Resilience helps individuals and organizations respond to challenges. According to Kathleen Vignos, personal resilience is built through adapting, technical resilience by mastering a variety of tools, and organizational resilience through flexibility and strong networks. In fast-changing software industries, recognizing tech shifts and fostering learning, flexibility, and collaboration, enhances resilience.
Kathleen Vignos gave a talk about cultivating a culture of resilience at QCon San Francisco.
Something that is resilient can bend without breaking. You find out how resilient something is once you’ve stretched, pushed, and tested it, Vignos said.
Personal resilience is built when things don’t go the way you planned, and you have to learn how to quickly adjust, Vignos mentioned. Technical resilience is built when you have to continually switch familiar tools with new ones, and organizational resilience is built along with your professional network so that if one organization fails, you have more options at hand, she added.
Any company on the edge of rapid innovation needs resilience to survive, as Vignos explained:
Few industries change as quickly as software. The skills and tools evolve, the players evolve, the funding evolves, and even the users evolve. Constant external factors influence the business and require nimble adjustments to roadmaps, org charts, and skill sets.
Technology evolves in waves and patterns, understanding these cycles can make us more resilient to change. Historically, we’ve seen major shifts such as the rise of the internet, mobile, cloud computing, and now AI, Vignos mentioned. Each wave follows a pattern: emergence, hype, disruption, maturity, and commoditization. Organizations and individuals that recognize these phases early can position themselves to be resilient to these shifts, she said.
To become more resilient to technology shifts, it helps to employ modular architectures with pluggable APIs, to keep abreast of emerging technology trends, and to inspire a culture of continuous learning, Vignos said.
To build a resilient culture in organizations, organizational leaders need to enable adaptability, learning, and sustained performance during periods of change within their organizations, Vignos mentioned. She recalled that from 2016-2018 many companies needed to respond to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), set to be enforced in 2018. In order to operate in the EU, companies needed to comply with rules that gave users the right to access their data, erase their data, restrict the use of their data, and be informed about the use of their data:
At that time, I was involved in a company-wide project to prepare for GDPR. The teams and individuals most important to the success of the project exhibited curiosity and a growth mindset to learn how to protect users; a willingness to change processes and development lifecycles to adapt; and a collaborative spirit to join together with new teams and divisions to coordinate getting a massive amount of work done in a relatively short period of time. We avoided multi-hundred-million dollar fines and maintained the ability to serve tens of millions of users in the EU.
Promoting a growth mindset and experimentation, fostering autonomy, and strengthening cross-functional collaboration all contributed to a resilient culture, paving the way to compliance and ensuring the company’s ongoing financial survival, Vignos said.
Artificial intelligence can help enhance resilience, Vignos mentioned, enabling faster decision-making by analyzing large data sets, automating tedious tasks, and supplying predictive insights, helping organizations and employees adapt, recover, and thrive in the face of change.
Every hardship and challenge throughout my career has provided an opportunity for me to build resilience, Vignos said. I like the way Oprah says it: “Turn your wounds into wisdom”, she concluded.
InfoQ interviewed Kathleen Vignos about cultivating a culture of resilience.
InfoQ: Why does resilience matter for software companies?
Kathleen Vignos: As an example, I can remember when the Clubhouse app became popular in 2020. Suddenly tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and celebrities were chatting informally with each other and attracting large audiences. Meanwhile, at Twitter, we had acquired Periscope a few years before, and had used the technology internally to host all company meetings with thousands of users (and speaking of scaling, shoutout to the engineer who could spin up a new AWS region for Periscope with about 15 lines of code).
Clubhouse initially could not scale beyond 1000 listeners, creating a prime opportunity for Twitter to leverage Periscope technology to launch Twitter Spaces in just a few months. With massive scaling capabilities and the advantage of a network of over 300M monthly active users to draw upon for listeners, Twitter Spaces (and other platforms like Facebook Live Audio) contributed to Clubhouse’s decline.
This story captures a point in time when one company’s leaders, employees, and technology exhibited resilience and agility over another. The one best equipped to respond to change survived – at least for a couple more years.
InfoQ: How can software developers increase their personal resilience?
Vignos: I can think of several examples through my development career when I got partway through delivering a project, only to have the roadmap change. Whether it was because of funding changes, or a leadership change, or some other reason, it felt demotivating not to be able to finish the work I’d started and become invested in.
The advice is to hold the work lightly. For long projects, identify milestones that can give you a sense of shorter-term accomplishment, no matter the long-term outcome. Stay flexible to hand off work to others, and be able to shift to take on new work when those opportunities arise.
I used to be paid hourly as a freelance developer – so I reminded myself that I got paid even when the client changed their mind and scrapped the work. Let it go!
