resilient
|riˈzilyənt|
|rəˌzɪliənt|
|rəˌzɪljənt|
|rɪˌzɪlɪənt|
adjective
• (of a person) able to withstand or recover quickly from
difficult conditions.
• (of an organization) able to recover readily, as from
misfortune.
• (of a community) able to flow with changing conditions
and prosper.
I always get my way,
because I change my way
Globalization?
Global competition? Global warming? Aging baby-boomers?
Succession? Healthcare? Overseas outsourcing? Education
system? China? India? Regulation? Regionalization? Finance?
Funding? Sustainability? Profitability? ................ Or
within any of the key words that illustrates the world you
face - ask yourself these questions - given
this environment and the above definition of resilience,
how resilient is your community, your organization, your
business? What
strategies and planning frameworks do you use to ensure
resilient responses to day to day change and disruptive
events and times? These
questions and your initial response are a good starting
point to begin to engage in the principles and processes of
resilience, and to question whether your current approach
guarantees a robust thinking and planning framework for a
resilient future.
I would assert three things. Firstly, while individually
some of us are at times good at being intuitively
resilient, we are not consciously adept at resilience and
we are not good at institutional resilience. Secondly, as
our environment becomes more challenging we appear to be
becoming more rigid than resilient - we control rather than
be creative - hence we break rather than bend. Thirdly, the
primary reason for this is that the thinking, planning and
management models we use are from a bygone era and not up
to the task for today's world. Especially when such old
tools are applied to today's complex and dynamic change and
the responsive decision-making required of communities,
businesses and organizations. This is a high risk state to
be in at a time when change is so disruptive and becoming
more disruptive.
The majority of us would agree that we are facing some of
the biggest challenges that contemporary humankind has ever
experienced. Our seemingly successful history is no
guarantee of a similar future. Our condition is critical,
our diagnosis shallow, our practice elementary, and we are
‘late in the season’. We have only recently begun to muster
the forces to develop a thoughtful response, and as
Einstein is overly quoted, but rarely applied,
affirms: "You
can't solve problems using the same thinking that created
those problems". If
these statements are accurate, what needs to be done to
rise to the challenge?
Having
studied this dilemma through the eyes of 'fresh' thinking
like the new sciences and emerging practices like
sustainability, I realize that to survive and thrive in
such an environment will not be achieved through
superficial modification to conventional wisdom and
behavior. That might help, but the situation demands
a new
conventional wisdom, for unconventional
times. The
real difference will be made through re-thinking the
fundamental assumptions and frameworks we use to think
about our future, and through our civic, business and
community leaders taking a quantum leap forward in how they
approach change, growth, policy-making and planning. This
starts with allowing the space for new decision-making
methods to ease aside those from a by-gone industrial age
that do not apply or work in today's environment. Today's
decisions needs to be made through planning models and
methods better suited to our times. In doing so we need to
re-learn a range of practices. To name a few - business
planning, economic development, strategic planning, land
use planning and community development. In doing so we need
to ask the tough questions of the 'old chestnuts', and even
review the way we are investing in sustainability.
Reshuffling mainstream practices to solve complex and
systemic issues might appear to help in the short-term, but
it will be new ideas from the margins that inform a
workable and livable future. I think resilience is one such
practice and science that can do that job.
I remember in the mid-eighties intuitively writing a short
poem - "I
always get my way, because I change my
way". Such a
small 'koan-like' thought that eased into my consciousness
on a Sunday at the beach became a persistent mantra that
shaped the many 'me's' that have emerged over time. So much
so that I gave it a name - 'the
buzz'. To
change my way, to get my way is a
simple metaphor for understanding the deeper principles of
resilience, and the important foundation it provides for
the idea of a resilient future - for people, communities,
businesses and organizations. Given the challenges we all
face, resilience must be a goal, the 'talk and the walk',
and the buzz for us all.
A
resilient future will require us to be accomplished in
having the insight to gauge what futures may be, to let go
of the past to see and respond to such new futures, to be
proactive when we see things emerging that require us to
change, to bend and bounce back or to creatively form new
shapes that are sustainable within new conditions, and to
do it all again when our sense of the future changes or
conditions change. Or as resilience science defines
resilience: "the ability of a system to absorb
disturbance and still retain its basic function and
structure". That is
resilience, the test of a resilient person, community,
business or organization, and perhaps our only hope for
workable and livable sustainability.
Resilient Futures is a model, method and a project
committed to assisting communities, businesses and
organizations to transform and 'tune' themselves to their
future through resilience. The intention of this site is to
raise awareness of resilience and its possibility, provide
an overview of how communities, organizations and
businesses can individually and together become resilient,
and to convene a network of people to share their
experience in becoming and being resilient.
We welcome you to join with us in creating Resilient
Futures, for resilient futures.
Larry Quick
Site Author and Convener