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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
[table id=33 /] My research into resilience started properly in 2007, but my story of curiosity around resilience really started back in the early 2000’s. I was a senior leader within the mobile industry, living at weekends in Edinburgh but commuting up and down to London each week, and often travelling to see staff and clients around the country. I had many years of leadership experience, international experience, an…