Tag Archives: agility

Taleb, Hamel, Holling…and I

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Revised on: 2020-12-23

Is my idea of how to differ robustness from flexibility from agility from resilience – hallmark of my research ideas – in any way related to the ideas of Nassim Taleb, Crawford Stanley Holling and Gary Hamel? Well, Sinan Si Alhir certainly thinks so, on a blog post that he wrote back in 2013, when he explored Taleb’s concept of Fragility and Antifragility. Interesting…, so where do I fit in?

Surprise surprise

Having had an online published presence for almost 20 years now it should not come as a surprise to me that every now and then I stumble across myself in the unlikeliest of places for the unlikeliest of reasons. That said, by now, based from the bits and pieces I have seen here and there, I really should no longer be so surprised that my idea of how to differ robustness from flexibility from agility from resilience resonates with quite a number of people, including Si Alhir, in his blog post on Antifragile, Flexibility, Robust, Resilience, Agility, and Fragile.

The champion of Creative Destruction

Nassim Taleb is certainly no stranger on this blog. After all, in 2009 I did review The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management, an article he co-authored in the Harvard Business Review, and that was based on his book on Black Swans from 2007.  And although I read the book, I never reviewed it, but I remember that liked his ideas. His latest book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder” makes creative destruction a major point.

The father of Resilience Theory

CS Holling does not have a blog post here; in hindsight I guess he should have, because he is often recognized as one of the if not THE founding father of resilience theory, and resilience has been one of the more frequent topics on husdal.com, even more so after I turned resilience practitioner after being a resilience researcher. That said, since Holling’s main domain lies within ecology I never thought of his resilience as something that I would be particularly interested in. That is why he is only mentioned as a side note in a blog post on transportation resilience.

The Iconoclast

Gary Hamel is another almost unknown on this blog. He shouldn’t be, because bGary Hamel is one of the world’s most influential and iconoclastic business thinkers. In my small world he is mentioned in a comment on my blog post about the HBR guide to Managing External Risk, and I also mentioned him in my review of Lisa Välikangas book on The Resilient Organization, as her co-author in the article on The Quest for Resilience.

The Fantastic Four

So, in his blog post on Antifragile, Flexibility, Robust, Resilience, Agility, and Fragile Si Alhir features me and my definitions alongside those of Taleb, Hamel and Holling, and I must say that I do feel somewhat like being part of the Fantastic Four (pun intended):

However, the most interesting part of Si Alhirs blog post is not the side by side comparison, but a figure that integrates these concepts into one, and that shows how Taleb’s Fragility and Antifragility is a continuum that encloses or surrounds the other concepts.

 

I like this figure. In a previous blog post I explored Terje Aven’s definitions of vulnerability and resilience, and the notion that you can be generally resilient, but not generally vulnerable, only specifically vulnerable to the specific impact of a specific event relating to a specific risk. That notion now makes much more sense to me when I see fragility below vulnerability. This makes it clear that fragile is a general trait, while vulnerable is a specific trait.

A new way forward?

Taleb’s idea of antifragility is very intruiging, especially if seen the way that Si Alhir manages to put it into one figure that makes it all easy to understand and apply. That reminds me of a paper I wrote 10 years ago, in the early stages of what unfortunately did not manifest into a PhD. Anyway, in that paper – being a qualitative not a qualitative researcher – I took a liking of Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Italian philosopher. Bruno advocated the use of conceptualising, that is to think in terms of images, and he said that to think was to speculate with images. For people to understand science,  according to Bruno, it ought to be rich in images and concepts, but poor in formulas.

I think that is exactly what Taleb is trying to do, and I look forward to reading his book on Antifragility, and to see how his ideas fit my own ideas. Si Alhir seems to think they do. I consider that a compliment.

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Am I making an impact?

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Revised on: 2015-10-04

Is what I am doing worthwhile? Is anybody reading and using what I write? Am I contributing to a broader and/or better understanding of supply chain risk and (transport) vulnerability? After more than a decade of blogging and researching I think those are legitimate questions to ask. More than anything, am I making an impact…at all? For many of us researchers that is an important question, because, after all, we do hope that someone picks up our ideas.

Robustness and Flexibility 2004

One concept that I have found cited more recently is what started out 11 years ago in 2004 as a university course paper on flexibility and robustness as options to reduce risk and uncertainty. In hindsight, it is not a paper I am particularly proud of, but it was the starting point for an illustration that later became the core idea of much of my work.

Flexibility and Robustness

Admittedly, not the best illustration, but the idea was to show that robustness means enduring and withstanding changes in the environment without severe impact, while flexibility means reacting to and adapting to the same changes, while not deviating from the target.

Robustness, Flexibility and Resilience 2008

Some years later in 2008 I added resilience to the concept, thinking I now had the whole picture, and once and for all – or so I thought – defined what robustness, flexibility and resilience are about:

Robustness Flexibility Resilience

The idea here was to show that robust means staying on course, despite being buffeted from both/many/all sides.  Yes, there are impacts, but they do not severely hamper reaching the target. In this picture flexible means reacting to environmental circumstances and changing course or even the target without reducing performance. Resilient is coming back to where we were after suffering a blow or setback.

Risk Management in Logistics 2009

This clear distinction between these terms was apparently good enough to earn me a place in a Dutch book titled Risicomangement en Logistiek (Risk Management in Logistics):

Robustness-Flexibility-Resilience

The picture is slightly skewed, but is still the same as the original.

Robustness, Flexibility, Agility and Resilience 2009

Robust-Flexible-Agile-Resilient

Later, after gaining more insight in 2009, I added agility to the same concept, and I now had what I thought to be the best possible illustration of robustness, flexibility, agility and resilience, defining all four concepts in one:

Here I differentiated between flexibility and agility by saying that flexibility meant reacting to environmental changes in an expected and preplanned manner, while agility implied reacting in an unexpected and unplanned (creative) manner.

Robustness, Flexibility, Agility and Resilience 2010

That complete concept was published in 2010 in my book chapter on A Conceptual Framework for Risk and Vulnerability in Virtual Enterprise Networks, and included a lengthy discourse on the literature for all four terms:

The published Robust Flexible Agile Resilient

While I not stated it explicitly, the definitions  read like this

  • Robustness is the ability to endure foreseen and unforeseen changes in the environment without adapting.
  • Flexibility is the ability to react to foreseen and unforeseen changes in the environment in a pre-planned manner.
  • Agility is the ability to react to unforeseen changes in the environment in an unforeseen and unplanned manner.
  • Resilience is the ability the ability to survive foreseen and unforeseen changes in the environment that have a severe and enduring impact.

All four are linked, all four are important in risk management, but they all put different weight on what should be the focal point.

Dissemination

No longer a part of academia, I have little means of disseminating my ideas, but I am glad to see that my rather lengthy discourse on the difference between this terms in the book chapter has struck a cord with a number of recent publications on supply chain risk and resilience:

The two first are co-authored by Andreas Wieland, on of my Linkedin connections and perhaps the biggest proponent of my aforementioned concept so far.

What does the future hold?

I don’t know what will happen next. In any case, the answer to the initial question “Am I making an impact?” is, surprisingly, Yes.

Reference

Husdal, J. (2010) A Conceptual Framework for Risk and Vulnerability in Virtual Enterprise Networks. In: S Ponis (Ed.)(2010) Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles. Hershey: IGI.

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Adaptation versus Transformation

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Many businesses believe themselves to be nested in a stable environment and are confounded when things suddenly change, and the world today no longer is the same world it was yesterday. Adapt or transform, that is the question, and in Adaptive Fit Versus Robust Transformation: How Organizations Respond to Environmental Change, written by Cynthia Lengnick-Hall and Tammy Beck in 2005, both options are explored.  While adaptation may work temporarily, transformation and building a resiliency capacity is what works best in the long run. What is it about resilience that is so important, and most importantly, why?

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The Definition of Agility

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Although getting close to 20 years old now, The Agile Virtual Enterprise: Cases, Metrics, Tools, written in 1992  by H T (Ted) Goranson, is a book that still holds timeless ideas and visions that are still applicable.  While the at that time emerging vision of  the virtual enterprise is at the forefront of the book, it is also the only reference I have found that properly differentiates between agility and flexibility and what being agile actually entails. This blog has previously reported profusely on flexibility, let alone resilience and robustness, but has severely neglected agility. With this post, I intend to take a closer look at what it means to be agile.

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Risks in virtual enterprise networks and supply chains

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Revised on: 2015-09-05

It is not unusual for suppliers in a supply chain to come together and act as a Virtual Enterprise Network (VEN) and today’s supply chains exhibit many VEN-like features. Is managing risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks different from managing risks in supply chains? With this in mind I submitted a paper to MITIP2009, the 11th International Conference on the Modern Information Technology in the Innovation Processes of the Industrial Enterprises, to be held in Bergamo, Italy, in October.

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Supply chain flexibility – a complete literature review?

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Someone had to come up with this, it was just a matter of time, and it is no suprise that this article comes from India, one of the major providers of global outsourcing for many industries. In an article reviewing some 100 references,  Babu & More (2008) Perspectives, practices and future of supply chain flexibility, the focus is on anything supply chain flexibility, really anything that relates to supply chain flexibility. And honestly, I must say, they don’t leave much ground uncovered.

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Robustness, resilience, flexibility and agility

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Revised on: 2015-10-04

Several “buzzwords” have been linked to supply chain risk  management (SCRM) in various ways: robustness, flexibility, agility and resilience.  These concepts are often confused, and thus, warrant further explanation. They are distinctively different, and which strategy that works best would depend not only on the supply chain in question as a whole, but also which part of the supply chain that may be vulnerable. That is why it is useful to look at what sets one apart from the other.

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Agile Business Continuity

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

The other day I came across a new term: Agile Business Continuity, on the blog of Paul James, agilecontinuity.org. The coupling of the term agile with business continuity aroused my curiosity and I decided to dig deeper into what this blog was really about. I discovered that was a blog that is well worth reading and I think that the word agile really captures the essence of what business continuity management (BCM) is about in the first place and I will explain why I think so.

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Robustness, flexibility and resilience

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Revised on: 2015-12-02

In a previous paper, back in 2004, I discussed the issue of Flexibility and robustness as options to reduce risk and uncertainty. Since then a new term has emerged: resilience, and today I would like to compare these three terms. Robustness is the ability to accommodate  any uncertain future events or unexpected developments such that the initially desired future state can still be reached. Flexibility is the ability to defer, abandon, expand, or  contract any investment towards the desired goal. Resilience is the ability of a system to return to its original state or move to a new desirable state after being disturbed.

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