Diane Coutu wrote a piece on “How Resilience Works.” I read it on the plane (and will listen to it on Audible as part of the Managing Yourself audiobook I bought). It introduced a few key ideas worth exploring.
First, resilience is a puzzle we probably can’t fully understand. It’s up there with creativity and religious instinct. However, knowing that resilience can be learned and trained is powerful.
“Resilience is a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world, that’s deeply etched into a person’s mind and soul” ~ Diane Coutu, “How Resilience Works”
Resilience has also been a buzzword among knowledge workers for the past two to three decades. It will only become more relevant as attention spans become shorter. Understanding resilience requires experiencing hardships, and it’s something you realize after the fact.
Looking for intelligence, ambition, integrity, analytical ability, and so on seems more straightforward for companies. Some institutions and agencies have started figuring out the science of resilience training.
“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.” ~ Dean Becker, CEO, adaptivlearning.com
From Coutu’s essay alone, it is helpful to remember how to cultivate resilience. It boils down to 3 practices: Face down reality, search for meaning, and continually improvise. Here’s my attempt at a shorter acronym to remember: RMI, short for Reality, Meaning, and Ingenuity.
Reality is about taking a down-to-earth view of the situation; that way, you can train yourself to endure. Optimism is a strength in many scenarios but a liability here. Admiral Jim Stockdale’s famous story about escaping eight years of jail in Vietnam illustrates this point. Jim Collins covered his story and coined the Stockdale Paradox.
When Collins asked Stockdale what sort of people didn’t make it out of the [prison] camp, Stockdale’s response was clear: “Oh, that’s easy. The optimists.” “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” ~ Jim Collins, “Good to Great”
Meaning is about not spending time on suffering and getting stuck in the “Why me?” mentality. One should come up with meaning for self and others. Make the present more manageable. Victor Frankl’s “Search for Meaning” book exemplifies this point. Core values become essential here, for an organization as well as for a person.
“While it’s popular these days to ridicule values, it’s surely no coincidence that the most resilient organization in the world has been the Catholic Church, which has survived wars, corruption, and schism for more than 2000 years, thanks largely to its immutable set of values.” ~ Diane Coutu, “How Resilience Works”
Ingenuity is about imagining possibilities others don’t see. Make do with whatever is at hand. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss calls this skill bricolage. The verb bricoler means to bounce back.
Bricoleurs are always tinkering — building radios from household effects or fixing their own cars. ~ Diane Coutu, “How Resilience Works”
Earlier, when we discussed “Meaning”, core values became a cornerstone to finding meaning. When it comes to ingenuity in times of pressure, it’s important also to know that our brain may not respond well to creativity. There are plenty of examples in organizations that proved resilience thanks to their clear rules and regulations that help employees act fast instead of trying to be creative.
UPS CEO Michael Eskew explained these seemingly stifling rules allowed the company to bounce back immediately after Hurricane Andrew, because people could focus on the one or two fixes they needed to keep going.
“Drivers always put their keys in the same place. They close the doors the same way. They wear their uniforms the same way. We are a company of precision.” ~ Michael Eskew, CEO, UPS
How would resilience be related to endurance?
I need to ask myself that question to internalize my understanding and to make this blog entry fit the endurance and entrepreneurship theme.
Endurance is training to push the body and mind through discomfort. Resilience is accepting the injuries and failures encountered along the way and somehow overcoming them.
Endurance focuses on incremental gain. Resilience is about being patient with slow progress. Persistence pays off, even though progress is not always visible.
Endurance increases adaptability in handling stress, boosting the chance for clearer thinking when resilience requires facing the setbacks matter-of-factly and improvising.
I’m approaching one month of writing in three days! As I endure, I need to seek new targets to improve in quality. I expect failures, and that seems discouraging. That’s when resilience will come in.
Next: On managing time