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Resilience Enablers: Learning

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To be resilient is about adapting successfully to change. Adaptability doesn’t happen without learning.

We have to unlearn the stuff that doesn’t help any more. We have to learn new ways of being and thinking. We have to learn from others. This is true as much for individuals as it is for teams, as it is for the whole organisation.

If we don’t learn, we will continue to do the same things, and get the same results. If we are creating results that are mediocre, we’ll get mediocrity. If we are creating results that are failing, we’ll get failure. If we create poor relationships for ourselves, without learning we will continue to do the same with any new ones. Even past performance doesn’t make for a happy future – we are often caught in traps from the past.

Organisationally, Gary Hamel[1] and Liisa Valikangas[2]  defined resilience in 2003 as a capacity to undergo deep change without or prior to a crisis. In 2010 Valikangas  listed the issue of ‘Fallen Eagles’ – expired rules that are no longer fit for purpose. They make kind of scary reading since so many of them are practiced still today :

  • Planning is sufficient preparation for the future. What about unpredictable events?
  • Good strategy is key to success. Most organisations linger in transition between old strategy that doesn’t work and the new one which is yet to be fully implemented.
  • People behave rationally. Example: we easily rush to imitate, even if what we copy is nuts!
  • Copying best practices cannot be argued against. Copying new isn’t possible when the old processes and habits still reside inside.
  • It is best to wait until change is absolutely necessary to save cost. Think this one is self-evident!
  • The art of management is about executing against pre-established goals and optimising performance. We are seeing the drive for innovation as new means of creating value, not just being even more efficient.

At the highest level of resilience, we have to learn emergently. Those operating in Breakthrough resilience learn in the moment. They are not caught up by a rule-book, not scared to give themselves time to sense what they are experiencing and change their plans accordingly. At the same time, they can notice what’s going on and stand firm in their planned path. Both are valid, and the options are explicitly examined and re-decided on an ongoing basis. Resilient people interrupt old patterns and old habits where they don’t serve their purpose any longer.

Emergent learning takes being able to be present to what is around us right now. Being mindful. Allowing yourself to ‘be’ more. Being with all our previous past experiences, and taking that into the moment right now, and as such leading us towards a different future. It’s what Otto Scharmer from MIT in his U Process might describe as ‘connecting with our emergent future.’

All of resilience development is underpinned by both the capacity for and the quality of our learning.  Here are some questions for you to consider for yourself, your team, your organisation:

  • Do you know your own learning preferences?
  • Do you know where your learning skills are strong and where you are not strong?
  • Who dominates the learning spaces you have?
  • What happens to your learning under stress?
  • How is it to set time aside to review and reflect well?
  • Do you have learning buddies that can walk alongside you so you don’t get stuck in a rut?
  • Is your learning at the end of the programme/project, or do you adopt an ongoing learning strategy? What are the implications?
  • What processes do you adopt to foster learning – in you, in others?
  • What’s your energy like? Energy is a precursor to learning
  • What’s your ‘being’ like? How able are you to ‘be’ in the moment, and not be caught up in racing to the next thing?
  • How do you learn into the future? How much do you engage with your imagination in this?
  • How can learning help you in your purpose?

The Resilience Engine has been researching resilience since 2007. We have deep experience in helping individuals, teams and organisations get better at learning. Get in touch if you are interested in what resilience can do for you or your organisations.

Jenny Campbell,
Senior Executive Coach and Resilience Researcher

 

 

[1] Gary Hamel, one of the most influential thinkers in the business world today. www.garyhamel.com
[2] Liisa Valikangas : Professor of Innovation Management, Aalto University School of Economics, Finland

Resilience Enablers: Being

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Being vs Doing, Resilience EngineBeing, Resilience Engine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now here’s one for all the macho resilient folk out there. ‘Being’ is one of the three fundamental skills to resilience. To be able to be present in the moment is critical for resilience. And that means it’s critical for leadership because resilience is the ability to successfully adapt to change. Isn’t that the essence of leadership in today’s world?

If you cannot learn to ‘be’ in the moment, your learning will be shot to pieces. If you cannot sense what is going on inside you, outside you, in others, your ability to respond to the actual situation will be weak. If you override your senses and ignore what’s going on, you are building trouble. If you are overriding the signals of stress, of exhaustion or ill –health, you are on your way to a breakdown.

Being. Quite simple to say, not so simple to embrace on a daily basis. It’s counter to our do!-do!-do! Culture. It feels weird. It can sometimes feel pointless. The point of being practices such as Mindfulness is the process itself. It delivers a multitude of benefits. For resilience, the biggest benefits are re-energising, getting perspective, self-acceptance, increased focus and massively enhanced learning.

Mindfulness is a mental state achieved by allowing one’s awareness to rest on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. The core tenets of mindfulness are compassion, curiosity and acceptance. The Resilience Engine embraces the revolution happening through mindfulness; it’s fantastic! So our question to you is.

What ‘being’ practices will you put in place to help your resilience?

 

Jenny Campbell,
Senior Executive Coach and Resilience Researcher

 

The Resilience Engine has been researching resilience since 2007.  To learn more about our research please click here. Get in touch if you are interested in what resilience can do for you or 
your organisation. Contact us.

What is the definition of Resilience?

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Resilience Engine, Resilience Engine Publications, Resilience Engine New Blog Post, What is Resilience

What is Resilience?Resilience is our ability to reshape ourselves. Or another way of saying it is our ability to successfully adapt to change. This definition is applicable at any level, individual, team, organisational right through to community.

It’s an unusual definition. Most of what is talked about on resilience is about either coping or about bounce back. Both of these are elements within resilience, but they do not capture all of what resilience is, or indeed can offer. In fact these definitions come from a deficit style way of looking at ourselves:

Coping

Coping is about not breaking down.

Coping is a state where things are held as much as possible at status quo. We resist change. Instead we look for the highest level of control. The state of coping is a rigid one, where we aim to deflect anything that will threaten us. We hold onto old habits and patterns because they give us stability. In this state our performance is at best satisfactory, but especially in a prolonged state of coping, performance is more likely to be at best mediocre, at worst poor.  That’s in any part of our life.

If coping strategies are successfully stopping a breakdown, coping is a great place to be. And it’s tough.

Bounce back

Inherent in the words bounce back is the notion of setback or even trauma. This time bouncing `back is great, if the alternative is coping. Bounce back means returning to something normal, and in doing so somehow absorbing the change necessary to do so, even if unwelcome change.

The return from difficulty feels good, but bouncing back has created a cost. There may be loss involved in the change. And often the total cost is expressed in our energy; we are often tired because of dealing with the setback, and that shadow of tiredness may last a long time. If affects performance. Our performance in this state is likely to be more satisfactory than at coping but it’s difficult to improve it.

Having to bounce back from several challenges wares us down. The Resilience Engine are seeing this more and more; more managers and leaders are having to face simultaneous difficulties, and it is this overlap that sends them back to coping mode. In the end, we may slip out of bounce back into something much more rigid and stuck, often coping, or sometimes, oscillating around in the middle of a kind of ok, static state where there is no change.

Either coping and/or bounce back give us ok.  Interestingly we notice how often organisations seek to get back to coping after difficulty – but in doing so not realising they are stymieing their own performance.

So Is There Anything Else? Introducing Breakthrough

What if there was another stage of resilience where deficit didn’t play a part?  Where in fact there was a high level of energy all the time. Where performance was sustainably high. Where even when things got tough, we operating from a surplus mentality, having enough understanding and confidence about how to whoosh back into high performance. All without cost. All of this no matter the domain, whether work or in personal life. Where bumps in the road were smoothed out long before they become a setback. Where we would thrive.

Doesn’t that sound great? And doesn’t it sound like those who operate at this level are really quite at ease in both home and work domains? It’s very attractive!

This state of resilience exists. It’s called breakthrough. When you are at breakthrough resilience, you are resourceful, adaptable and energised. If you know this level of resilience and do experience a tough time where your resilience slips, you are wholly confident in your abilities to go back to breakthrough, and the return is straightforward and quick. When at breakthrough, one particular setback, no matter how important, will not completely dominate our existence. We will have better perspective, and in fact still be able to experience joy in our lives.

This is when resilience is wholly about our abilities to reshape ourselves. It’s a strategic capability in business and organisations. It’s a strategic capability in our personal lives. When we operate with this level of resilience, our capacity increases immensely, our clarity of purpose and motivation and alignment all increase, our options for solving problems increase, our speed of decision making and action increases. It’s a great place to be.

The Resilience Engine® has been researching resilience since 2007. We have discovered these levels of resilience, and how dynamic resilience is. We are proud to offer  The Resilience Dynamic® as a simple model that helps people – individuals, teams, organisations – diagnose their own levels of resilience and  understand the implications.

Jenny Campbell,
Senior Executive Coach and Resilience Researcher

 

The Resilience Engine® then helps develop them develop it according to this initial diagnostic.
To learn more about our research and The Resilience Dynamic click here. Get in touch if you want to learn more.

The Simplicity of Resilience

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The Simplicity of Resilience, The Resilience Engine

I am struck by how complicated resilience seems to be.

There is so much out there that seems to say different things, it ends up being complicated for people to navigate.  We either have to wade through the conflicting lists of how to manage stress. Or decide that we’ll ignore all that stress stuff and be tough. Or more helpfully, we start to learn about the evidence bases that are out there that identify the key resilience capabilities we need to develop.

Professionals are wading through just as much as we punters are. Health clinicians must follow clinical evidence, and that is informed by clinical psychologists. Coaches and therapists look wider afield and take into account Eastern practices such as yoga and mindfulness, the power of our belief systems and such applied psychologies such as NLP, and we search in leadership and performance literature from the likes of Harvard and the business schools. Sports psychologists take it all in, but hone it for their guy in their sport, and we end up with a team of people supporting one individual to be our hero. We all love Andy Murray, bite our nails when he seems to lose focus in any of his matches, but shout and jump when he comes back and wins. We all want to be heroes like that, but we don’t have a team behind us oiling our resilience machine to get us to perform. Instead we’ve got the internet, our doctors and some friends and family to advise us. And ourselves.

It all seems hard work.

What’s not obvious to many of us is how resilient we are already.

If we are coping we are resilient. If we have higher resilience we can bounce back from challenges and adversity. And with even higher still resilience – and the surprise of the research from The Resilience Engine – we won’t really need to bounce back from challenges because we spot them early and deal with them early. Those with the highest resilience don’t really suffer from stress. Stressors exist for them of course, but their internal responses are not driven by stress.

The point is most of us already know some of the conditions for what makes us resilient. And that can be built on to get to this stress-free zone.

That’s right; you already know many of your own resilience factors. Not anyone else’s factors, yours.

We know that the conditions for each person’s resilience are unique. It’s a particular blend of aspects to do with inner attitudes and beliefs, individual purpose, and what we call Adaptive Capacity.

The other big news for the toughness-seekers out there:

Resilience, even for those who have the highest resilience, goes up, and goes down. It’s dynamic. 

Nothing embarrassing about it, it just is dynamic. You can be the highest performing leader in your organisation, but if your capacity is canned because you are having to deal with multiple tough assignments, your resilience will go down for that period. It’s not that you can’t respond resiliently in many and perhaps all work circumstances, but you can’t sustain that level of response in every moment of every day. Over time, if you continue to outrun your own resilience resources, you will run dry and come a cropper.

So yes, resilience varies. Get over it.

So that’s two things that are different to what’s out there. You already know a lot of what gives you resilience and you know that it naturally varies.

So what can you do for your resilience already? Figure out those conditions for yourself and make them more available to you more often. That means giving your resilience your attention.

If it’s giving yourself a one minute breathing exercise then do that every day. If it’s having a hug from your kids, do that every day. If it’s saying ‘no’ to 100 things and saying ‘yes’ to the important one for you, then do that every week. If it’s connecting with your purpose often, then do it every day. If it’s minimising what you need to cope with and maximising the fun to counter-balance it, then do that every week.

Anne Wilson Schaef, The Simplicity of Resilience, The Resilience Engine

One caveat in all of this is where our coping mechanisms break down. If you are reading this and thinking “yes, all very well but I can’t do that”, then stop and seek some support. Not coping is a very tough and health-reducing place to be; there is much help out there from very highly qualified people. The most qualified to help you might indeed be your family since they know it. It’s good to ask for help and indeed is one of the core inner attributes of the highest resilient people.

Bottom Line

Resilience is our ability to successfully adapt to change. Change is upon us constantly, and it is ever more demanding and increasing. Let’s connect with our own resilience and honour it by giving it a chance to be available to us daily. If we notice it more, we can stabilise it.  And that already will increase our resilience.

Jenny Campbell,
Senior Executive Coach and Resilience Researcher

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Resilience is like a River

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Resilience Engine, Resilience Engine Publications, Resilience Engine New Blog Post, Resilience is a River

 

glenorchy river for postcard

Consider the following situation. When the river is high, the water whooshes over the rocks, not taken off course, and where the rocks are respected but not dominant.

When the water is low, it’s the opposite. Rocks are felt much more, out of perspective, and the river can be pushed off course. There is tremendous effort in getting a good flow, of moving towards where the river needs to go.

Knowing where your own resilience at any one moment, helps define the capacity you have for what you have to do. It defines your performance. It defines your ability to drive towards a set of goals, or whether you can be taken off course. It defines the pace you can enact on. It defines whether you feel good or not good.

How is your Resilience river?

 

Resilience underpins all sustainable success in life.

 

Jenny Campbell,
Senior Executive Coach and Resilience Researcher

 

Curious about what resilience really is or how to build it? For further information on how to develop resilience, please get in touch. Email: jenny.campbell@resilienceengine.com.

Seeing Things For What They Really Are

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This is the domain of the brave. And for that you definitely need resilience.

People won’t like it. People don’t want to see the truth because they want to stay within their comfort zone. Often it’s because there is a lack of collective resilience that change programmes deliver mediocre results.

The famous change equation (The Change Formula and model of Beckhard and Harris (1987) is actually attributed by them to David Gleicher) is a way of showing that an enormous effort is put into creating the conditions for getting over resistance to change:

 

gleicher formula for change

Gleicher’s formula basically says your first step is to show people they should be dissatisfied with how they’re doing today. How do you lead people to become deeply dissatisfied with their current performance? It feels dangerous, difficult and unpredictable. It feels that the anxiety caused may not be worth it. Then, perhaps the whole issue is that the dissatisfaction would have to be BIG to make any difference- after all, doesn’t everyone have quite jaded views of change nowadays?

Then, do you have enough collective resilience to maintain a safe container strong enough for the level of anxiety that could be created?

On top of that, if the vision that you want them to go towards is unclear, woolly or emergent, creating dissatisaction seems pointless. The truth of current organisational visions is that they are unclear – we are in a world of ambiguity, complexity and wicked issues.  Visions are now emergent, we’re trying stuff out, we rely on learning like mad to do all this successfully.

What do we do to help enable change as a leader? It seems we’re stuck!

The first step is that leaders – you  –  need to see the results you have today, and understand against the vision of the organisation and your bit of it – your vision – how you are doing.

  • That takes capacity
  • That takes mindfulness on a collective basis.
  • That takes perspective.
  • That takes collaborative effort.
  • And to do it speedily, that takes resourcefulness.

How does all that come together? Resilience.

To have a vision in the first place takes a future-oriented focus.. We know that those who are at the level of resilience of coping or not coping so well, cannot have the capacity for this future-focussed work. Those whose resilience is not at least at bounce-back and beyond cannot authentically, passionately and intelligently co-create a vision that is about the future. Those coping, or those not coping well, resist change.

Bottom line? Resilience development is a necessary condition for any successful change.

 

Jenny Campbell,
Senior Executive Coach and Resilience Researcher

 

Curious about what resilience really is or how to build it? For further information on how to develop resilience, please get in touch. Email: jenny.campbell@resilienceengine.com.