Tactical, Operational & Strategic Analysis of Markets, Competitors & Industries

Does Resilience have anything to do with Competitive Intelligence?

If so in what way?

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/

On Resilience

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Loosely defined, resilience is the capacity of a system — be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy — to deal with change and continue to develop. It is both about withstanding shocks and disturbances (like climate change or financial crisis) and using such events to catalyze renewal, novelty, and innovation. In human systems, resilience thinking emphasizes learning and social diversity.

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and coevolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held, implicit assumption that systems respond to change in a linear — and therefore predictable — fashion is altogether wrong. In resilience thinking, systems are understood to be in constant flux, highly unpredictable, and self-organizing with feedbacks across multiple scales in time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmark features of complexity.
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Permalink Reply by Craig S. Fleisher on December 31, 2010 at 12:08pm

Hi Miguel:

Reslience is a variable that many organizational theorists and strategists have taken hold of in the last decade (in particular, but (very) few global organizations have institutionalized mechanisms in order to diagnose, measure, assess and improve it. Resilience is critical to organizational performance and survival, even more so during times of uncertainty, transition, and complexity. As such, at least in concept and theory if not because it is rarely done in practice, competitive intelligence (CI) should be positively correlated with organizational resilience in that it provides a means for organizations to adapt to change coming from the competitive environment.

This is one of the interesting areas of organizational inquiry that a couple of CI and strategy academics in our community have "sniffed around" in their research (including yours truly, B. Gilad, and others) but still lacks that foundational piece (i.e., an article or book, etc.) exploring and helping us make progress on this important connection. Thanks for raising it here in our community.

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Permalink Reply by Miguel Duarte Ferreira on January 6, 2011 at 5:44am

Hi Craig,

Thank you very much for your reply andfeedback.

The key take out from your comments is the lackof research over the relationship between Resilience and CompetitiveIntelligence and how potentially relevant such work might be.

Would it be possible for you to share whichauthors have ‘sniffed around’ as well as any company case (if public and available)?

Thank you in advance.

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Permalink Reply by Elena Larina on January 10, 2011 at 8:30am

Hi Miguel!

Thank you for the interesting subject. I agree with Krieg that competitor intelligence is linked with resilience. I think that it is very important that Craig uses such term as an adaptation. As you know there are 2 kinds. Feedback adaptation (Norbert Wiener) and advance adaptation (Heinz von Foerster – Anokhin). I think that Competitive Intelligence shall provide advance adaptation.

CI asintegral subject shall use information, management, cognitive, math and other science achievements in order to develop its own methods, models and tools for the business advance adaptation to CI.

A lot of scientists worked under resilience. All main management schools explored resilienceas an economical factor. Biologists started to research it in 30^thyears XX. Math basis was developed at the same time and dramatically improvedfor the last 2 decades.

Santa Fe Institute (FI) is the leader in complex adaptive systems study.Also interesting researches are made in France,Germany and Russia. If youare interested in this subject, I can give you links for it.

Thanks