The Weaknesses of Resilience
Having spent the bulk of my career working in large, corporate organisations, including in the insurance and education sectors, I am well used to discussing the coveted quality of resilience.
I’ve sat in meetings and worried about how we hire for it, or rebuild it in our teams after the pandemic. I’ve hand-wrung in policy discussions about why our young people fear failure, and on uninsurable risks. At different times, I’ve been personally criticised for having too little resilience, and praised for the depth of my reserves. I’ve even included it in a catchy trifecta to describe company strategy to employees.
The ability to withstand unexpected shocks and to recover well is critical at an organisational, national and system level. Economic resilience, financial resilience, operational resilience are all important and useful goals. Since the financial crisis we have seen increasing regulatory focus on company risk profiles and mitigations, with efforts redoubling in light of the complex disruptions of the last three years.
However, in many instances, I have seen the emphasis of conversation tip towards personal and emotional resilience, and with it the burden to keep the show on the road.
An ability to get knocked down and back up again is positioned as a core skill, almost fetishised. While we are encouraged to show vulnerability, the heroic story arc dictates that we are not defeated by it.
With that in mind, close your eyes and picture an image you associate with “resilience”. For me, it’s a copper pipe, being peppered with small beads that ricochet from its exterior, each leaving an angry pockmark. A tinny sound, the sort that makes you want to put your hands over your ears. Hailstones on a roof.
The current turmoil in our public services I believe has something to do with this trend. When we clapped our frontline workers during the pandemic (and the military language is indicative here), we were not only thanking them, but celebrating their ability to keep going and succeed against the odds.
The problem with odds, as any gambler will tell you, is that the casino always wins eventually.
In some settings, we are seeing a trend back towards more “paternalistic” employee benefits — living wage, more generous family leave, healthcare, mental health support. Elsewhere, we have a huge swelling in the safety nets provided by the voluntary sector to help those who can’t get by.
Yet it is no use providing a hot meal, warm hug or cold compress at the end of each day, if this is predicated on the expectation that people go dutifully into an unwinnable battle every morning.
Resilience is intrinsically valuable only if it is part of the route to success, or genuinely relied upon only in extremis, to avert disaster. It must be distinguished from dogged endurance of the objectively, unassailably intolerable.
I got far enough into A level Physics to know that a hollow pipe is stronger than a solid rod*, although not far enough to be able to explain why. The rub, of course, is that once one of those tiny, angry beads penetrates the exterior of the hollow pipe, it’s useless.
The solid rod, on the other hand, takes longer to erode, it might even be unbreachable. If, in a whole-system context, we imagine people as the outer edge of our pipe or rod, we are leaving them vulnerable to total and catastrophic collapse if we don’t focus on building a strong core to support them.
Let’s not forget, there are plenty of demands made of individuals outside of the professional sphere, into which they cannot opt in or out. Our workplaces and communities should be resilient because they are responsibly led and properly funded, not because we ask those who participate in them to dig deep and diminish their personal resources.
That’s why I increasingly believe we need to shift our discourse away from resilience as a personal quality, and understand it as a collective goal, achieved through a combination of infrastructure, processes that work, sound leadership, and organisational empathy.
When describing what we want from individuals, there are plenty of less dangerous, more positive characteristics to reward. Tenacity, ingenuity, compassion, conviction…
Words that focus on how a person behaves, not what they withstand.
Let’s seek out — and, if we are in positions of power, seek to create — situations that name, harness and nurture these qualities instead.
*taking a strength to weight rather than an absolute view :)
