Reslience and the Need for Morphological Placticity

Organizations across the globe this century face a similar question - how to build resilience in a fragile world.  The main strategic challenge that most organization face is building resilience for long-term sustainability.  Building resilience - the ability to bounce back more quickly and effectively - is an urgent social and economic issue that engineers will face this century.  As we have all seen, our interconnected world is susceptible to sudden and dramatic shocks stresses - ranging from a cyber-attack to a new strain of virus to terrorism to infrastructure failures to a violent storm to an economic blow to civil disturbances. 

One way to look at organizational resilience is to look at the plant that gives us cotton.  The epic story of cotton is one of a plant that is stubborn, seemingly able to thrive with little help from farmers, given the right natural conditions.  It grows in a wide range of environments thanks to its "morphological plasticity" - its ability to adapt to diverse growing conditions by shortening, lengthening, or even interrupting its effective bloom period,

When assessing the resiliency of your organization, the five characteristics of resilience are a good place to start - awareness, diversity, integration, self-regulation, and adaptive are a good place to start.  Under adaptive, also start thinking about the level of "morphological plasticity" your organization has and needs for a century of constant change and disruption.