FUNCTIONAL RESILIENCE: PARALLELING BRAIN PLASTICITY WITH AN ORGANIZATION’S OVERALL WELL-BEING

Individuals have the ability to adapt their behavior to how others are organized around them. Whether in social, economic, political or simply work structures; often success for individuals can be defined as the ability to positively embrace change in organizations. The researchers postulate the similarities of human behavior (more specifically the brain) and organizational functioning and draw parallels between these two systems. Furthermore, they posit that brain plasticity and organizations can optimistically encompass change to achieve a higher degree of functional resilience. Considering how two neurons connect as a starting point, authors parallelize change in any organization to how a neurotransmitter operates in activating the receptors of nearby neurons. They also speculate how neurotransmitters can be viewed as one or more people aligned to implement a particular change and in turn review how “receptors” may represent different people of an organization. Hence, the authors derive a measure of functional resilience for organizations that entails quantifying the number of different people in respective “receptor” categories and proceed to give an organizational explanation for “people that fire together wire together”, as a way for organizations to encapsulate change.