The Agile Turn: Fostering Resilience in People,
Organizations and Systems

A One-Day Leadership Dialogue  

What are the practices and habits of personal resilience, and how do we encourage them?

How does an organization’s culture amplify, or limit, the resilience of its people?

How do organizations recover, persist or even thrive amid disruption?

And how can we bolster the resilience of the many interconnected systems on which we depend?

In an age of connected volatility and change, these are increasingly urgent questions.

In this half- or full-day interactive dialogue purpose-built for senior and emerging leaders in corporations, governments and NGOs, Andrew Zolli leads participants through these topics – presenting frameworks, actionable strategies, new scientific findings, and real-world lessons of resilience, drawn from years of pioneering research.

Through presentation, conversation, and group exercise, this dialogue explores resilience at three, interconnected scales – the individual, the organizational, and the systemic. Across each of these scales, we identify recurring themes and practical principles of building the resilience of your people and your organization.

We start with The Roots of Resilience, defining resilience and its key dimensions, and exploring why the resilience narrative is emerging now, at the beginning of the 21st century. How is the world changing, and how do our own cognitive biases make us alternately blind, or too sensitive, to these changes? How do we overcome these biases to better see the world as it is? And how do we act with agility in the face of change? From here, we explore some shared frameworks and principles for resilience that work across many domains.

Next, we turn to the Resilient Mind. Here, we explore some dimensions of people’s psychosocial resilience, and various applied strategies, practices and habits, for improving it, including the role of learning, play and mindfulness.

Then, we explore the (mostly cultural) issues that shape Organizations that Bounce Back (and Forward), including trust-and-empathy building, cooperation, creative experimentation, agility and adhocracy, and learning and continuous transformation.

Finally, we turn our attention to issues of Systems-Level Leadership, and to the constellation of strategies used to transform the largest systems on which our organizations, our industries – and often, our whole society – depends. We explore the dynamics of resilient systems, learn how we build and shape networks and whole ecosystems of organizations, and amplify a spirit of shared, creative possibility that can cement lasting structural change.

 

To inquire about convening this dialogue for your organization, please contact assistant@andrewzolli.com.