Strategic Planning with Agility & Resilience - If agility is an offensive business strategy enabling enterprises to pursue opportunities quickly, then resilience is a defensive business strategy enabling them to recover quickly from shocks or unforeseen events.

We define the management agenda for organizational resilience — not resilience by serendipity, but rather resilience by planning and design.  Because we cannot depend on the availability of brick and mortar structures being available during a catastrophic event, we must plan for the virtualization of our critical business functions.

The virtualized business organization is emerging as a preferred strategy for many leading global businesses to work across boundaries of time, distance and culture. The virtual business organization (VBO) is yet another evolutionary stage as enterprises move from being highly responsive and agile to being agile, responsive and resilient.  What is the underlying architecture of the VBO? We have identified five key components that represent a variation on Gartner's New Synergy model, which sets forth a framework for creating a highly agile, synchronized and knowledge-based organization.

1. Leadership: Resilience begins with enterprise leadership setting the priorities, allocating the resources and making the commitments to establish organizational resilience throughout the enterprise.  Leadership achieves a balance between risk taking and risk containment to ensure ongoing innovation, but in the context of prudent risk minimization.

2. Culture: The second component of organizational resilience is enterprise culture. A resilient culture is built on principles of organizational empowerment, purpose, trust and accountability.  The VBO must evolve systematically into networks of employees who self-organize into communities of practice for learning and mentoring, and who are empowered to participate, lead and organize virtual teams (in which most of an enterprise's productive work is completed). It is those networks of empowered and connected employees that form the bedrock of the VBO.  The resilient organizational culture has a strong sense of enterprise purpose that cascades down and across the enterprise. It is that strong sense of purpose that glues the VBO together and aligns individual, workgroup and enterprise goals as a continuum. A resilient culture is built on a strong sense of trust between employees, management, suppliers and partners.

3. People: As mentioned above, the bedrock of organizational resilience is the enterprise workforce. People who are properly selected, motivated, equipped and led will overcome almost any obstacle or disruption. There are countless stories that emerged after Sept. 11 about individual heroism, self-initiative and self-sacrifice. Yet, to harness people's incredible ability to lead and respond during trying circumstances requires a systematic enterprise strategy for people selection and people support.  HR department must evolve into a virtual HR group that can support employees regardless of time and space.

4. Systems: The VBO is built on an infrastructure of extensive enterprise connectivity and information robustness. That framework is set forth in "Workplace Agility Equals Workplace Resilience: Here's How" The premise is that leading global organizations are achieving agility and flexibility by combining a highly distributed workplace model with a highly robust and collaborative IT infrastructure.  Technology, systems and management capabilities must be built into a highly resilient global enterprise.

5. Settings: The final component of the VBO architecture is the physical deployment of the workplace.  Workplace resilience is achieved through the distribution of the workplace into multiple, dispersed settings. Alternative workplace techniques such as office "hoteling," telecommuting and desk sharing provide the level of workplace flexibility and agility that is essential for mitigating the risk of catastrophic or disruptive incidents at an enterprise location. Enterprise resilience is the flip side of organizational agility.  It's not enough to create a highly distributed and connected environment. It is essential to undertake a comprehensive assessment of workplace security and safety.  This workplace "triage" is the first step in identifying high-risk locations from people and operational standpoints.

The VBO is the template for organizational competitiveness and survival in the 21st century. It is an organizational framework that will enable the enterprise to respond and flourish in an environment of hyper-change.  The VBO must operate on foundation principles. It must:

1. be without boundaries;
2. be impassioned by a strong sense of leadership;
3. build a culture of purpose, empowerment, trust and accountability;
4. select, motivate and support people who have the requisite skills to flourish in ambiguous and uncertain environments;
5. exploit systems to connect and inform the organization; and
6. move to highly distributed settings that diffuse and disperse enterprise assets and operations.