Relying too much on resilience: silver linings and dark clouds

This upcoming summary is a cracking read from Bob Wears and Charles Vincent, exploring how we can come to over-rely on the adaptability of people and systems.

They argue that while “resilience is generally thought of as an unalloyed good …no silver lining is without its cloud” and that sometimes, resilience may be inappropriately deployed “wastefully or even dangerously”.

As examples:

An organisation may depend on resilience too much for achieving routine success, “frittering away a valuable adaptive resource on the everyday that might better be husbanded for greater or less tractable threats”
Too much time and effort may be spent in adapting to issues that aren’t real challenges, thus “degrade its own ability to sustain key operations in a sort of disorderly, continuous boiling”
Organisations may employ resilience unevenly across organisational levels, creating a co-dependency instead of addressing fundamental challenges; e.g. “front-line resilience leads to short-term ‘fixes’ that put off more fundamental, long-term solutions” (a focus on first-order problem solving away from second-order problem solving)
A focus on resilience and capacity may allow “upper management to protect itself from inconvenient truths and shift accountability for failures to frontline workers”
Resilience may act as compensation for poor reliability, and under the assumption that ‘people will sort it out’ (inadequate and ill-fitting designs, resource constraints, trade-offs etc)
Excessive reliance on resilience masks the inherent limitations in systems, designs and resourcing

In concluding, it’s said that “hospitals cannot learn from their history because in a sense, they have no history; the stories of near failures and how they are routinely overcome are encapsulated in the tight, difficult to penetrate social networks of the front-line workers”.

The organisation benefits from this silence since unknown issues don’t pose a problem of potentially expensive and disruptive change.