Building resilience-focused organizations

The importance of culture, mechanisms, and tools

“How do you build a resilience-focused organization?”

In this blog post, I aim to address this question and provide some insights into some of the strategies that I believe have proven effective for AWS.

In my view, building a resilience-focused organization requires three essential elements that are interrelated. First, cultivating the right culture is crucial. Second, having the right tools is essential. And third, establishing comprehensive mechanisms is vital. These principles are relevant to organizations of all sizes, whether they are large, medium, or small.

Before I begin, it’s important to note that the strategies I discuss are tailored to our specific organization and its unique culture. What has worked for us may not necessarily be applicable to every situation, so it’s crucial to exercise your own judgment.

Let’s begin by examining the first step: creating a Culture of Resilience.

Culture

Have you heard of Conway’s Law? It was named after Melvin Conway, who introduced it in 1967. Conway’s Law states:

“Organizations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” M. Conways

In practice, it means that a system’s design is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

When it comes to resilience, the most obvious effect of Conway’s Law is illustrated with the different interpretations of safety.

In his book, Safety-I and Safety-II, Hollnagel describes that really well.

He explains that Safety-I organizations focus on the things that go wrong: accidents, incidents, near misses. They believe safety can be achieved by first finding and then eliminating the causes of failures. In other words…