Future Here Now: What Does it mean to be Resilient?
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Every third email I get anymore has “resilience” in it. Resilient environments, resilient cities, resilient people, resilient infrastructure.
At this point, I think we all basically understand what it means to be resilient — it means to bounce back, to recover successfully from something bad. It means rebuilt towns, stroke patients who learn to walk again, streets that absorb water instead of flooding, companies that don’t die when the economy goes bad.
But in any of these cases, resilience is a thing that we see after the fact. We don’t fully know if the business or the stroke patient or the town or the street are going to show us resilience untill they do. Until the bad thing happens, we are guessing as to what conditions might make the situation more resilient when the awful thing happens.
Part of why it’s so hard to develop resilience is that we don’t fully know what we will need until it happens. We can model water flows and do medical studies and read the case studies, but we really know until it’s too late to build resilience.
I think the crux of our problem is this: resilience is not a solution, it’s a hedging of bets. It’s anticipating a whole variety of possible outcomes and putting a collection of interconnected, meshed hedges in place - hedges that can’t prevent possible bad things in and of themselves. It’s basically building a sandbag wall, and hoping that the gravity that forces the sandbags together creates a whole protection from all of these separate pieces.
That’s a massive shift from the Industrial Era mindset that we’ve imbibed — a mindset that says that if the thing we are doing isn’t going to guarantee safety, it’s not worth doing. So the council turns down the funding, treatments get rejected by the insurer, the very lucky (and big) business gets a bailout while the thousands of smaller ones flounder.
Resilience requires the opposite. It means making lots of small investments that work together instead of a Big Something that looks impressive … until the emergency comes.
Here are some examples of Future-Ready resilience at work in businesses, communities and people today.
Measuring Resilience
https://econsultsolutions.com/climate-resilience-index/
I’ve see several indices and toolkits for measuring resilience over the years. This one appears to be pretty comprehensive, although the information in this summary is focused on climate change mediation strategies and does not appear to directly address the social and economic aspects of resilience.
I would personally like more attention to these aspects of community resilience: managing the impacts of flooding does not necessarily mean that people can find food or living wage jobs in the aftermath.
Rural Resilience
https://theconversation.com/why-natural-disasters-hit-harder-in-rural-school-districts
This article is particularly insightful, and actually has recommendations that I can see improving rural school resilience. I particularly like the use of offline and mobile strategies.
We also see an important truth of resilience here: resilience requires flexibility. Industrial era systems like the way we do education are designed to use the same method everywhere in the name of “efficiency.”
Resilience fundamentally requires the opposite. There’s no one approach that will work every time, but having a toolkit of alternative strategies makes all the difference.
The next question will be, how does evaluation need to change if the methods to deliver learning are flexible? Because it cerrtainly will.
Resilient Organizations =resilent people groups (AKA “teams”)
Team fatigue is real, and it’s affecting businesses of all kinds especially since no one has really taught us how to collaborate — most of us find ourselves sort of winging it off of fair play rules we learned in kindergarten. Managers and organizations often don’t help us do that better because they’re focused on putting out current fires, not building the systems that equip members of teams to collaborate more effectively and…resiliently.
This set of insights points to the systems within and around the team, and sketches some strategies for building a resilient team that isn’t as prone to burnout, hopelessness or nihilism. It’s a light touch, but it indicates a good balance of team agency and interconnectedness with other functions.
The great challenge, of course, is that modern knowledge industry- type work like this requires a very different kind of energy from the old industrial business model, and modern companies fall prey to a constant pressure to do more and more and more with less and less. Since mental energy cannot be measured the way outputs of widgets made by people running a machine are, neither teams nor management really understand why they don’t feel like doing it anymore. So these techniques are probably useful, but this is a case where the source of the lack of resiience runs much deeper than it might appear.