Nurturing a culture of resiliency in the age of fundamental change

Increasingly institutions function within an unprecedented context of fundamental discontinuous change. Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe in researching how institutions deal with unexpected trends and events, suggest that managers are not all that skilled therein and events spiral, get worse and disrupt the operations of the institution. The researchers claim that commitment to resilience and an ability to bounce back from those inevitable errors are part of an indeterminate world. Van Opstal suggests that globalization, technological complexity, interdependence, climate and energy volatility are increasing the level of risk that organizations now face. With this in mind the role of organizational culture, in the institutional response to unexpected emergent contextual conditions that impact on an institution and consequently its resilience capability and survival is the focus of analysis in this paper. It is suggested that organizational culture is complex in nature and emerges in response to a shared learning experience. The role of engineers and managers, using narrative and artefacts, in nurturing a culture of resiliency forms a key theme in the paper. Organizational culture and institutional resiliency are metaphorically intertwined as two strands of a rope flexing under the tremendous contextual strain of an age of fundamental change.