Abstract
A vicarious 15-hike executive leadership resilience incubator in Mann Gulch, Montana, permits readers to upgrade their resilience leadership skills. Monday's hikes focus on sense-receiving, skills such as the leveraging of received national cosmologies, received community cosmologies, and received organizational cosmologies. Tuesday's hikes focus on sense-losing skills, moving from initial retentive sense-losing through a vicious cycle of selective sense-losing to the brutally honest audits of enactive sense-losing. Wednesday's hikes focus on sense-improvising skills by differentiating among temporality sense-improvising, identity sense-improvising, and social sense-improvising. Thursday's hikes focus on sense-remaking skills, moving from the enactive sense-remaking period through the virtuous cycle of selective sense-remaking to the retentive sense-remaking hinge between the catastrophe and the post-catastrophe. Friday's hikes focus on sense-transmitting skills, leveraging transmitted organizational cosmologies, transmitted community cosmologies, and transmitted national cosmologies. This chapter explores these five resilience leadership skills.
TopIntroduction
A striking promise from president-elect Joe Biden on January 19, 2020, was his assertion that the 59th U.S. presidential administration would “manage the hell out of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Resilience leadership experts around the world routinely manage the hell out of organizational trauma at all levels of intensity (perturbations, disruptions, crises, disasters, catastrophes) and at all levels of analysis (individuals, teams, organizations, communities, nations) in two ways. The first, most prevalent, meaning of “to manage the hell out of” an organizational trauma is vulgarly, coarsely, and simply to do a good job reducing human suffering. The second meaning—aspired to in this chapter—is spiritually, expertly, and complexly to enact numerous righteous solutions to any given wicked problem through sense-receiving, sense-losing, sense-improvising, sense-remaking, and sense-transmitting resilience leadership skills.
So how do resilience leadership experts learn to manage the hell out of organizational trauma? Traditional psychological, leadership, and management theories are built for the continuous operation of the world of “known knowns,” with occasional deviations into the less easily manageable worlds of “unknown knowns” or “known unknowns.” In contrast, resilience psychology, leadership, and management theories are built for the study of the “unknown unknowns” such as the world of organizational trauma (Weick, 1993; O’Grady & Orton, 2016; Orton & O’Grady, 2016). Thus, executives, scholars, professionals, consultants, and students seeking to reduce human suffering must build on their existing mastery of traditional leadership skills by investing significant resources in the development of resilience leadership skills within themselves, their top management teams, their organizations, their communities, and their nations. This chapter is an effort to help readers increase their resilience leadership expertise by summarizing the findings of the 2020 season of one executive leadership resilience incubator.
Among many possible designs to assist executives with their internalization of resilience leadership skills, the 2020 Mann Gulch executive resilience leadership incubator was created as a nature-grounded, evidence-based, internationally embedded, and extreme context-focused expedition. In 2020, the fifteen hikes that constitute the Mann Gulch expedition were divided as follows:
Hikes 1 through 3: exploration of the skill of sense-receiving
Expeditions 4 through 6: exploration of the skill of sense-losing
Expeditions 7 through 9: exploration of the skill of sense-improvising
Expeditions 10 through 12: exploration of the skill of sense-remaking
Expeditions 13 through 15: exploration of the skill of sense-transmitting
TopTheoretical Foundation
The theoretical foundation for the Yarnell-Mann executive resilience leadership incubator is based on literature professor Norman Maclean’s and resilience expert Karl E. Weick’s magnum opus study of the August 4 through 6, 1949, Mann Gulch cosmology episode (Maclean, 1992; Weick, 1993). Weick wrote an article to reanalyze Maclean’s story about a large firefighting disaster in Mann Gulch in which thirteen firefighters died. In his analysis, Weick sought to understand why organizations break down and fail and how they could be more resilient (Weick, 1993). In his article, he perceives the firefighters as an example of a small organization and suggests that the organization disintegrated in the context of the disaster (Weick, 1993). Weick (1993) argued that the organization failure was the result of a simultaneous and interrelated collapse of both “sensemaking” and structure. According to Weick, sensemaking is the process through which people give meaning to experience. Weick (1993) argues that, “the basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs” (p. 635).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Resilient Leaders: These types of leaders have the ability to maintain their energy level under pressure while at the same time coping with disruptive changes and adapting.
Cosmology: Perturbations, disruptions, crises, disasters, and catastrophes that are perceived to be a sudden and deep challenge to national, community, organizational, team, and individual cosmologies (Weick, 1993; O’Grady & Orton, 2016; Orton & O’Grady, 2016).
Resilient Organizations: These types of organizations anticipate, prepare for, respond, and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and thrive (Denver, 2017).
Enacted Environments: Are part of the link between individual cognitive processes and environments. In enacted environments, preconceptions can shape the nature of the environment.
Cosmology Episode: A sudden loss of meaning that is followed eventually by a transformation, which creates the conditions for revised meaning.
Resilience Leadership Incubator: A peer-to-peer learning experience through which participants work together in a safe, confidential environment, over multiple periods, for leadership development and to solve real-world problems.
Cosmologies: A complex collections of beliefs about the nature of the universe and the role of a social unit, an individual, team, organization, community, or nation in that universe.