By Bonnie Chiu

This is the fourth blog in our integration series. Read the previous third instalment here.

“Antifragility goes beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. An adaptive system is one that is robust under volatile environments/conditions, and an antifragile system is one that is robust in a previously unknown environment.”

In a conversation with Abi, the co-founder of an innovation consultancy, Brink, she talked about the concept of antifragility. It sparked my curiosity, and I read up about the concept online. Embracing volatility and uncertainty can lead to personal and professional growth – for us and systems we work within. It suddenly provided new vocabulary for me to make sense of the experiences our new group has been through in the past year.

Organisational resilience is a concept that is rarely questioned. One funder defines it as, “an organisation will have greater capacity to withstand threats, respond to opportunities and to adapt to changing circumstances to give you a more secure future.” This is very important. When TSIC spoke to some of our friends and clients in the sector to consider the way forward with the acquisitions, one person described us as “survivor”, as we had weathered through sector challenges and grown over ten years, building healthy reserves with no external injection of capital investment. We were able to go beyond hand to mouth and therefore pursue this strategic integration.

However, when TSIC reached out to funders for investment towards the post-acquisition journey there was hesitancy to support our transformation plans. Possibly because it was deemed too risky (three, not just two, social impact organisations coming together amid exceptionally challenging times for the sector), or because funders did not want to favour one set of organisations over others. So, we had to be self-sufficient. In a way, self-sufficiency was all we knew. Numerous reports and inquiries have shown that organisations led by leaders from under-represented backgrounds navigate systemic disinvestment, despite a broader tacit agreement sector-wide, that this expertise is central to catalysing social transformation. In our personal lives, we also had to work many times as hard as our peers to get to the same position.

But the relative resilience of TSIC is not to be taken for granted. While small to medium charities and social enterprises are an important element of a thriving, forward thinking impact sector, many are in varying degrees of financial precarity, and cannot afford to be strategic. To be clear, the vast majority of the sector is made up of SMEs and small charities. They are not just part of the sector; they are actually the sector.  In the past few years, so many organisations, including knowledge intermediaries, have been navigating challenges. Some are continuing to face systemic underinvestment – Do It Now Now’s recent report Beyond The Cliff Edge sets this out clearly. Some, even those that we consider to be longstanding, “traditional”, elements of the sector, are chipping into reserves to enable them to continue to deliver on their strategy but in the long-term disintegrating the viability of the organisation. Others have called it a day and closed their doors, and others have cut deeply or placed long-term freezes on pay and discretionary spend.

Despite the wider trends in the sector, we have managed to be resilient, but the process also had huge toll on our staff and morale, from grappling with the uncertainty, to working on integration on top of our day jobs with no additional resources. It has made us reflect, whether there are even more demands on underrepresented leaders to be resilient, than others. The “glass cliff” phenomenon describes the tendency for women and other underrepresented groups to be promoted to precarious leadership positions during times of crisis or organisational downturns. What if the pressure to be resilient actually causes harm and burnout?

Indeed, many organisations have ceased to be ‘resilient’ and have to choose to end. The sector is only beginning to set up infrastructure to support organisations to end well –  for example, initiatives like The Decelerator has been growing its capacity and relevance over the years and is an immensely useful resource. In times of crises, often, bigger players are better placed to withstand shocks. We hear time and again that the strength of the social impact sector is in its plurality – which is true. But currently, there’s little support to enable strategic collaboration amongst the smaller players.

Can an organisation, however resilient, navigate a fundamentally broken system? How can system-wide impact truly take root?

The integration journey has revealed to us that organisational resilience is not enough. Working in a sector plagued with chronic underfunding, so many of us are programmed into fight or flight mode, and the constant urge to react. The first few months of our integration journey was indeed that. We had three organisations coming together, and we were just trying not to topple over. We were resilient. But it was until we leaned into the discomfort, that we started growing and moving back towards our shared mission of creating systemic change.

These reflections on rethinking and actively going beyond resilience have helped us to emerge as better people and a stronger team. And we believe that a critical element in getting better, is that we did not resist the shocks, but we embraced them, and we allowed ourselves to learn in a previously unknown environment. None of us have worked in a M&A context, and we didn’t know what would truly unfold. This involved what we shared in the previous blog about reflecting on our assumptions, becoming more attuned and making space for difficult emotions.

For those of us running the organisations, the experience has also made us clear-eyed about the dynamics of an industry conditioned to operate from a place of scarcity rather than abundance and that therefore has a long way to go in how it thinks about risk and value at a system level. Being resilient is not enough – maintaining one’s shape under pressures that come is equally important. Our hopes for the impact sector are for all of us to lean into discomfort, confront some inconvenient truths, and to step into antifragility, to improve and change under pressure.

In our final blog in this series of reflections, we will be sharing ideas on what leaders, Boards, philanthropy and social investors could consider as they navigate their own decisions or rethink what role to play in a changing landscape. If our reflections so far have got you thinking, we’d love to hear from you.