Between Sponge and Titanium: Design features for the resilient organization

Many contemporary organizations must deal with high levels of environmental uncertainty, complexity and equivocality, struggling with not only strong competitive pressures but also increasing uncertainty related to sociopolitical and economic trends within the frame of a risk society. The centrality of resilience in contemporary managerial discourse is mostly related to the social, political, environmental and economic turmoil and jolts, to which organizations have been exposed during the past decades. Organizational survival is therefore increasingly challenged, and to survive and prosper, organizations must transform jolts and shocks into new and resilient solutions. Organizational resilience refers to the ability of an organization to continue to meet its core functions by finding and implementing in a fast and timely manner organizational micro and microstructure able to transform uncertainty into new solutions. While the progressive turbulence of the external environment requires organizations to be more resilient, the design of organizational resilience appears to be still limited to its adaptability to the external environment. Within this context, this chapter draws an original proposal on the design of resilient organizations considering both micro/individual-level and macro/design-level features.