In 1990 the principals of Magus Toolbox Limited conducted a new research programme that was designed to answer two simple questions. What is the set of skills that is needed to manage change, in the decade of the 1980s? To what degree is that skill set different from the one that appeared generally to give good results 20 years earlier?

The answer to the first question turned out to be simple - there was no special skill set for managing change. The reason was that good management was and is about change, and the skill set required is much as it always was, which also answered the second question. No change there.

What did emerge was a key insight into why some organisations find it easy to change - and others do not. A chart was prepared that distributed all the organisations in the sample (circa 230 organisations) along a spectrum, which had ‘change enabled’ at one end and ‘change disabled’ at the other. When the characteristics of the organisations were checked, the correlations were clear. What determined where along the spectrum individual organisations lay was their organisational management practices and processes. This was done after discounting those organisations that had a poor track record of growth, either measured in straightforward financial terms, or in their ability to deliver improving services. The latter applied, as there was an 80:20 mixture of private and public sector organisations in the sample.

The resilient organisation is one that has a high level of capacity to adapt to a changing environment, internally or externally. A key consequence of the adoption of the management practices indicated in the 1990 research as being appropriate for a change enabled organisation is that all employees are players. Especially operational people - 'the sensors at the periphery of the organisation' - engage in sensing signals coming in from the world outside the organisation that imply the need for change; all play their part in interpreting these signals; at the very least, these people are able to get items placed on the strategic agenda. Frequently, they are able to act in accordance with their interpretation of the signals.

The original concept of the resilient organisation has developed over the nearly 20 years since it was first articulated. It has been informed by much published work on chaos and complexity; on the inevitability of emergence in organisations; on actor-network theory; and on MTL's own work with influence networks in and between organisations.