Building Organizational Resilience: A System Approach to Mitigating Risk and Uncertainty

Our organizations—designed for optimal performance—work well under normal conditions but are vulnerable to failure when the unexpected occurs. How do we design systems that work efficiently under typical conditions, yet respond resiliently to “unknown unknowns”? 

Building Organizational Resilience provides business leaders with a practical approach to assess and build organizational resiliency. Learn how systems thinking and continuous improvement can help your team identify problems before they occur and fundamentally alter your organization’s ability to effectively respond when they do. Understand the role hidden factories and irregular operations play in contributing to catastrophic events, and how this knowledge can be leveraged to reverse their effects. Leave with a playbook for improving the resilience of your company.

Deepwater Horizon. The Flint water crisis. Boeing’s 737 Max. Notre Dame Cathedral. Cybersecurity breaches at Target. SolarWinds. What do these incidents have in common? As these scenarios evolved, the systems' response consistently lagged behind the incident, despite multiple opportunities for intervention.

This course will help you:

• Develop a consistent language of risk and resiliency across your organization
• Understand the underlying assumptions of your operating paradigm
• Design processes that are robust and inject flexibility into your systems
• Learn to identify the unconscious assumptions and irregular operations that can derail your efforts
• Make your processes and operating paradigm more robustly and flexibly without losing efficiency
• Understand the relationship between continuous improvement and systemic risk, and how to implement continuous improvement for greater organizational resiliency, and greater profits
• Identify the right intervention points in your operations and supply chain to arrest and recover from evolving critical situations based on system thinking
• Effectively select and implement new technologies to fundamentally change your organization’s productivity/risk curve

MIT’s perspective on mitigating organizational risk and managing uncertainty is rooted in real-world practice, systems thinking, and a focus on the human factors that drive suboptimal events and processes. This new organizational resilience course will help you think differently, and systematically, about real-time risk/reward Improvement.

Through faculty presentations, panel discussions case studies, interactive exercises, and small-group discussions, you will explore the importance of systems thinking, learn to identify and act on the warning signs of irregular operations, and understand the important roles that continuous improvement and organizational agility play in developing a more resilient organization.

You will leave this organizational resilience course ready to implement a 90-day playbook for improving the resiliency of your organization.