I glace away for a moment and suddenly Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions is linking to OSD, thanks to my stumbling into Steve and Mark’s dialogue on resilience. Unpacking all of the twists and turns of these two sharp minds would take me several posts (besdies, I have complete faith that all of you are emininently capable of following the links to retrace the discussion yourself) so I will just dive in.

There are two related ideas here. One way to understand them is as two aspects of resilience. The first issue is resilience on what Boyd would call the moral level. The second issue is resilience on a technical level. There is a complex feedback loop between these two aspects of resilience; it leads to both excitement and confusion. This is my attempt to explore that relationship. Be warned, my enthusaism might overwhelm my clarity.

Moral resilience is what Boyd focused upon late in his life and a topic that Chet Richards has expanded upon in Certain to Win. The issue they consider is why certain organizations have been able to consistently prevail against adversity. They have concluded that success depends upon maintaining internal cohesion while disrupting the cohesion of your adversaries. When Mark discusses the importance of consilience, I see him implicitly recognizing this. It is not sufficient to just bounce back quickly, because such a strategy is inherently reactive. It abdicates iniative, conceeding the most important factor to one’s competitors. While there aren’t any blueprints one can blindly apply to become resilient, there are some common characteristics of resilient organizations. None of these characteristics, notably, are technical.

Technical resilience is where SOAs and IT platforms come in. In Steve’s business world, he needs tangible (well, alright, more tangible than “moral resilience”) products to sell, and hence Enterra’s focus. The ability to plug-and-play reduces the costs of joining efforts, which I expect will produce a reinforcing feedback loop as the critical mass of players grows (which in turn attracts more players…). By removing the “it is too hard to do” excuse, effective IT (which is really what we’re talking about here) can help motivated actors from the NGO, military, diplo, and for-profit sectors achieve incredible results.

None of that can happen, however, without a compelling answer to the “why should I bother at all?” question. It may be simple, but what’s the point? This leads us back to the dynamics of moral resilience as examined by Boyd and Richards: how to create schwerpunkts and how to foster individual iniative within an organizing purpose.

In the 21st century, it will become more difficult to be resilient in one of these manners without being resilient in the other. An SOA will not change much of anything if it is merely being used to support 19th-Century style hierarchical bureaucratic processes. No, one needs a motivated and cohesive workforce to really make a SOA pay off. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine a cohesive organization prevailing in this era without its employees being empowered by a robust IT infrastructure. These factors feed on one another. Motivated employees can take drastically more iniative when they are unburdened from unnecessary bureaucratic constraints and allowed to find the data they need when they need it in the format they want. Suddenly people are getting excited, somebody’s yelling or standing on his desk and people are scribbling diagrams on white boards.

The time is ripe for the SOA/resilient era’s equivalent of the blitzkrieg: a doctrine that links organizational structure and philosophy with appropriate technology. The center of gravity, as in any competitive endevor, remains the human mind. Technology can facilitate coordination towards a schwerpunkt, but it cannot provide the schwerpunkt. Development-in-a-Box can vastly reduce the friction generated when distributed and previously unconnected entities begin to work together. It does not motivate cooperation, any more than the radio motivated maneuver warfare. Still, effective IT will become the defining feature of this era’s most successful companies (it already is for companies such as Budweiser, Dell and Wal-Mart), just as the tank has become a symbol of the blitzkrieg. And this is proper, since it is what makes this era unique - even as the moral dynamics have existed for centuries and will continue to be relevent long after we have passed.