Newsletter N°2 - English

Interview Newsletter CIRERO

Timothé Graziani – Associate Director of Cap Resiliencia – facilitator of the LATAM network.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothegraziani/

Portrait

Originally from the Paris region, I began my career in the Internet in 1995. It was still new and I had the chance to enter the University of Marne-la-Vallée which was particularly advanced on the subject at the time and even equipped with fiber! This key moment in my career gave me a direction: Internet and IT services for businesses, etc. I evolved within several companies in France including Orange which, among other things, sent me to the Dominican Republic for one of its subsidiaries, as part of a business continuity program. This 2-year project launched me locally and in the region on a professional and entrepreneurial level since I created my first consulting company during this period. I continued to work on the theme of business continuity, crisis management and risk management in the Latin America region but also with a few clients in France.

How did these issues lead you to question resilience?

For me, Latin America was the region where I projected myself the least at the start of my career, but after having progressed well in France, the opportunity for development abroad arose in the Dominican Republic. What particularly marked me when I settled in this country was the people who, in the face of hardships, difficult situations (economics, politics, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.), always have a smile. Even the one who has next to nothing smiles and it was a revelation for me. On the other hand, this factor, this capacity for detachment, can also complicate the managerial relationship with American cultures. For example, IBM, with whom I worked a lot, created GBM to enable Latin American managers to manage local human resources more efficiently. I also worked in a large bank in the Dominican Republic and it was while working on the next business continuity activities that I saw the term resilience appear more and more as I read. So I created another company in 2017 – Cap Resiliencia – to dedicate myself to consulting, event creation, etc. on continuity, resilience and governance, in a context of digital transition and cyber threat.

How do you define the terms business continuity, crisis management or even resilience?

As a little boy, I wanted to be a firefighter and I see myself today as a business firefighter. There is a dimension of protection which is quite strong in these disciplines, of security, but also of change. These changes are often abrupt and massively affect certain company assets. The questions are: how to protect? how to manage these changes? and what's next? In English, the concept of preparedness links all these disciplines. The notion of preparation is the most important because we cannot predict the future exactly, in detail. There are major events, out of control, which are crises. There are more moderate events which are incidents. And business continuity consists of designing how I will recover such an asset and how to continue to deliver my products and services to my customers.

I don't use the term forecast too much. This is not very common in Latin America either, but I had this thought a few years ago. David Lindstedt and Marc Armor created a professional business continuity movement called Adaptive Business Continuity. They particularly use the term capacity. They're getting away from the notion of a plan – you know, all plans cancel each other out on contact with the enemy. We spend a lot of time writing plans that won't work because (1) we didn't foresee exactly the situation we're facing, and (2) everything is so interconnected that what affects you is more and more wide. When we plan, we make the effort to consolidate strengths, to improve, to prepare the teams... which gives the company a capacity, skills. Perhaps certain fields, including technology, engineering and computer science, which through mathematics give meaning to forecasting. But even in the field of computing, 4 years ago, we experienced a black swan of computing so it is not antithetical.

According to you, is resilience conditioned by circumstances?

When human beings are faced with circumstances much stronger than themselves, one notices that many seem to overcome the situation despite everything. We are not all made of one mind, one thought, one heart, etc. This is very relative depending on the human being, the infrastructure, the type of business, etc. We cannot rely on the single circumstance to know if the company is resilient. An organization remains complex so it takes work beforehand. Working on this capacity makes it possible to ensure a little more the probability of being resilient in a situation.

All the work I do on organizational resilience is connecting areas like security, cybersecurity, communication, etc. to work together. Synergy is key to dealing with major events and gaining this ability, although it's not 100% guaranteed. Different disciplines feed into this work, but a methodology is also needed to avoid silos. The methodical application and association of all these disciplines opens a path towards this capacity for resilience.

What is organizational resilience for you?

Organizational resilience brings together 2 terms. What is certain is that resilience, I see it as a state that appears long after the event. A major crisis, an extreme event that causes a person to lose both legs does not make them immediately resilient. If after years and years of effort, this same person becomes a Paralympic champion, then we can consider that he has shown resilience to his accident.

People and organizations must overcome events, extreme situations, to develop resilience capacities. For me, on an individual level, it must also make it possible to become better in terms of values. For the organization, it is different and perhaps even easier because it is a group of people, a group of assets who use the infrastructures and within this framework, the organization becomes better because of the preparation. At the business level too, there are also traumas that hurt people. So the idea is also to not only consider the only physical risks but also major negative changes in the environment, such as a market disruption unfavorable to the said company. And for that, we must all work together.

For example, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) released its Guidance on Operational Risk and Resilience in March 2021. At the same time, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) released a summary of upcoming actions in areas related to non-financial risk more generally two months later. In these standards, reference is not made to the market but to what can affect you operationally. This distinction between the organizational and the operational, I do not really see it. The operational is perhaps more about the physical elements and the operational about the strategy and the image.

In itself, this is not a concern, but the first to apply these standards will be the English. However, 3 years ago, the British Standard Institute had already released the ISO 22316: 2017 Security and resilience — Organizational resilience — Principles and attributes standard, which is already on the subject. Afterwards, operational resilience risks being confused with well-done business continuity, because the term resilience is overused! I know that all these standards will arrive in Latin America within 3 years and create panic, especially since the certification bodies do not take into account the applications of resilience by geographical business ecosystems. It's a big global issue and we didn't start very well. The ISO 22316 standard also seems to me to be better positioned than the operational resilience of Basel.

Do you have articles or readings that you would like to share with the CIRERO community?

I highly recommend the book by the philosopher David Lindstedt :

https://www.routledge.com/Building-Resilient-Organizations-through-Change-Chance-and-Complexity/Lindstedt/p/book/9781032280813

I also recommend the book by Judith Rodin, who was director of an NGO on the 100 resilient cities. Paris is cited but also Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic. Her refreshing vision made it possible to talk again about the principles of resilience.

https://www.amazon.com/Resilience-Dividend-Being-Strong-Things/dp/1610394704

In the field of business continuity, David Lindstedt and Marc Armor offer interesting reflections on this notion of capacity in their ABC program. The human being is the last asset that can save the company. This dimension is to be associated with resilience, because it is above all a human process.

And of course, the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, particularly on the black swan.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan

Concluding remarks

Finally, the geographical areas do not all have the same levels of maturity on the subjects of business continuity and resilience, the same relationship to the plan, etc. The why is very important so that companies are inclined to listen to you. A reflection by region could be very interesting to measure the degree of resilience, because it is this small figure that an executive committee will want to see at the end, to take into account the risks by zone, the levels of maturity, etc. International regulations translated without adaptation in territories with distinct problems do not necessarily give good results.

Portrait

The Moroccan researcher, Larbi Yacoubi is conducting his work at the ENSA in Agadir. The latter focus on the entrepreneurial skills and organizational resilience of SMEs.

At the last international symposium on resilience management and engineering promoted by the National School of Applied Sciences in Morocco last October, he received the prize for best communication.

This winter, we had the pleasure of interviewing Larbi to talk about organizational resilience, his vision on the subject and how the latter is studied in Morocco.

Focus on this researcher who gives us during this interview, the keys of the main elements to be addressed so that a theory of organizational resilience can be born.

Interview :

JG - Your research focuses on the resilience of organizations. Could you explain how this topic is currently being studied in Morocco?

LY - This is a fairly recent topic. Personally, when I started my research five years ago, I was able to boast that I was one of the first to discuss this topic as a thesis subject. Since the Covid-19 crisis, there has been considerable interest in the subject. There is a proliferation of research papers and communications. And this at all levels (from the individual level to the organizational level), and in all areas (SMEs, entrepreneurship, the supply chain, cooperatives, territories, etc.).

JG - You also work on entrepreneurship. What are your favorite subjects in this field?

LY - There are several. This includes entrepreneurial resilience, the relationship between the individual resilience of the entrepreneur and the organizational resilience of the company. I personally work on the entrepreneur’s skills and their contribution to the resilience of SMEs. The fields of entrepreneurship and organizational resilience offer interesting research opportunities.

JG - Last October, you organized the first symposium on Resilience Management at ISME d'Agadir. Could you tell us about your experience in setting up this academic event?

LY - Yes indeed, this conference has required a lot of upstream work at various levels:

- At the financial level through the mobilization of the financial resources essential to the organization of an event of such scale. We must thank all the sponsors and the president of the university Ibn Zohr Agadir, as well as the director of the ENSA of Agadir.

- At the level of the guests through the invitation of internationally renowned researchers, whom we thank very much for their contribution.

- At the level of content, which has been quite rich, by integrating all the lines of research likely to touch the central theme of the colloquium and by opening the participation to all nationalities. The work also extended the two days of the event with all that this requires at the logistic level. I thank everyone who contributed to the success of this event from near and far.

JG - At the event held in October 2022, you had the opportunity to work with francophone researchers and the CIRERO research center. As regards opportunities for Franco-Moroccan collaboration, what project do you want to see mature in 2023 in collaboration with these researchers (colloquium, journal, collective, courses)?

LY - In the short term we are working on the publication of the most interesting papers in a special issue of the magazine Cahiers de résilience. In the medium term, we hope to launch a Master specialized in organizational resilience with Mr Tenneau’s CIRERO Laboratory. It is hoped that this collaboration will continue and extend to other areas.

JG - Today, there is no comprehensive theory on organizational resilience. To understand it, we need to use other theories. In your opinion, what are the main elements or concepts that need to be addressed for an organizational resilience theory to emerge?

LY - Personally, and from my humble experience, I believe that we should first identify the phenomenon of organizational resilience. At some point, we must stop and agree on a uniform and precise definition of a resilient organization to develop a theory that explains the phenomenon.

Résumé de la thèse de Aurelia Heurteux

Summary

During her thesis, Aurélia Heurteux was interested in the different management tools such as budgets, costs and dashboards integrating the principles of sustainable development in French cities. The management of metropolises providing a public service cannot be identical to that of the private sector and the management tools are likely to be modified. This work has also highlighted certain levers enabling the transition to a more sustainable territory, such as communication between the various players, the political will and that of the agents, taking into account the opinion of the inhabitants, and the place of the sustainable development department in the organisation chart of the metropolis. Some metropolises have put in place such levers and management tools. However, others use sustainable development as a means of communication, a means of protecting themselves vis-à-vis their stakeholders, which leads to a gap between discourse and action (known as organisational hypocrisy).

Youtube link of the presentation of Aurelia Heurteux's thesis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oengQjVo0mw.

Abstract

During her thesis, Aurélia Heurteux, was interested in the different management tools such as budgets, costs and dashboards integrating the principles of sustainable development within French metropolises. Some cities have implemented management levers and tools. However, others use sustainable development as a means of communication, a means of protecting themselves vis-à-vis their stakeholders, which leads to a gap between discourse and action (called organisational hypocrisy).

Detailed summary of the thesis

The subject of the thesis on sustainable development and CSR was carefully thought out during my Master's degree in research.

The thesis is entitled: "Sustainable development in French metropolises: between management and organisational hypocrisy". It is a transversal thesis, mainly combining public management, management control and strategy. The thesis highlights the different management tools for stesustainable development, combining ecological and social transition. It also highlights the fact that French metropolises have specific characteristics, namely territory, politics and temporality, which do not allow them to use tools that come from the private sphere alone. They need to be modified or created. Moreover, each metropolis is different, and in particular the political sides have an influence on how sustainable development is taken into account in the territory. The steering tools have been classified under three main headings: costs, budgets and accountability, and indicators (management charts). These tools are essentially used in local authorities. A second literature review supported our research, namely the specificities of the public sector, the theory of New Public Management (Christopher Hood) and the search for legitimacy of public authorities. Our field study focused on metropolises, a local authority newly created in 2012, as small municipalities are still struggling to set up a management control system. Numerous crises have been upsetting public authorities for some time, such as the yellow waistcoats, the demand for transparency from citizens, or the awareness of global warming and its challenges for the planet. Citizens are asking to be consulted on territorial policies. In order to implement public policies for a more sustainable territory, citizens must be taken into consideration as they are the main ones impacted by political decisions.

We were able to highlight different CSR strategies, such as the following typology:

- "Cosmetic": that is, companies that only meet the obligations of the law. The CSR policy is therefore light. They therefore demonstrate a responsible commitment through so-called "cosmetic" actions.

- "Annex or peripheral": actions that demonstrate that the company is involved in the CSR policy. Peripheral CSR represents actions that are not directly related to the company's activity. Thus another organisation could have implemented these actions.

- "Integrated": this means that CSR is present in the BSC.

- "BOP, Bottom of the pyramid", i.e. the organisation focuses on the poorest people (4 billion people living on less than 2 dollars a day), Prahalad, 2004; Martinet and Payaud, 2008; Ngok Evina, 2017.

Integrating sustainable development into the general policy of the metropolis becomes a strategy. It is necessary to ask whether the metropolis uses the concept of sustainable development only to communicate, to be accountable to the State and the citizens or whether it is a real will to carry out projects for a more sustainable territory. It turns out that for some cities, sustainable development is only a tool to protect themselves in the face of citizens' expectations, and there is a gap between words and actions. This is in line with Nils Brunsson's theory of organisational hypocrisy. Others have integrated sustainable development into the centre of their strategy and use steering tools, such as dashboards created internally. The metropolises then want to educate and take into consideration the expectations of citizens with sustainable development bodies.

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Résumé de la thèse de François Xavier Kemtchuain Taghe

Reflective processes developed by medical interns and residents in the context of adversity to learn from practice

Dr. François Xavier Kemtchuain Taghe, PhD. Qualified as a University Lecturer (pending appointment). Associate researcher at CPASS-University of Montreal, Associate researcher at the Centre de Transfert pour la réussite éducative du Québec. Member of the CRIFPE-antenne Université de Sherbrooke

ABSTRACT

We expect that emotional regulation increases the feeling of competence as well as control over achievement activities. However, the observation of the gap between the situation before exposure to the vulnerability related to the constraints experienced in the work situation and after, the modification of experience and emotional expression, is favoured by the reflexive view of the intern and the medical resident on the obstacles to professional practice as well as on the strategies aimed at overcoming adversity and bridging the knowledge gap. Our study thus aims to present reflective practice as a catalyst for generative possibilities for the development of practice- and experience-based knowledge, but also as related to the development of experiential knowledge necessary for the adaptation of the subject in the work situation. In order to achieve the intended objective, we proceeded through grounded theorisation used in this work as an inductive and data analysis method (Paillé and Mucchielli, 2016). We opted for the theoretical sampling technique. An interview guide progressively stabilised according to the field data was administered to two residents and two medical interns from French and Quebec medical schools. The results reveal that the interns and medical residents interviewed encounter situational difficulties that complicate the capitalization of knowledge and experiential knowledge. In order to get out of the peril and to develop in spite of everything, the participants in the study developed four processes that we have modelled. However, we mentioned in the concluding part of the work that it is because the intern or medical resident feels capable of facing up to the resistance of reality that he or she can now think of the mechanisms likely to help him or her to get out of it. In other words, protective factors support the feedback between reflective practice and emotional regulation.

Key words: medical intern/resident, vulnerability factors, reflective practice, emotional regulation, learning