Peter Drucker Forum 2023 – Creative Resilience

My learnings from the Peter Drucker Forum 2023: Risk management is a common practice for project managers. You assess the potential impact and the corresponding probability and put a price tag on it. You do this based on your experience and that of your team. But how do you prepare for the unexpected - the black swan? In Israel, it is common to imagine a terrorist plane crashing into a skyscraper. This was not the case in the USA until September 11, 2001.

Many lessons can be learned from the Fukushima disaster on March 11, 2011 for leadership in an unexpected crisis. At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the earthquake and subsequent tsunami led to a meltdown in three reactors. At the same time, personnel at a second plant (Daini) 11 km further south managed to lay 8.8 km of high-capacity cables within 30 hours to supply the cooling systems with electricity and replace the pump motors at the same time. The concept of "all hands on deck" and responding with creativity and common sense instead of following procedures prevented the disaster at this power plant. This is truly creative resilience!

The situation in the nuclear power plants is of course a special one. But the lessons learned are a plea for general agility in organizations in order to better respond to a VUCA world. Act like an organism and enable the organization to act autonomously. The system response must become more robust, so to speak, which includes saying goodbye to the efficiency paradigm. Instead, the muscles of the organization must be strengthened for adaptive responses by connecting employees across departments in networks. To make bold decisions as a leader in crisis mode, you also have to overcome your fear of making mistakes when you leave the standardized path. Many inspirations to think about!