The Critical Need for Resilience

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I’ve just returned from a client engagement in Botswana. I arrived there not long after they elected their fourth President (the country is about 50 years old and the President serves for five years) – in fact I got there on Inauguration Day, which the new President had declared a two-day national holiday.

It was quiet, peaceful, with no evidence of rancor over the election. The mood was optimistic and even joyful.

I was there working with a large national company in the finance sector. Last year we worked with the Executive Committee to design a new culture for the company, one that would foster employee engagement, accountability, and partnership as well as customer service and great products. In the course of that work in 2023, the ExCo created a list of 10 “cultural practices” – behaviors that would embody the new culture in action and keep the organizational values in people’s awareness.

Now we were there to train 16 mid-level people, from each of the company’s divisions, to be “ambassadors” for those cultural practices and to roll them out to the company at large by teaching, coaching, fostering discussions and the like. While these duties would be in addition to their regular jobs, the participants were enthusiastic, energized, and thrilled to be certified as “Cultural Practices Trainers.”

This was one of the most successful implementations of organizational transformation I have ever participated in, and it put me in mind of an article in Harvard Business Review in 2021 titled Company Culture is Everyone’s Responsibility by Denise Lee Yohn.

The article was excellent, and the title explains Yohn’s point. The company in Botswana is an outstanding example of putting Yohn’s principle into action.

In my work on organizational transformation, I make the point that there are cultures that are present by default, and cultures that exist by design. We call the default culture “being human.” To be human is to live in a default culture that “something is wrong” – with me, with other people, or with the circumstances. In this culture we fix blame, as in the old adage "search for the guilty, punishment of the innocent, and rewards for the uninvolved?[i]" As I explain in my forthcoming book (shameless promotion warning) Transformation: from Potential to Practice, blame locks on into the Victim Triangle, entering as a Persecutor, a Rescuer, or a Victim, and inevitably ending up at Victim to start the cycle over again.

While the default culture, for individuals, groups, organizations, countries, etc., operates, as the name says, by default, i.e., automatically, a designed culture takes practice, takes time, and works best when adopted by a community. Implementation of a designed culture has to allow for mistakes and falling back into the default with opportunities for recovery and cleaning up. Practiced long enough, a designed culture will never be automatic, but it does gain stability and can largely displace the default culture. Examples of this include:

?In my last post, just after the US election, I argued for optimism. Optimism is a designed culture. Those of us who did not vote for the outcome we got can be resigned Victims (“not my president”), hand-wringing Rescuers crying for those who will, inarguably suffer under this regime, or angry Persecutors (a la January 6, 2021), but none of those will make a difference. The institution of tyranny is built to expect and thrive on those default responses.

Instead, I believe we need to design a culture of optimism, activism FOR the right rather than AGAINST the wrong, and above all resilience.

We failed in this election. Designing a culture starts with unflinchingly confronting the facts, and the facts are that we failed – not just in the Presidential election but in scores of down-ballot elections as well. Failure is an investment of resources (time, money, and talent) that fails to produce the desired outcome. The investment is material and real; the return on investment of failure is learning. If we do not gain a level of learning that is commensurate with the investment we made in the failure, we will have wasted an enormous opportunity.

Gleaning and implementing the ROI of the failure is what I mean by resilience. If we don’t learn, if we let the other side control the narrative, if we stand against what we oppose rather than for what we favor, we will lose indeed.

History says that the odds of our regaining the House and Senate in 2026 are good. Hopefully the new administration, which we can expect to be blind and deaf to half the population, will help us with this, but we can’t depend on that – we must be optimistic, active, and resilient. Are we up to the challenge? God help us if we’re not.

[i] The earliest known reference to a similar concept dates back to 1975, appearing in the "ACM; proceedings of the annual conference" by the Association for Computing Machinery