No Substitute for Relevance

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, some patterns are emerging in how to cultivate shock-neutral organizations that will weather storms and remain relevant in volatile times. As reflected in the NATO HQ experience handling the crisis, resilience of our business is a broad function of people, technology, infrastructure, and finance, which, in times of crises, has to be supported by collaborative culture, agile decision-making, and clear and timely communication.

Resilience, the trendiest of the trends in 2020 and on course to be embedded into national social fabrics and organizational DNAs, is essentially a trait that allows one (individual, organization, nation state) to recover from a shock. Resilience is also directly linked to relevance, an ability to deliver on one’s mission. An organization’s relevance diminishes if its resilience is weakened. 

It is easy to feel left behind as exponential technologies and connectivity mishmash with the overpowering COVID effect and, as a result, leave businesses and organizations without a guiding vector, in effect, accentuating irrelevance. In the national security realm, where NATO operates, relevance serves as a metric, more often qualitative than quantitative in the geopolitical sense, to gauge if an organization has appropriate structure and capabilities to deliver on its mission. NATO HQ’s four-pillar approach to resilience touches on all key functions of crisis management. 

People

Taking care of people is a fundamental tenet of relevant and well-led organizations. Process-wise, scaling a relevant organization always starts with hiring the right people. Yet, as the COVID crisis has shown, management needs to reiterate from the start the importance of business continuity—formerly an uninteresting part for employees at knowledge-intensive companies. Continuous learning is essential in helping management embed resilience-focused culture into people's work habits. 

In NATO’s scope of activities, human resources serves as enabler by crafting policies and procedures to smooth a shift to teleworking or switch on surge capacity when time comes. Similarly, single points of failure—having a single person perform a critical function without a backup—is probably the most fragile element in most organizations and has to be managed proactively. All of that requires careful planning and exercising to test the viability of business continuity procedures and plans. A standalone business continuity office can be one of the best investments a company can make. Whichever way we cut it, people are at the center of a resilient enterprise.

Technology

A big winner in the post-COVID world will be technology companies, not least because organizations big and small, public and private, are coming to the realization that minimal technical specifications, yielding lowest-cost proposals, are no longer sufficient to guarantee business continuity. As we witness a surge in teleworking and the (over)usage of bandwidth, organizations will need more powerful hardware, robust data centers, more diversified approaches to storage, more cloud capacity, etc. NATO’s determination to run virtual classified ministerial meetings is a testament to the times and to the criticality of cutting edge technologies to our mission.

Technologically, the outcome for a resilient institution should be a seamless work environment for employees to connect and collaborate in a secure and trusted format from anywhere, no matter what happens. In the same vein of thinking, organizations globally will need to overhaul the procurement and technical specifications process to generate resilient technology architecture. The leap to the resilient future will require smart contracts, future-leaning technology projections, and, well, “dough.”

Infrastructure

With the whole world teleworking, infrastructure (read: real estate) is the big unknown. Theoretically, if everyone can deliver outcomes by working remotely, what is the role of brick and mortar buildings? At NATO HQ, we are definitely able to get the North Atlantic Council and other supporting committees to meet through VTC and audio. Yet, live meetings remain essential in putting together complex documents, which require multiphase negotiations and involve sensitive drafting processes, in NATO’s case, among 30 member states. Hence, both in public and corporate domains, a need to meet in person will remain sacred. 

From a resilience perspective, long-term planning to find locations for partial and full evacuation is essential. Equally important is the presence of trained medical staff on premises as well as a buildup of emergency aid supplies. Japan’s emergency kits hanging on every chair in every office building is an example of where we might need to end up.

Finance

Money always matters, but especially so in crisis situations. In the corporate world, credit analysts make numerous assumptions and determine the cash amount for a company to hold in case they run into trouble. That’s financial resilience expressed in credit worthiness and liquidity terms. COVID-19, though, will challenge both corporations and the public sector. For public institutions, even NATO, it is less about financial liquidity but the speed at which you can tap the funds to procure or develop deterrence-enhancing capabilities. 

Procurement processes in the public sector are notoriously long, while a tendency to go for the lowest price proposal (often prescribed by the regulations) produces sub-par outcomes. It is especially sensitive when investing in resilience capabilities, which by definition need to be robust and agile given potentially short response times. We are witnessing this live as nations scramble to procure medical equipment. In times of great stress, money might be “too tight to mention,” yet timely financing and procurement serve as enablers of the previous three pillars: people, technology, and infrastructure. It all works as a package or not at all.

Bring it all together

Finally, the four pillars of the NATO HQ approach to resilience must be aided by an organizational culture, which puts a premium on agile decision making because speed is of essence. It’s no urban legend that the larger the organization, the harder it is to ensure agility, which (in large organizations) can only emerge through collaboration. NATO is a complex consensus-based mechanism of military, civilian, bureaucratic, and national sub-cultures, which on one hand might sound paralyzing, yet on the other hand offers the right amount of diversity required to deliver innovative solutions in times of crises.

In all this complexity, the role of effective communication is paramount. PR wizards, communications strategists, editors and alike are not simply the messengers of the news but have become a full-fledged part of the crisis management enterprise. Operating in a disinformation environment means we need to continue to deliver the right message and on time.

Crisis management is a broad and complex endeavor, which must be cultivated through intense collaboration among diverse stakeholders. The four-pillar approach to resilience is what has emerged from COVID and is likely to evolve as we reflect on what’s happening globally, but the true guiding star is the real “why” of why we do that - for NATO, there is no substitute for relevance.