Building a business for resilience 34 – open systems, closed systems and selectively porous ones 26

This is my 34th installment to a series on building flexibility and resiliency into a business in its routine day-to-day decisions and follow-through, so it can more adaptively anticipate and respond to an ongoing low-level but with time, significant flow of change and its cumulative consequences, that every business faces in its normal course of operation (see Business Strategy and Operations – 3 and its Page 4 and Page 5 continuations, postings 542 and loosely following for Parts 1-33.)

I began working my way through a brief to-address topics list in Part 32 of this, that I repeat here for smoother continuity of narrative as I continue discussing its points:

1. Even the most agile and responsive and effectively inclusive communications capabilities can only go so far. Effective communications, and with the right people involved in them, have to lead to active effectively prioritized action if they are to matter, and with feedback monitoring and resulting reviews included.
2. Both reactive and proactive approaches to change and to effectively addressing it, enter in there and need to be explicitly addressed in rounding out any meaningful response to the above Point 1.
3. And I will at least begin to discuss corporate learning, and the development and maintenance of effectively ongoing experience bases at a business, and particularly in a large and diverse business context where this can become a real challenge.
4. In anticipation of that, I note here that this is not so much about what at least someone at the business knows, as it is about pooling and combining empirically based factual details of that sort, to assemble a more comprehensively valuable and applicable knowledge base.
5. And more than just that, this has to be about bringing the fruits of that effort to work for the business as a whole and for its employees, by making its essential details accessible and actively so for those who need them, and when they do.

I have addressed Point 1 of that list and have started addressing its Point 2 since then, starting an orienting discussion of reactive as a business practice approach in Part 33 for that. My primary goal for this posting is to complete my discussion of reactive business practices, at least for purposes of this series, and to discuss proactive responses as a sometimes overlapping alternative to that – which I will explain in what follows. And I will proceed here from that, to at least start preparing for a fuller discussion of Points 3 through 5 as well.

That noted and turning specifically to Point 2 and its issues again, reactive and proactive as I am using those terms, both refer to decisions and actions that would fall outside of business as usual and the more routine that is expected and carried through upon in a more standardized manner.

• Reactive is usually if not essentially always the more catch-up and remediate side to this, where ongoing events that have not been planned or prepared for and certainly operationally, have to be identified and understood, corrected for and resolved after the fact and at least in part on the fly. That is why I refer to reactive in Part 33 in terms of ad hoc and I add here, one-off. And that is why I refer to that approach as being unsupported by either reliable precedent-based experience, or by thought through strategy.
• Proactive, at least holds out the possibility of decision and action that is grounded in the ongoing experience of others at that business, and on strategy. And proactive is also, of the two, where current more standardized practice and its lessons can at least be more systematically considered and even if that means deviating from them and if that means setting them aside in order to address the disruptively new and novel in what is at least a more thoughtfully considered ad hoc manner.

Every detail that I just offered in the immediately preceding bullet points concerning reactive and proactive, depends entirely for any success that those approaches might lead to, on communications and on developing and maintaining effective communications and information sharing. Ultimately the tipping point that distinguishes between them as they are pursued in practice, and in the crucible of perhaps suddenly emerging need, is on how quickly, fully, reliably and effectively the stakeholders involved in addressing a challenge can gain access to the key information that they would need in order for them to make effective decisions and take effective actions, and on how quickly they can and do continue this information sharing process and both through feedback to others already involved and through bringing in other stakeholders who would now need to be included too.

And this brings me directly and specifically to the above-repeated Point 3 and “corporate learning, and the development and maintenance of effectively ongoing experience bases at a business.” And I explicitly note in this context that Point 3 is in fact the largest and most wide-ranging of the issues that I raise in this list and that is in fact part of why I in effect split off two aspects of it as separate Points 4 and 5.

I have already touched upon the issues of Point 3 on a number of occasions in assembling this blog up to here, so my goal for what is to follow in its regard in this series is two-fold: to summarize what might be more widely scattered ideas and approaches that I have offered in earlier series, in one place and as a single more organized whole, and to add some further details to that albeit summarizing line of discussion, as would be called for in addressing the issues of this series.

I am going to start that systems process analysis and discussion in my next installment to this series, and in anticipation of that I offer here an at-least starter outline of some of the approaches and issues that that topics point raises and that I will delve into:

• The accumulation and partitioning of information in a business, and even for what might legitimately be considered low-risk information and processed knowledge held that is not explicitly sensitive or confidential in nature, and its counterpart in more open information sharing.
• Lower-tech and higher-tech tools and approaches for finding and maintaining a more effective balance between tighter information access control and more open access. I will discuss version 2.0 intranets and artificial intelligence supported database systems in this context, among other resources that can be turned to. But I add here that one of the most important aspects of that side to this topic point that I will address is how better technology and its implementation might be able to make it easier to design and develop better and best practices for managing information sharing, but technology alone and even best of breed technology cannot take care of this complex of challenges on its own.
• And as a part of this overall flow of discussion, I will revisit an information sharing detail that I first touched upon very early in writing to this blog at all: the value of being able to identify and network with people in a business that you work at who have, in general been there long-term and who can be considered repositories of knowledge, experience and wisdom there, and of in-depth knowledge of that business’ history. I will, among other details, cite these special resources in order to discuss the range and the limitations of what can effectively be included in an established accessible information and knowledge repository such as an intranet-accessible database system.
• And that raises the issues of what types of information and processed knowledge that would be stored and how it would be selected and included, and organized as far as openness of access is concerned. In anticipation of this portion of this overall narrative to come, this is also where I will distinguish between directly usable actionable information, and the more meta-information that would serve to indicate where to find and gain access to specific types of directly actionable information.

I will add more to this outline as I proceed in addressing it, and offer the above here as an orienting starting point for what is to follow. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Business Strategy and Operations – 5, and also at Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 and Page 4 of that directory.