Is your small or medium-sized organization prepared?
The world is more VUCA than before and the rate of technological change is accelerating. Is your organization ready for unexpected shocks and opportunities? Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have an advantage compared to large corporations: they can be more flexible and agile, given their smaller size. At the same time, that is a disadvantage: they have less resources (time, money, support staff) to weather the storms that loom ahead.
Let’s learn from research on organizational resilience by Denyer & Sutliff with the UK’s National Preparedness Commission, Deloitte and Cranfield University. (Source: Denyer, D. and Sutliff, M. (2021). Resilience reimagined: a practical guide for organisations. National Preparedness Commission, Cranfield University and Deloitte.)
Their Organizational Resilience Maturity Model entails five levels - roughly summarized as:
- Ad Hoc: based on optimism - “things will work out”.
- Reactive: resilience is important after an incident - prevent it from happening again, defensive resilience.
- Prescriptive: focus on specified risks for the organization, compliance with regulators, planned audits, silos for different risk areas.
- Adaptive: focus on impact for end-users, continuous scanning, thresholds of what is acceptable, stress-testing, employees empowered to solve issues, psychological safety, coordinating risk areas.
- Generative: focus on impact for all stakeholders and system, resilience embedded in all areas, people feel responsible, a learning, adaptive culture, long-term view, strategic foresight and also progressive resilience: can we benefit from unexpected opportunities?
- At which of these five levels is your SME organization currently?
Resilience with 4 Rs
Resilience consists of 4Rs, in this model. Resilient organizations demonstrate:
• Readiness (preventative control) - they can avoid more incidents and disruptions than their peers.
• Responsiveness (mindful action) - they are flexible and able to adapt their response, so the impact of disruption on their performance can be lower than their peers.
• Recovery (performance optimization) - the speed of recovery of essential outcomes (not just assets) can be faster than their peers.
• Regeneration (adaptive innovation) - the extent of recovery can be greater than their peers (generative and transformational, not incremental change).
This fascinating research is still ongoing. But organizations can already self-assess themselves with these dimensions in mind.
- Which R is your organization’s forte? Which not so much?
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Strategic Tensions Model
Denyer & Sutliff’s research found that organizational resilience strategies differ on two core dimensions: mindset (defensive vs progressive) and design (consistency vs flexibility). These two dimensions form the Strategic Tensions Model, that highlights four common strategies for achieving organizational resilience - depending on how organizations balance these tensions or dilemmas.
These dimensions align well with the dimensions of the Competing Values Framework (CVF, Cameron & Quinn, 1999) that describes the tensions in organizational culture.
The dimension defensive versus progressive aligns with the CVF-dimension of internal versus external orientation.
The dimension consistency vs flexibility looks like the stability versus flexibility focus in the CVF.
Strategy and culture
As the saying goes: culture eats strategy for breakfast. So checking on your culture when working on your strategy and future resilience is crucial. The four core strategies that Denyer & Sutliff found are described below - paired with the relevant culture type based on Cameron & Quinn.
• Preventative control (Readiness). Organizational resilience is achieved through robust risk management, physical barriers, systems back-ups, safeguards, and standards. The focus is on protecting the organization from threats and predicting and preventing disruptions and crises. Preventative control is essentially a defensive strategy based on consistency and returning the organization to its current state if there is a crisis.
This resilience strategy fits with the CVF’s process-oriented Control Culture.
• Mindful action (Responsiveness). Organizational resilience is created by people who use their experience, expertise and teamwork to anticipate and adapt to threats. Responding flexibly to unfamiliar or challenging situations requires creative problem solving and expert improvization. Mindful action is a defensive strategy based on flexibility.
This resilience strategy fits with the CVF’s people-oriented Collaborate Culture.
• Adaptive innovation (Regeneration). Organizational resilience is created through innovation and by developing new products, services or markets. It is also the strategy required to resolve complex, intractable issues, both internal and external, requiring a fundamental rethinking of the business and culture. With this strategy, forward-thinking businesses can themselves embody the disruption in their environment. Adaptive innovation is a progressive strategy based on flexibility.
This resilience strategy fits with the CVF’s entrepreneurial, learning Create Culture.
• Performance optimization (Recovery). Organizational resilience is formed by continually improving, refining and extending existing competencies and exploiting current technologies to serve present customers and markets more efficiently and effectively. It involves improvement within the current paradigm rather than creative 'blue skies' or 'out of the box' thinking. Performance optimization is essentially a progressive approach based on consistency.
This resilience strategy fits with the CVF’s results-oriented Compete Culture.
Go to this webpage for explanations of the Competing Values Framework and its four culture types
In addition to developing your culture, consider working on Strategic Foresight and futures thinking. If you want to learn more, join our Strategic Foresight & Futures community.
Mix the strategies and culture types
As Denyer & Sutliff and colleagues write: The four resilience strategies could be seen as separate opposites, with an 'either/or' choice. However, organizations can live and thrive with paradox. Leveraging these tensions by employing ‘both/and' thinking is a critical aspect of organizational resilience. Cameron and Quinn state exactly the same about the Competing Values Framework. In the long run, you need them all to be successful. The frameworks helps to navigate complexity and invites both/and thinking.
An overemphasis on any of the resilience strategies can create vulnerabilities and enhance crises:
• Stagnation: too much control with too little innovation can make essential outcomes static, stale, and uncompetitive, threatening the organization's viability. (Too much Control culture)
• Fragmentation: too much responsiveness with too little optimization can be inefficient because of duplication of resources and activities. Critical information can fall into the 'cracks' between
functions enhancing the potential for incidents. (Too much Collaborate culture)
• Brittleness: too much optimization with too little responsiveness can strip out slack or system redundancy. The adaptive capacity necessary for complex, dynamic environments can be inhibited. (Too much Compete culture)
• Disorder: too much innovation with too little control can heighten the risk of failure when innovation outstrips rules and regulations. (Too much Create culture)
These negative effects resemble the “shadow sides” of overemphasizing the culture types as well.
Denyer & Sutliff developed a Strategic Tensions Assessment Tool (STAT) survey. But even without scoring this survey you can get an idea of where your organization scores, based on the descriptions above. Denyer & Sutliff suggest using these two questions:
• What was your organization's profile prior to COVID-19?
• What does the profile need to look like in the future?
The same goes for Cameron & Quinn’s Competing Values Framework. You can assess the organization’s culture by reading the culture type descriptions or scoring the formal CVF survey: the OCAI.
How defensive, progressive, consistent and flexible is your resilience strategy?
How stable, flexible, internally and externally oriented is your culture?
You can score the OCAI survey via https://www.ocai-online.com
Which culture mix would you need to arrive at Resilience maturity level 5: Generative? There, the organization has a focus on impact for all stakeholders and system, resilience embedded in all areas, people feel responsible, there is a learning, adaptive culture, a long-term view, there is strategic foresight and also progressive resilience where the organization benefits from unexpected opportunities.
In addition to developing your culture, work on Strategic Foresight and futures thinking. You are welcome to join our Strategic Foresight & Futures community.
In the next article, we’ll look at the seven recommended resilience practices, according to Denyer & Sutliff’s research. Stay tuned to expect the unexpected and make your small or medium-sized enterprise more resilient and future-fit.
© Marcella Bremer, 2025
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