Strategic Resilience: Lessons From Agriculture For VUCA Leadership

After 355 years of operation, The Bay, a large retail department store known as Canada’s oldest company, has filed for creditor protection. One of the factors for the closure was an inability to adapt to the decrease in consumer traffic post-pandemic. In an era marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, resilience is vital for long-term sustainability and firm survival. Conservative Smart Agriculture (CSA) is a global movement aimed at building resilience against the impact of climate change in order to ensure long-term sustainability. Many countries and regions are recognizing the importance of integrating conservation principles into their agricultural practices, particularly in areas facing significant agricultural challenges due to climate change, soil degradation, and resource scarcity. Admittedly, as an organizational psychologist, I haven’t thought deeply about CSA but as resilience continues to be named as a high-demand skill in the future of work, I wondered what CSA might be able to teach organizations about how they can be more strategic about helping their firm (and the employees within them) thrive as workplace conditions, skills, technology, and geopolitical relations fluctuate.

Conservative Smart Agriculture

Recently, Drs. Naveen, Datta and Behera systematically reviewed the literature on the adoption of CSA practices and produced a list of the most widely adopted practices in South Asia. After reviewing 78 studies drawn from their search of three scholarly databases, the researchers presented several agricultural practices and recommendations that can be implemented management settings to cultivate adaptability and resilience. Just as farmers adapt their agricultural strategies based on environmental conditions, below are three insights that business leaders can apply to their work to better navigate change.

3 Ways Agriculture Sheds Light on Strategic Resilience

1. Crop Diversification: The practice of growing a variety of different crops in a given area to increase biodiversity, which can improve resilience to pests, diseases, and changes in weather patterns.

The agricultural sector is constantly evolving, with farmers adopting innovative practices based on research and technology. Managers, too, must foster a culture that celebrates ongoing innovation, and openness to failure. In their Harvard Business Review article, The Quest for Resilience, Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas argue for the importance of strategic resilience: “Continued success no longer hinges on momentum. Rather, it rides on resilience—on the ability to dynamically reinvent business models and strategies as circumstances change. Strategic resilience is not about responding to a one time crisis or rebounding from a setback. It’s about continually anticipating and adjusting to deep, secular trends that can permanently impair the earning power of a core business. It’s about having the capacity to change even before the case for change becomes obvious.” One agile methodology they recommend for organizations is to institutionalize a process of experimentation that solicits and tracks novel idea generation from the entire company and test and measure their potential financial viability. Rather than pursuing new “grand, imperial strategies”, explore low-risk experiments widely and frequently.

2. Climate-resilient seeds: These seeds are specially bred or engineered to withstand extreme weather conditions, such as drought, floods, or extreme temperatures, to ensure food security despite climate adversity.

Organizations seeking to better position their ability to thrive in volatile environments should consider what culture they are creating and whether it is breeding employee behaviours that allow them to survive rapidly changing conditions. In 1999, Dr. Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety which refers to a shared belief that people feel safe about the interpersonal risks that arise concerning their behaviours in a team context. “Project Aristotle,” Google’s internal study on what team-level variables are most commonly found in their most successful teams, examined over 250 variables and found psychological safety was the most important factor, followed by dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact of work. Unfortunately, despite the importance of psychological safety for leadership, performance, and culture, only 42% of managers report feeling psychologically safe at work, only 40% of managers felt this way. Implementing leadership training that teaches how leaders can regulate their emotions and attune to their employees can help cultivate a higher quality team climate that encourages honest feedback, dissent, and discussion of errors, which promotes innovation.

The CSA researchers advocated for establishing specialized training centres for women and elderly farmers, the population they identified as holding the most potential to enact CSA practices. Given businesses that prioritize learning tend to demonstrate higher levels of resilience, leaders may consider which employee skills are most essential, or most at risk of redundancy, and begin strategically establishing a process to support job redesign and training in-house.

3. Value-chains: To advance the integration of CSA practices, small and medium enterprises and agricultural agents were encouraged to generate more value by collaborating more intentionally. In a management setting, as demands for skills are expected to change rapidly over the next five years, leaders might consider where to position particular skill sets, roles, or people in order to support collaboration. Two measures of how networks are interlinked in academia are eigencentrality, which characterizes the degree to which an employee is a core person in collaboration structures, and betweenness centrality, which refers to whether an employee lies on the path of other employees who are not directly connected. Strategically placing employees with critical high-demand skills in central positions may help organizations remain resilient in the face of change. In agriculture, community knowledge-sharing plays a vital role in successful cropping strategies. Similarly, fostering collaboration across departmental projects can build a sense of community and collective problem-solving. Agroforestry refers to a tactic where trees and shrubs are integrated into crop and livestock farming systems to improve biodiversity, soil fertility, carbon sequestration, and microclimate regulation. Strategically placing an employee with expertise in cultivating psychologically safety as a shrub in a crop full of AI competencies could help the team’s overall performance to be more fertile.

E-I-E-I-O and Strategic Resilience

Emulating the resilience strategies from agriculture can provide valuable insights for business leaders looking to enhance organizational adaptability. By embracing experimentation, while fostering a psychologically safe culture, and actively seeking ways to encourage collaboration, managers can be strategically resilient and prepare their teams to navigate the complexities of today’s business environment.