Why Mechanisms

Mechanisms for Resilience were born from the deep desire to help organizations facing an uncertain future where, regardless of past or present success, what worked before will not be sufficient in the future.

At its core, Mechanisms for Resilience are designed to help these organizations improve since improvement is future agnostic. No matter what tomorrow holds, the ability to improve will ensure a better footing for the next tomorrow.

Improving value delivery and resilience provides the building blocks for navigating the unforeseeable. Improved value delivery ensures sufficient resources for improving resilience to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties.

The objective is significant improvement, sufficiently significant to ensure the organization thrives in an uncertain future, transforming a rapidly changing world into a strategic advantage. Even becoming a driver of rapid change.

Discrete mechanisms were selected as a vehicle so that anyone can self-serve, using the mechanisms best suited to a specific situation. This is an essential abstraction from know-how or skills of a select few, since they might not be accessible tomorrow, and whole-sale implementation of a framework, since the framework might not be relevant tomorrow.

In unison, these whys led Mechanisms for Resilience to become:

Discrete mechanisms

helping organizations improve

value delivery and resilience

for navigating the unforeseeable

to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

The mechanisms do not guarantee success, nor do the absence of the mechanisms lead to failure. They do however increase the odds of lasting success, dampening the need for luck.

Assignment:

• Reflect on the past (month, quarter, six month) and list all the forces that prevented or slowed progress (friction).

• Categorize each of these as internal or external to the organization and calculate the ratio.

• Guesstimate what progress would have been made if the internal friction did not exist and express that as a percentage of the actual progress. This represents one element of the opportunity realized by implementing Mechanisms for Resilience.

Assignment:

• Ask [3, 5, 7] leaders:

  • What percentage of their time is spent strategizing for the future?

  • What would the value be if that could be increased by 10%, 20%, and 50%?

• Roughly extrapolate the data to all leaders in the organization. (Be mindful of double counting.)

Assignment:

• Identify [on, two, or three] unforeseen disruptive events.

• Articulate, in the greatest possible detail, the resources (energy, capacity, time, etc.) it took to recover from the event, the opportunity cost of the disruption, and the remaining cost if full recovery has not been made.