Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization: 3 Lessons from Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar (Innovation/Anthropology)
This article is part of a series profiling innovative organisations from various industries. Find all of the articles here: Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization: 3 Things We Learned During COVID-19.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders with free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during this crisis.
Idea Couture is a global strategic innovation and experience design firm that operates where design meets business.. As part of Cognizant Interactive, Idea Couture brings insight and foresight, strategy, research, and design together to deliver tomorrow’s experiences today.Idea Couture clients have included FedEx, Johnson & Johnson, Humana, Mattel, Fisher-Price, Scotiabank, SickKids.
Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar is the Chief Anthropologist and SVP of Insights at Idea Couture, where she leads a global team of social scientists and design researchers in decoding the social and cultural processes through which experience is made meaningful.
Aiken-Klar draws on the concept of Liminality to make sense of the discomfort caused by transformation. “Anthropologists use the term to describe the sense of chaos and ambiguity that a social group endures during a time of transition,” she wrote in an article from 2018. “Organizational transformation is like a rite of passage. The outcomes are well known; the sense of ambiguity has an end because the purpose of the transition is an objective that is known and shared by all members of the community.”
As the world collectively moves into a rite of passage full of ambiguity, this concept can help illuminate new paths forward.
3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar (Chief Anthropologist and SVP of Insights)
Today’s struggle is surviving and it’s full of chaos and ambiguity. Overcoming it requires an understanding of the cultural beliefs and practices within the organization that will either help or hinder the desired change.
#1 To become resilient we need a shared sense of purpose
Organizations are questioning their supply chains, value chains, working models, and funding models. It can be paralyzing and can limit the organizations who aren’t sure what to do.
“Having a renewed sense of purpose in spite of this uncertainty can help teams move through these moments of change. We’re no longer what we used to be and we’re not sure what we will become. In moments like these anthropologists say that you are betwixt and between two states of being,” she says.
Organizations that have communitas — the sense of sharing and intimacy that develops among persons who experience liminality as a group — will be more resilient and able to weather the storm. They find ways to maintain and adapt the cultural traditions that unite them, like the virtual sessions of yoga, happy hour, and trivia. More importantly, they begin to look at moving forward as part of their community purpose.
#2 We need to understand and overcome some parts of how our business are run
This crisis highlighted fragility in the ecosystems that private- and public- sector organizations operate within. Leadership now understands the value created by different parts of their ecosystem, along with the risks created by the fragility of the ecosystem. Becoming resilient to these kinds of shocks will require a new model of understanding, as well as overcoming the barriers created by some parts of how organizations are run.
Aiken-Klar notes “We are also seeing how operations are being re-imagined to make global travel, global trade, and public health happen.” She references how two traditional pharmaceutical competitors have come together to work on a vaccine as a way to overcome the norms and structures which would otherwise slowdown the process.
The same is happening elsewhere where an entire industry’s survival has become a rallying cry for the individual operators and unites them. In these moments it will be clear which organizational decisions and priorities are unsustainable when entire funding models are at risk. Higher education and tourism are two examples of that function.
#3 This is an opportunity to measure performance differently
In the discomfort created by this transformation, organizations should look for opportunities to re-imagine performance and sustainability.
On an individual level, when you have people working at home you need to rethink what being a worker is, the pressures they are balancing, and the different identities they have outside of the office. “How do we evaluate people who are doing their jobs, homeschooling, taking care of family members, and balancing more? There are probably different ways of capturing performance based on value delivered rather than daily activities.” The human-centred lens will be important as technology provides more data which could result in management further abstracting and quantifying people.
On an organizational level, corporate performance will need to redefine what ‘good’ is. We are seeing examples of this happening in the financial sector where institutions are starting to measure performance in different ways. Impact is becoming a more important measure and may become more determinant of a ‘good’ business than the economic performance.
This crisis will highlight those organizations who were more resilient because of the strong community and customer support they maintained. They’ve fostered a sense of shared purpose because what they deliver to the community and to their customers is much more than the food that they serve and the products that they sell. Sustainable organizations play a bigger role within ecosystems than the economic impact created.
Article by Arpy Dragffy, Principal at PH1. He leads customer experience, service design, and journey mapping projects for higher education, charity, health, and technology clients.
Register for the June 17 webinar How Organisations Become Adaptive & Resilient in a Time of Crisis to learn directly from some of the leaders profiled.
More lessons from this series:
- 3 Lessons from Zahra Ebrahim (Civic Engagement): Their solution required no technical background and it helps communities precisely because of its simplicity. They wanted to create a resource that made it extremely easy to connect people needing help to resources offering help.
- 3 Lessons from Young Enterprise (Education/Charity): This crisis forced the charity to quickly re-think their entire model. The needs of teachers, youth workers, students, and parents all changed and the charity had to adapt to deliver support in new ways.
- 3 Lessons from CityStudio (Education): CityStudio brings innovation, engagement, and experimentation to Vancouver’s City Hall by uniting city staff with post-secondary students, faculty, and community.
- 3 Lessons from Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Education): The abrupt shift from in-person to online classes meant that Dr. Beausoleil had 2 days to take in-person lab-based business design, innovation, and design thinking classes and rethink how to offer the same learning outcomes digitally.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Ernesto Peña, Ph.D (Charity/ Technology): As a technology platform which has the primary goal of making giving easy, he has had the privilege of being able to study topics such as why donors stop giving and what makes them comfortable to give to a charity for the first time.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar (Innovation/Anthropology): Having a renewed sense of purpose in spite of this uncertainty can help teams move through these moments of change. We’re no longer what we used to be and we’re not sure what we will become.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Tyson Villeneuve (Events/Hospitality): Events as an industry effectively flatlined and we were the first to get hit: Large sports events, festivals, gatherings. The entire industry was shut down two weeks before restaurants.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dianne Dredge, Ph.D (Tourism / Community Engagement): Her lens from the perspective of regions and tourism ecosystems that had to completely rebuild provide lessons on how industries can become adaptive and resilient.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during the COVID-19 crisis.
