While agility enables teams to respond rapidly to change, resilience ensures they can keep going when the going gets tough. In today’s interconnected world, resilience isn’t purely technical or procedural, it’s socio-technical. It’s about how people and systems work together to navigate uncertainty. This article explores what socio-technical resilience means for business agility, and what we can learn by shifting our perspective.
Exploring resilience through a socio-technical lens
Resilience is a popular topic, and is often mentioned in the same breath as agility. Resilience may refer to a property of a product or a business, or to the potential of a system to exhibit resilient performance. The term socio-technical resilience refers to the latter, and recognises that there are both social and technical aspects to resilience in today’s business environments. Socio-technical resilience is the ability to handle uncertainty, adapt to change and thrive despite a turbulent environment.
Often, resilience is viewed as relevant when disasters or emergencies occur, e.g. when the global pandemic of 2020 struck causing significant disruption to businesses, but adaptation and compensation is also needed to keep everyday activity going. Agility is good at this because it supports autonomy – people are empowered to act so they can implement small adaptations on a daily basis to keep things running smoothly.
But how can socio-technical resilience be recognised or improved, and what can be learned about it by taking a different perspective?
In October 2024 an interdisciplinary workshop was held in Reykyavik to explore cybersecurity and socio-technical resilience in the context of Iceland and its particular geographical, cultural and digital circumstances. In cybersecurity terms, Iceland is geographically isolated and Icelandic society has unique characteristics such as high levels of interpersonal trust and digital literacy which makes it an interesting case study. The workshop was jointly organised by the University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands) and The Open University, as part of a NERC-funded project on Socio-technical Modelling of Resilient Arctic Communities.
The presentations and discussions were wide-ranging (see this workshop blog for more details), with several themes emerging over the two days, illustrated in the word cloud below. The workshop also prompted some insights that are relevant to Business Agility:
Communities shape their own approach to resilience
The importance of a coherent community and self-sufficiency (in particular being aware of critical dependencies) were common themes in discussions. As Iceland is an island community this heightens the social aspects of resilience, particularly the influence of culture and social identity, but also the practical realities resulting from the fact that Iceland’s digital infrastructure is dependent on only a few connections to neighbouring countries. The notion of “islandness” resonated with many attendees who noted that any coherent community can be viewed as an “island” even if they aren’t surrounded by sea!
Self-sufficiency is a valued characteristic of agile teams and businesses yet it may be compromised if too many external dependencies exist. Within agile software teams there is often a desire to be as self-sufficient as possible, but with the explosion in technology underpinning software systems and the inter-connected nature of software endeavours, this is hard to maintain.
The impact of culture in socio-technical resilience was highlighted in several contributions. Culture helps to establish coherence and informs everyday actions, responses and “the way things are done around here", which in turn informs how resilience is maintained. The discussion around the strength of community led to an observation that there isn’t one prescribed way to maintain resilience. Instead, communities find their own way, shaped by their own culture, identity and place. Business agilists understand only too well the impact that the right (or wrong) culture may have on a team, what may be less understood is the role of social identity and place, which are also relevant concepts for understanding socio-technical resilience.
Resilience goals: how to recognise resilient performance
In order to improve resilience it’s necessary to understand what resilience is – or more precisely, what does resilient performance look like? Underlying this is the notion of resilience goals. In safety-critical environments safety was and is the top priority and so a resilient system needs to have safety as its resilience goal. But in other contexts such as software development, or HR, what would be a suitable resilience goal?
The idea of resilience goals has not been widely recognised in the context of software development, but in the contexts discussed at the workshop, resilience goals are both recognised and understood. Resilience goals were implicit in presentations about Iceland’s volcanic eruptions and lava flow modelling, and about how the Icelandic community responds to such events. In non-critical situations where adaptations are made on a day-to-day basis, the role of resilience goals is not just to identify resilience but also for teams to know what to prioritise – and to be alert to the subgoals other subsystems (teams) might prioritise that would compromise the organisation’s overall resilience. Different resilience goals result in different priorities. Prioritisation is well-known in agility but usually agilists are prioritising which user stories to implement, while the kind of prioritisation prompted by resilience goals relates to processes and practices, i.e. ways of working, rather than outputs.
So, what might a socio-technical resilience goal look like in business agility? Having a thriving business is the ultimate resilience goal for most organisations, but that kind of goal doesn’t help the kind of day-to-day decisions that underpin socio-technical resilience. A number of factors have been associated with a good agile environment, for example psychological safety, knowledge sharing and collaboration, diversity and inclusion, and continuous improvement in processes, tools and practices. Any of these may form the basis of a socio-technical resilience goal, although identifying and deploying suitable assessments to measure these characteristics may prove challenging. But as observed above, there isn’t one way to maintain resilience: it depends on culture, social identity and place, so each business needs to settle on its own goal.
Small things don’t need to be written down
What to document is an old chestnut in agile circles. If interactions are valued over documentation then agilists need to make sure that documentation is kept to a minimum. The same is true for processes and practices: some things don’t need documenting. Instead, a strong culture, underpinned by trust can make documentation unnecessary as the way forward is widely accepted without formality. For example, when an emergency occurs, there is a tradition in Icelandic society for a “trusted trinity” to form, made up of a protection officer and two experts. There is strong trust in this approach.
So, in small communities it may not be effective to expend effort in formalising things – instead formal structures may be replaced by informal networks with relatively little documentation because “everyone knows” what to do. In the small community that is a software team, this notion has been researched but its implications for resilience are not yet fully explored.
Considering business agility and the wider organisation, the question of what to document and what remains tacit is also pertinent. Agile organisations will capture and share experiences by collaborating and communicating in whatever ways are most effective for them. Writing down formal instructions or plans has limited applicability because instructions can never cover all the possibilities – some things have to be left to human judgment. This may have implications for automation and machine learning too – it’s not about rules but about making connections, balancing and “understanding” – being driven by resilience goals to prioritise the right things.
To prepare or to plan? And what’s the difference?
Which is the key to socio-technical resilience: preparedness or planning? For some situations planning isn’t enough. Planning is inflexible but preparedness is flexible. You plan for specific events (‘what if’s) but preparedness allows you to handle unexpected events. For example, the Icelandic Met Office does a lot of lava flow modelling, which allows people to plan and prompts them to take suitable actions. But when an eruption happens there are always unexpected consequences. Modelling helps, but reality is never quite as the models predict. So, to complement planning, the community also has to be prepared, a mindset that accepts not everything can be planned for. They understand that it requires them to be adaptable, to trust in each other, and able to handle changes in the everyday, as events unfold.
The use of ‘what if’ scenarios in business planning has been around for decades, and definitely has its uses, but agile organisations need to also be prepared: to understand that socio-technical resilience requires adaptation and flexibility to handle everyday changes.
Conclusion
If business agility enables organisations to adapt, then socio-technical resilience ensures they endure. It provides the structural and cultural foundation that allows organisations to maintain continuity, absorb disruption, and evolve with confidence. Shaped by trust, shared purpose, and the integration of human and technical systems, this form of resilience goes beyond processes. It is embedded in how people think, act, and collaborate under pressure.
When socio-technical resilience is intentionally developed, organisations shift from reacting to disruption, to leading through it. They become more than just adaptable. They become sustainable, future-ready, and capable of thriving amid uncertainty. As such, resilience is not a peripheral consideration, it is a vital element of business agility and a defining factor in long-term success.
Looking to go deeper on culture and agility? Explore the newly published article by the Agile Research Network: Data-Driven Agility: Assessing Agile Culture Transformation in a Technology Organisation.
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