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Organisational Resilience and Risk

Organisational Resilience and Risk

European Parliament staff workshop exploring the role of organisational design in risk management.

Posted

12 May 2014

European Parliament staff workshop exploring the role of organisational design in risk management.

The European Parliament’s Risk Management Unit recently contracted a workshop from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) to begin an internal conversation about the role of organisational design in addressing risk. Such risks include wide ranging aspects of risk and uncertainty and mitigating factors such as building organisational resilience and developing new organisational routines. These qualities of organisational capability encompass both organisational design approaches as well as organisational culture change strategies. The participant group included those drawn from a vertical and horizontal cross-section of the European Parliament’s staff group.

Participants were given case presentations from within the European Parliament’s own activities, including finance and buildings maintenance, as well as design principles from organisational design and culture theory and practice more broadly. They considered the emerging organisational design propositions and their application of these to their own work settings in small and large group clusters. In particular, they considered how organisational design adaptation is often framed as: identifying what is to be preserved and what expendable, rather than what can be reformed or gained and as ‘the process through which actors are able to reflect on and enact change in practices and underlying institutions’. Adaptation to design or culture is not coterminous with resilience and attention needs to be paid to adaptation that can undermine resilience, for example when adaptation by one sector or in one location undermines resilience elsewhere.

For further information please contact Fiddy Abraham.

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