Posilience; ahead by design

For three and a half years, I wrote a scenario prompt almost every day. More than 1,400 of them. When I went back and checked, I was about 80% wrong. That turned out not to matter. As I wrote in Rumsfeld on steroids, there are things we don’t know we don’t know. Predicting the future is pointless. The question is never whether a scenario is right. It is whether it is useful. The value was in the habit of scanning, of reading signals, of rehearsing futures before they arrived.

Ahead by design

That is what my book STOP PREDICTING: 13 lessons from 1,400 attempts to see what was coming is about. So I was delighted to read Ahead by design: Building the ‘prosilient’ organization by  Oscar E. Arias and Sharon M. Ravitch, in Chief Learning Officer, this week. They have a word for what I have been circling for years: prosilience.

The loop

You know the loop. Launch an academy. Run a reskilling push. Announce a culture reset. Watch it fade. Repeat. Arias and Ravitch call it precedent fatigue. Leadership has always worked by studying what worked, turning it into a template and scaling it. Competency models, certifications against existing standards, best practice imported from elsewhere. It worked when the world was less volatile.

Disruption is not new

What is new is the accelerant. Same fire, much more fuel. And at that speed, the authors argue, the difference becomes one of kind, not degree. Routine becomes a liability. Best practice is somebody else’s past. It ignores your context: your power structures, your history, your technology, your regulator. How much of your strategy is a copy of what worked five years ago?

VUCA. RUPT. BANI. TUNA

I compared them in Dealing with VUCA, RUPT, BANI and TUNA. Volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Rapid, unpredictable, paradoxical, tangled. Brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible. Turbulent, uncertain, novel, ambiguous. Arias and Ravitch go with Jamais Cascio’s BANI. VUCA still assumed the world was knowable. BANI does not. Systems that look strong snap rather than bend. Information overload breeds dread. Tiny causes create huge effects. Explanations come late, or never. Problems become dilemmas. In a BANI world, looking backwards is not prudence. It is a blind spot. But BANI is a diagnosis, not a destiny. Flip it:

• Brittle becomes bendable
• Anxious becomes attentive
• Non-linear asks for neuroflexibility
• Incomprehensible is met with diverse perspectives

Prosilience

Resilience is about recovery. Prosilience is about readiness. It is the deliberate practice of building adaptive capacity before the disruption hits. The authors’ image: resilience is how you land; prosilience is building the runway while you are still flying. Three commitments:

1. Intentional. You design it, through team structures, hiring and promotion, how you use data and the stories the organisation tells about itself. Start by simplifying. In a TUNA world, six statements carry a strategy: vision, mission, passion, values, positions and resourcing. That is The Strategic Box.
2. Systemic. It lives in information flows, cross-level conversations, room to experiment and knowledge sharing. Not in a few heroes. I call that collective situational awareness.
3. Ethical. What is the organisation becoming? Whom does the system serve? Whose dignity gets treated as negotiable during change? This is the return to the core: purpose, principles, authenticity. The one thing competitors cannot copy.

Architects

We have treated organisations as machines (great, as long as conditions are known) and as organisms (adaptive, but only within an environment they do not shape). Both metaphors are now incomplete. Leaders are architects. They do not predict the weather. They create the conditions: for trust, for vision, for resilience. Then people adapt inside them.

Gymnastic

The organisation you want is a well-trained athlete. Agile. Ambidextrous, exploiting today while exploring tomorrow. Able to pivot without falling over. Athletes train before the match. That is the adaptability quotient: built through scenario planning and strategic gaming, rehearsed until it is reflex.

Four choices

Arias and Ravitch offer four choices that build it:

1. Rebuild structure, not just behaviour. Don’t teach collaboration and then send people back to their silos. Design cohorts, action-learning projects and rotations that cross functions, levels, geographies and identities. Before a crisis forces you to.
2. Widen what counts as learning data. Dashboards plus stories, fears and what people are quietly learning. When engagement scores look fine but the stories point to fear, chase the gap.
3. Treat human capability as infrastructure. Emotional intelligence and psychological safety (Amy Edmondson) built into job profiles, hiring, coaching and promotion.
4. Redefine success. Well-being, belonging and growth on the same dashboard as the financials. And ask who carries the cost of change. Flourishing is a precondition for adaptation, not a reward for it.

Scanning!

Scanning is where prosilience meets my book. Precedent is prediction in disguise. It assumes the future will look like the past. Prediction fails. I have the 80% to prove it. What works is a sensing system:

• Mix the signals (lesson 1 of the book).
• Build a dashboard from high-quality sources, and scan continuously.
• Feed it content from outside your usual sources. Filter bubbles are where disruption hides.
• Track weak signals, not just the loud ones.
• Separate hard trends (demographics) from soft ones.
• Think developments through to their extremes. Assume exponential.
• Link scanning to scenarios: growth, collapse, discipline, transformation.
• Ask “What if?” and think future-back.

Don’t outsource this to experts, algorithms or AI. AI is very good at the probable. It cannot imagine the unimaginable. That is your job. Arias and Ravitch’s second choice, widening what counts as data, is a sensing system for learning leaders. My book closes with exactly that: how to build the sensing system. What are you seeing that your dashboard is not?

Turbulence

Turbulence is not going away. Call it VUCA, RUPT, BANI or TUNA. Start building the capacity for what no one has faced yet. Stop predicting. Start scanning.

My book: STOP PREDICTING: 13 lessons from 1,400 attempts to see what was coming