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Building antifragility in service organisations: going beyond resilience

journal contribution
posted on 2014-12-22, 15:36 authored by Ayham A.M. Jaaron, Chris Backhouse
To maintain organisational growth in a turbulent environment, organisations must build highly effective learning systems to innovate and develop from threats and stressors. This has been termed by Taleb (2012) as 'antifragility'. This paper explores the benefits of applying a systems approach to service delivery design in order to build an 'antifragile' organisation that can learn from disruptions. Two exploratory case studies were conducted in the UK insurance sector using in-depth interviews supported by documented evidence. The findings of the case studies analysis suggest that systems approach expressed as the Vanguard method (Seddon, 2003) is likely to enhance organisational 'antifragility' by promoting a multilevel driver for learning from stressors. These levels being: 1) the macro level of clarity on the system due to the continuous analysis of customer demands received; 2) the meso level of organic structure of work place where effective learning-centred teams are built; 3) the micro level of emloyees' engagement with work and readiness to learn. This paper represents an early effort to explore the dynamics of how organisations can go beyond resilience by discovering how to develop the capacity to learn from stressors in order to flourish.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

International Journal of Services and Operations Management

Volume

19

Issue

4

Pages

491 - 513

Citation

JAARON, A. and BACKHOUSE, C.J., 2014. Building antifragility in service organisations: going beyond resilience. International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 19 (4), pp. 491 - 513.

Publisher

© Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This article is closed access.

ISSN

1744-2370

eISSN

1744-2389

Language

  • en