A Formula for Resilience

COVID is giving us an invaluable resilience stress-test. It’s a real-world opportunity to look around and ask who is resilient and who isn’t, and why.

I’m on an emergency council for the governor of Colorado, which recently recommended funding a number of community resilience programs. Those programs are doing great work around specific vulnerabilities, but I’ve also been thinking about resilience in general — and resilience that doesn’t just help us get through something, but helps us come back stronger. Yes, we need to make specific preparations for specific challenges, but what practices or mindset helps us thrive in the face of any challenge?

Here in Portland, I see some restaurants with people lined up around the block to get their favorite sandwich for takeout. I see restaurants pivoting to sell basic groceries, adapting and thriving, doing better business than ever.

I also see restaurants that are closed. I don’t want to judge without knowing the whole situation, but it does make me think about how I could prepare if I had a restaurant. Whatever crisis comes, I don’t want my restaurant to go under — I don’t even want it to barely squeak through. I want to be ready to transform the potential setback into a growth opportunity.

I don’t have a restaurant, but I’ve been looking at what everyone is doing, looking at my own teams at Vestas, and trying to figure out what works.

Resilience or Luck?

Some businesses are doing well because they’re truly resilient; others are doing well because they happened to have the right business model at the right time. There are lessons in COVID, but if we can’t tell the difference between resilience and luck, we’re going to take away the wrong lessons. In the next crisis, the resilient businesses are still going to be doing well, and the businesses that got lucky … well, maybe they’ll get lucky again.

Example: Amazon is doing well. Maybe they deserve some credit on the operational side, but not, I’d argue, on the strategic side. They just happened to be an online retail business at a time when brick and mortar retail is limited. If we look at them and conclude that we need to put everything online, we’re learning the wrong lesson. What if the next crisis disrupts the Internet or the power grid? Suddenly putting everything online wasn’t the resilient move after all.

This is lesson zero of resilience: Think the lessons of each crisis through. Don’t just get ready to double down on whatever worked last time; ask what’s going to work every time. Learn smart.

Mission Is the Basis

I’m not here to brag about the corporate culture at Vestas, but the fact is it’s working. I’m struck by how many of our people refuse to be sidelined by the pandemic. We’re working from home as much as we can, and sure, there are some people who aren’t working as hard as they could be — many of them because of family issues, health issues, life issues outside of their control. But there are a surprising number of people who are still bringing their best game. They’re working around technical obstacles, fighting past the weird solitude, solving whatever problems come up, delivering top-quality work.

I don’t think every organization this size is seeing this kind of spirit. Why are our people so driven?

One reason is that we have a mission that inspires people. We attract true believers. People work for us not just because they need a job, but because they want to change the world. They want to solve pollution, they want to solve climate change, they want to build a rich and sustainable energy economy for future generations. And it’s not just something they say at the interview — they really are committed to changing the damn world.

That kind of mission keeps people going. Someone who is working to change the world is not going to be stopped by a global pandemic, or anything else. The mission makes them personally resilient, and to the extent that an organization can attract those people, the organization becomes resilient too.

Empathy Is the Multiplier

We try to build a human-centered organization at Vestas. It’s always a work in progress, but we take deliberate steps to promote cooperation and empathy. Our performance reviews don’t just cover results, but also behavior — a framework to reflect on social presence and relationships within the company. Our sales awards don’t just recognize individual successes, but also the best teams.

The obvious benefits of empathy in any organization are too numerous to mention. When people care about each other, they take care of each other. They listen better, they share more freely, they offer all those human touches that bring the work to life.

But here’s the other thing I’ve noticed: Empathy acts as a force multiplier for our mission. A strong mission goes a long way on its own, but when people believe in that mission together, when they echo that belief back at each other and build on each other’s commitment — it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire.

COVID is showing us the importance of all the human contact we used to take for granted. Social distancing is harder than not being able to go out and sit down in a restaurant or get a haircut; some of us are finding out that it’s hard to sustain even a simple idea without telling someone about it, talking it out, believing in it together. The opposite is just as true: The more we share our ideas, the stronger they get. If the idea was compelling to begin with, it takes on its own life, becomes real in a way we could never make it real on our own.

And empathy is our bandwidth for sharing. As we’re more open with each other, as we have more human back and forth, we create a bigger and richer space for good ideas to take root — and good ideas, about how to change, how to adapt, and how to grow, are exactly what we need for real resilience.

Shared Intention is the Outcome

Mission × Empathy = Shared Intention

What’s the difference between mission and intention? The mission is the goal; it’s out there in the distance, big and static, something we’re not going to get to in a day or a year but that we keep working toward. Intention is our mindset in the moment. It’s all the little decisions we make every day, all the insights, inventions, sacrifices, and successes that move us toward that mission.

In an organization without a compelling mission, nobody knows where they’re going. With a mission but no empathy, they know where they’re going but they’re not really working together to get there; everyone is in their own box, focused on their own role. You can make progress if the organization is well designed, but there’s no life in it, and in a crisis it’s liable to break down because nobody understands how to help their neighbor.

In an organization with a strong mission and a culture of empathy, our shared intention keeps us aligned in any crisis. In fact, it does more than that: It keeps us driven. When we all believe in what we’re trying to do and we support each other empathetically in that belief, then we’re moving together, fighting together, solving problems together, changing the world together.

An organization of people with shared intention is a resilient organization. When we work together that way, everything is an opportunity for a new idea, a new solution. Whatever kind of crisis comes next, whatever strategic or operational or financial challenges we face, none of it touches that shared intention, and we rebuild stronger and smarter every time.