Talk: Lifeguards and Lifeboats - from Robust to Resilient

Talk description

Title:	Lifeguards and Lifeboats - from Robust to Resilient
Short synopsis:	Organisations exist in increasingly complex environments. This complexity comes with more failure modes for us all to survive within. Traditional tackling of everything that can go wrong has value, but as we move from the probable, through possible to plausible there is little chance that the event that occurs is the one that you have prepared for. This leaves us vulnerable. We need to embrace different approaches to building resilience, not just robustness. My talk will explore aspects of resilience, drawing on my experience of the curiously similar world of lifeboat Search & Rescue. Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):	Organisations are existing in (and creating) ever-increasingly complex environments, products and services. This complexity has implications and one of them is that there is an increasingly long tail of failure modes for those organisations to contemplate and survive within. The traditional approach to this challenge is to attempt to predict what can go wrong and plan for each failure mode in turn. To employ a metaphor - this is like having lifeguards patrolling the beach at Gyllyngvase spotting everyone who is likely to get into trouble and stopping them getting in the sea. The perfect lifeguard never gets wet. This approach is robust but very brittle, if the next random event isn't on our predicted list our systems are likely to fail - sometimes catastrophically. Let's push the lifeguard metaphor a little. Lifeguards don't spot every incident before it happens, they do need to get wet. And sometimes the complex system that they're watching over, the beach, goes so wrong that they need to escalate and get help from Lifeboats too. I've spent twenty years volunteering as an all-weather lifeboat crew. I've been part of the organisation that provides the UK lifeboat and lifeguard service, the RNLI, and I've come to realise that it is a shining example of resilience in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. Does that environment sound familiar at all? I believe there is a surprising amount of commonality between the seemingly eclectic communities of search & rescue and business and I'll draw upon some of my experiences during this talk to highlight aspects of our thinking, our practices and our leadership that will help us move from robust to resilient - and perhaps even further. Topics we'll cover include: Contextual awareness and 'assuming the callsign...'; understanding what weak signals may mean and how to spot them, helping you and your teams to 'change gear' when situations change. Resilience in leadership; when command and control makes sense, how leadership at all levels builds resilience. Cultural and structural resilience; the importance of building social networks within the organisation, the power of exercise (not pilates or yoga, more like what NATO does). Embracing chaos; the Cynefin model and implications for resilience, what Netflix did with monkeys. What comes next; can organisations become anti-fragile? Max size: 5000 chars
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