Resilience requires imagination

I’m teaching a course this week on the future of business. I co-created it with colleagues at the School of Management at the University of Bath, years before they were generous enough to make me a Professor. It came about in part because I’ve always thought that teaching about business in a lecture theatre was absurd: it’s the one place business is never done—so our course takes students out to visit and assess companies. But it also emerged from a lot of thinking I’d been doing since before the global financial crisis about the nature of resilience.

My passion grew out of the experience of investing a year researching resilience only to have my book proposal turned down by every publisher in the US and UK on the grounds that we had no more need of resilience: having conquered boom and bust, they said, the book was irrelevant. That was in 2007.

My own argument had been less grandiose. On the grounds that bad things of all kinds will always occur, foresight demanded not mastery but resilience: the capacity to come back after disaster strikes. When crises arise, what protects organizations? (I was and remain, of course, deeply interested in same question addressed to individuals.) But by the time of the 2008 crash, the publishers had missed their chance and I moved on…to write about wilful blindness.

This week’s course looks at the multiple threats that assail businesses, governments, organizations of all kind. Its text book is the annual World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report. Strange reading perhaps for the beginning of each new year, but fascinating. Extreme weather events, loss of biodiversity, war, misinformation and disinformation, societal polarization, erosion of human rights don’t make for easy reading. Last year, I struggled to be entirely open with my students, muting how traumatic reading the report had become. This year, perhaps I’m inured; or the Report’s writers have cooled it down. In any case, you don’t expect risk reports to cheer you up.

But it’s fascinating to explore how much context matters to business, something that isn’t discussed nearly enough. All the things that cannot be managed or controlled. When the students visit companies—some corporate public behemoths, startups, PE-backed firms (in a tricky year) and charities—they have to assess for themselves how resilient they believe these companies to be in the face of a monstrous risk register. There are no right answers. I don’t know. They have to look hard, ask tough questions, and most of all they have to imagine: what if…. What if not…? What could…? What might?

This is fundamentally a creative exercise. The students just have to make their case. Would you invest your money in the business? Would you invest something more valuable: your precious time? What do you think could happen? How might the organization defend against it? Management requires imagination, but generally that isn’t how it’s taught. In my experience, much management teaching frequently spins a fantasy of certainties. Newtonian causes and predictable effects. From inception, management has suffered a kind of physics envy, longing to be a science although these days, fewer of my colleagues truly believe it is. The pure controlled experiment, running over months or years, remains elusive because every day, market, product and customer is different. Context changes everything and uncertainty rules. So imagination—the capacity to imagine multiple possibilities—is the name of the game.

So if the Risk Report is gloomy, the rest is a ton of fun. When we first ran the programme, my MSc students yearned for a single right answer. Now, they’re getting far more comfortable accepting that there are many. That is a form of resilience in itself. I can’t wait to see what they find.

If You Want to Go Deeper

Here is the Global Risk Report for this year – and for 2024. The differences between them should provoke some thoughts.

Things I Love

On 27 January, my alarm clock went off and I found myself listening to the BBC’s Radio 3 commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz. It was a shock. An excellent one.

Serious, subtle, informed, enlightening choices of music presented with a tone of thoughtful intent. No sentiment. An exemplar of the power of music to express what no other language can. And proof of the irreplaceable importance of public service broadcasting. Radio 3 even held a London studio and presenter on standby thoughout the day, in case the line to Poland failed. The courage to be serious, and deeply informed, has never been more fundamental.