufficient for this. System resi￾lience can be systematically increased if the various activities of a context are modeled and analyzed. The functional resonance analysis method is a suitable tool for this purpose.