Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks. We often talk about the resilience of communities in the blitz or after an event like Hurricane Sandy.  Barrow Cadbury in recent research on this issue asks the question – “what happens if a community is not resilient enough to face the shocks?” Their concern is that these communities will face long term decline and poverty.

The Centre for Local Economic Strategies believe that many communities face a 10% reduction in their income in the next three years – with, of course, more serious consequences for those who lose their jobs. Other commentators are concerned about “housing churn” as neighbourhoods see well established households forced to move elsewhere in response to benefits cuts.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) state “Cuts, recession, and benefits changes create an unmanageable spiral of decline.”

Building resilience NEF say resilience “depends on relationships – and the quality of those relationships – in a particular place between public, commercial and social spheres.” Social Capital in a neighbourhood becomes a really important indicator of that neighbourhood’s capacity to survive the challenges thrown at it. The development of social capital requires the active and willing engagement of citizens within a participative community.

Research by the Chamberlain Forum in Birmingham demonstrates a strong correlation between social capital and house prices. People want to move into communities that are lively, proactive, supportive and generous. Housing associations benefit from the deliberate actions they take to equip and enable the community.

US author Edgar Cahn talks about the core economy – the real economy happening under the surface. This is fuelled by relationships, through family, community and the things we love and give time to. Can we tap into this core economy to build resilience?

Four steps to resilience

Four key steps a Housing Association can do directly or working with others are

1. Co-production: This is a technique to enable communities to work together with the public sector and housing providers to address those problems that won’t go away. Inevitably austerity is a great catalyst for fresh thinking and the neighbourhood that learns to adopt and shape its own way forward raises its chances of success.

2. Time banking – time banking links to the core economy. A time bank is a way of organising, extending and promoting self‐help and social networks between citizens and/ or between citizens and public services. Participants ‘deposit’ their time in the bank by giving practical help and support to others and are able to ‘withdraw’ their time when they need something done themselves. In a time bank, everyone’s time is valued equally: one hour = one credit. Time banking recognises and encourages people using their talents to benefit their community

3. A neighbourhood plan – a neighbourhood plan best mobilises people when it is focused on priorities that people can unite behind. We advocate a simple one page plan with five key neighbourhood priorities. Issues neighbourhoods may wish to priorities include loneliness, struggling families, poverty, health inequalities and youth unemployment.

4. A neighbourhood manager – neighbourhoods need a catalyst who can help them think through their key needs, help them shape solutions and enable citizens to engage with service providers, drive community projects and enable great communication.

NEF make the point that many of the organisations society relies on to build community resilience have been squeezed to breaking point. Housing Associations with their broad perspective, networking capacity and awareness of local needs may find themselves taking a more proactive role in building social capital.

The Challenge for Housing

In our contact with many RSLs we increasingly talk about the need to create a new culture, a new way of doing things. In doing so there are three key challenges Housing providers face

1. FOCUS – those organisations that succeed in challenging and complex times have a really clear focus. They have robust discussion about their priorities and manage their impact well. This creates alignment – the organisation works well together with a real focus on results.

2. CONSISTENCY – in a time when many neighbourhoods will struggle with large economic and social challenges Housing providers need to be credible and trust worthy.  Housing providers face a wide range of customer issues as benefits policy changes. They will need to work hard before issues arise to ensure they can address problems in a consistent and transparent way. Consistency will deliver value for money - poor preparation could lead to a wide variation in responses and significant added cost.

3. SUPPORT THE FRONT LINE – the Housing front line will be a place with many stresses and pressures – they need excellent support. This is a prime culture issue Managers – and the wider organisation needs to be supportive and enabling whilst maintaining standards.

In short Housing Associations will themselves have to become resilient if they are to face the shocks and changes that lie ahead.  They need to build their own social capital if they are to work effectively with stressed neighbourhoods. This is a time when a good Housing Association may be the difference between survival and economic decline for our communities. We need to be ready.

Steve Botham is Chief Executive of Caret Consulting Group and Chairman of the Chamberlain Forum

If you were a business leader in New York City in 1886, what to sort of things might you be paying special attention? As it turns out, (as reported by Roy Williams), according to Manufacturer and Builder, the leading monthly journal of innovation and change, the big news in New York was the scandal over the proliferation of overhead electric lines.  And, there’s more. One of the most important discoveries reported in the journal was a new way to colour bricks red!!  But, what else was going on in 1886?  How about this as a starter for ten? 

• Crates containing the Statue of Liberty were being unloaded by dock workers
• Richard Sears was launching a company that would bring catalogue shopping to America
• In Atlanta, John Pemberton was finalising the concoction that would become Coca-Cola
• Gottlieb Daimler was completing the world’s first car - across the pond

As a leader, how might you make sure you are not so fixated on the slightly unusual (overhead electric lines!!) that you are blinded to crucial changes such as the birth of what was to later become the giant company Sears?

I started my “proper” working life at Longbridge - then a factory employing 20,000 workers, the UK’s biggest at the time. To join up I had to walk through a picket line of angry engineers - they were relatively polite and sympathetic to my need to reassure my employers that I was alive and well and reporting for duty. As time went on the striking got worse, the assembly workers came out and filled the nearby parks with mass meetings and angry placards. We faced a weekend when all of us in Personnel were told to go home and prepare to make thousands redundant if crucial talks between management and unions broke down. Fortunately there was a breakthrough but the knock on effect in terms of suspicion and lack of cooperation persisted for many years.

Move forward to the present day. I was facilitating a day long workshop for an excellent group of HR Managers working in local government. At one point we considered the key risks their organisation faced as it prepared for significant change. There were big issues: significant damage to service delivery, inability to simplify processes and bring in new ways of working with reduced resources, antagonistic staff, a new structure with fewer people working but with less commitment to support vulnerable people or children. We looked at the capacity of their middle managers to take their teams with them through difficult change. “Oh my goodness,” one of the managers sighed, “some of them will be great but some of our managers will be an absolute nightmare.” My Longbridge experience was partly driven by very militant unions but it also symbolised a vote of no confidence in the senior managers. It was as if the workforce all joined together to sing “You don’t know what you’re doing.” In change, the organisation as a whole may be able to take the workforce with them during economically difficult times. But some managers “won’t know what they are doing” and will lose the confidence of their teams. The result? At best poorly implemented change - at worst antagonism and tensions for years to come.

The job of senior managers during change is to find the middle managers who are most likely to destroy staff morale or commitment. Leaders need to be looking carefully at who gets their vote of confidence to take people with them through change - and who needs attention now before they create disproportionate damage.  

Like a skilled surfer gracefully rides the waves, so managers must learn to surf well when it comes to change.

To say that we live in a world of change is to state the blindingly obvious.  But just because rapid and discontinuous change is an inescapable reality does not guarantee we will be good at handling it.  Every day you and I meet with or observe people who are living proof of Alvin Toffler when he said the future would shock us.  But the fact remains that the best way to prepare for the future is to understand change.  This is crucial given that in many cases when managers (or individuals!) plan for the future, we are comforted by assuming present conditions will continue - even when we are claiming things are going to be very different.

So what to do?  Many years ago, Leon Martel suggested the following by way of a strategy for mastering change:

1. Recognise the change is occurring

2. Identify changes likely to affect your business, your profession, and your personal plans

3. Determine type and probable pattern of each change

4. Rank changes by importance of effect and likelihood of occurrence

5. Make use of changes

On this final point of making use of or exploiting change I am reminded of Ralph Teeter.  His change was the fact that he was blinded in a childhood accident.  The person who drove him about turned out to be so erratic this caused Teeter to suffer from motion sickness.  This adverse change was used by Teeter in that he invented cruise control for use in cars and other applications.  What are your personal or observed examples that might illustrate points 1 to 4 of Martel’s suggested strategy for mastering change?

“People are always for change in general and then they begin to worry about particulars“.  Those were the words of Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, in an interview about the health bill currently being debated in Congress.  She is right, both Republicans and Democrats agree something needs to be done but vehemently disagree on what should be done, how it should be done, and who should pay.  This seemed illustrative of the dynamics of recession-triggered change and transformation taking place in many organisations.  People tend to agree to something needs to happen but….

Leaders in organisations could benefit from taking a leaf out of the book of Dupont’s CEO, Ellen Kullman, who advocates four principles for moving ahead during turbulent times:

• Focus on what you can control
• Adopt a new trajectory by re-thinking your business model
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Maintain pride around your organisation’s mission

Kullman’s organisation employs 60,000 people in 70 countries so she decided to adopt the idea that:

“If you try to change everybody at once, you are changing nobody, so you really have to start in one area, or a couple of areas and show success”. 

The impact of her disciplined implementation of these principles can be measured in many ways, not least of which are employee engagement and financial metrics.  If you were to take a leaf out of her book what might that look like?  Or, maybe you are already doing so - in which case, tell us some of your stories.

We are used to change; many organisations have almost become change junkies looking for the latest idea or the smartest improvement. There are different types of change - some is fast moving and potentially high risk e.g. I was once involved in a merger where huge change needed to be achieved within 48 hours to meet regulatory requirements. I have been involved in redundancy programmes that need to have pace so that people know where they stand as quickly as possible. Other change takes time; some of our finest examples of changing and thriving communities in the UK have taken 15 - 20 years to bring about. With these extremes in timescales and scope it is difficult to be prescriptive about the best way to achieve change.

What we do know, however, is that up to 70% of change programmes fail to deliver what they set out to do - some commentators put the figures higher. This means that change can be an extremely expensive, exhausting, all consuming waste of money. John Kotter, often viewed as the guru of change, states:

“The number one problem organisations have is all about creating a sense of urgency - and that’s the first step in a series of actions needed to succeed in a changing world.”

Kotter argues that urgency is essential. Gallup’s work suggests that this links closely with people knowing what is expected of them. Leaders need to articulate a clear, achievable and ambitious vision - it may need to challenge some attitudes, it must clarify what will happen next (and the realistic steps) and gain the commitment of a significant proportion of those delivering the change.

Change leaders know about the need for a clear vision, a detailed plan, the need to manage risks and key stakeholders. These are “the good practices of change”. David Maister makes a very telling point about change:

“Knowing that something is good for us is not necessarily a predictor that we are going to do it.”

The vision, the planning and the processes of change can be brilliant but ultimately it is the people element that plays a key role. Are the people who need to deliver this change committed to making it work? Some people just don’t want to change. The reasons can vary greatly but gaining that commitment to act in a time of great uncertainty and stress may well be the thing that will separate out the organisation’s heroes of 2009 from the organisational losers.

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Studies have found that less than 10 percent  of effectively formulated strategies carry through to successful implementation.  Some 90 percent of companies consistently fail to execute strategies effectively.  One key to effective strategy execution is the fact that it results from executing the right set of strategic projects/work streams in the right way.  These numbers seem to chime with the experience and research of change expert John Kotter.

Referring to his work for the book Leading Change, Kotter explains:

“That book was based on the analysis of about one hundred efforts in organisations to produce large scale change: implementing new growth strategies, putting in new IT systems, reorganising to reduce expenses.  Incredibly, we found that in over 70 percent of the situations where substantial changes were clearly needed, either they:

• were not fully launched, or
• the change efforts failed, or
• changes were achieved but over budget, late, and with great frustration

We also found that in about 10 percent of the cases, people achieved more than would have been thought possible.  Surprisingly, at least to us, in those 10 percent a similar formula was used in virtually all instances”

Sound familiar?  What has been your experience?