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Statement of PurposeSustainable Transformation - Building a Resilient Organization Governments and organizations around the world are facing major challenges that are taxing their ability to respond and meet the expectations of citizens, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. From fiscal and economic challenges, to demographic and labour force challenges, to environmental and safety challenges, publically funded organizations must build their internal capacity in order to respond to the multiple, often competing, priorities and objectives they are expected to achieve. This can mean responding to adversity, making smart decisions, and bouncing back to a level of good performance. It can mean getting short-term results in the face of a budget crisis, while also protecting (and building) reliable methods and processes for the future. Or it can mean reaching for a longer-term goal over a period of five or more years, while not losing sight of urgent short-term problems. Resilience is a core capability of well-performing organizations and leaders in the public sector need to learn how to help their organizations practice resilience. A “resilient” organization, team, or individual has the ability to recognize when day to day work is operating at the margins of expected performance and safety, and are able to adjust practice to return the organization, unit or a specific patient interaction to a state of balance or optimum level of functioning. This idea has been gaining prominence across a number of sectors over the last few years. In safety across high-consequence industries (aviation, chemical, nuclear, and healthcare), it involves not only the ability to recover from accidents but also possessing other key attributes, such as vigilance that can prevent harm before it happens. In human and social development, it means the ability of individuals and communities to rise above their circumstances and better themselves despite misfortunes or difficult conditions. In organizational terms, in means the capacity of a government, healthcare system, or private-sector company to recover from environmental shocks, adapt to the new situation, and return to a well-performing equilibrium point. Why is resilience an important capacity for organizations, groups, and individuals to develop? As noted already organizations operate within a complex myriad of competing priorities, goals and constraints. Resilience focuses on how to help people manage complexity under pressure to achieve success. A resilient organization will look for ways to understand the shifting environment in which it operates and will learn to recognize vulnerabilities and hazards to defend against potential failures and create pathways to success. Brittleness is the antithesis of resilience. Although these ideas are not well understood or widely practiced, they are also not entirely new as they were alluded to in a report prepared by Otto Brodtrick in 1988 for the Office of the Auditor General, Federal Government of Canada: “Well-performing organizations encourage risk taking. They are willing to try new methods when common sense dictates that better results can be achieved by following the spirit of a regulation, instead of the letter. However, staff must hold the values of stewardship, service and results, and they must consult with each other. When their people are governed by these values, the well-performing organizations encourage risk taking as a matter of strategy.” Strategic risk-taking and risk management, toward optimizing performance, are hallmarks of the Resilient Organization perspective. How does resilience contribute to results? Given budget shortfalls, aging populations, and increasing demands for targeted, high-quality services, governments and healthcare systems must meet urgent short-term demands. Many studies that show that by focusing only on results, organizational improvement is temporary and not embedded in the culture of the organization. Using the same resources, leaders can focus on creating a resilient organization that will achieve the desired results over the long term. Public sector organizations must develop their capacity for resilience if they hope to accomplish their mandates and sustain improvements beyond the near-term. The sustainability challenge is also present for high-consequence industries, where safety is mission-critical. In these industries, attaining good performance in pockets is often more attainable than maintaining and sustaining it over large segments of a system or organization. Pursuing a two-track strategy, or achieving results while moving toward reliability and sustainability, is key to success for leaders in these organizations. Building organizational resilience is a necessary performance platform in today’s environment. Sustaining results and reliability requires the ability to respond to surprise, adapt to changing conditions, and anticipate possible trends before they play out. Leading for resilience helps to identify, nurture, and develop these capacities in large, complex organizations. For example, many governments, hospitals, school boards are facing budget crises and severe fiscal constraints across Canada, Europe, and the U.S. In many Canadian provinces spending on health care is fast approaching half of the provincial budget and is growing at a rate of 5-8% per annum. At the same time, governments are running significant deficits and the demand for health services is climbing. Meanwhile, governments need to focus more of their scarce resources on investing for the future. Departments and Ministries of Health and Finance can only meet their fiscal accountabilities if they adopt a resilience perspective and become a well-performing organization. Otherwise, their strategies will be limited to broad-brush cuts in service which do not change the basic dynamics of the system. Resilience can achieve both, for example by steadily bending the cost curve in healthcare while increasing quality of care and access to service. How? By improving alignment across the sector, enabling organizations to adapt, flex, and anticipate to environmental shocks, and reducing the costs of coordination by improving system-wide teamwork and situational awareness. All of these are characteristics of resilient, reliable, and results-oriented systems. The Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC) with the support of the Ontario government is hosting a conference on September 21, 2010, called Excellence for All: Building Resilience through Quality and Safety for public servants, healthcare leaders, and champions of resilience from high-consequence industries. This conference will start with an orientation to the topic, followed by case examples from the health care sector and an application of learnings to participants’ own situations and challenges. We intend to equip each participant with 3-5 new options for action and learning that will help them “turbo charge” their agenda, while building the capacity for resilience in their organization. Following the conference, we will invite participants to join a virtual network and learning journey to be hosted by the “Three R’s” Network, a joint commitment of IPAC and other sponsoring organizations to improve Resilience, Reliability, and Results. An organization does not become resilient and reliable overnight. It must build the capacity of its staff; it must develop clear objectives that are shared throughout the organization; and it must have clear accountability that aligns individual performance to organization goals. Without these building blocks, an organization will not be able to achieve resilience. The purpose of the Three R’s Network is to mobilize and support leaders to move organizational agendas forward, meet stakeholder requirements and mandates, and work together to anticipate and prevent external shocks, while also identifying and pursuing compelling opportunities.
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