Domain

Explanation

What is resilience?

• According to the author, it is the "skill & capacity to be robust (unaffected) under conditions of enormous stress & change"
• It is observed to be "more than education, more than training, more than experience; a person's level of resilience will determine who succeeds & who fails"
• It is "neither ethically good or bad"
• Setbacks would always occur whether for an individual or an organisation
• Resilience in the face of harsh reality, setbacks, hardships & misfortunes is not only critical for survival, but is also necessary for conflict management & sustained success
• It is an art that requires mastering critical thinking & balancing, both the perception & effort, the skill & the technique

Theories of resilience

• Research on resilience as a faculty of research was started by Norman Garmezy more than 40 years ago (~1950s)
• Conventionally, resilience is regarded as a genetic trait - i.e. it can only inherited & passed down from generations - in other words, U either have it or U don't
• Contemporarily, resilience have also been found to be learnt
• Maurice Vanderpol: resilience is like a plastic shield which has the following attributes:

1. Sense of humour, often black
2. Attachments to others
3. Inner space of protection from intrusion

• Resilient kids display the following traits:

1. Able to get adults to help them - wit
2. Possess athletic abilities - health & fitness

• Research has also discovered that resilient people have the following three essential characteristics:

1. Acceptance of reality: face reality with staunchness, never shy away or coerce
2. Deep belief of associated values & meanings: making meaning of hardships, instead of crying out & never learns
3. Ability to improvise: improvise solutions from thin air, without the obvious tools or help

• Assuming emergent nature, we can expect resilient organisations to have the above three characteristics

Acceptance of reality

• The reality in its stark truth has to be perceived & accepted
• A sober, down-to-earth of parts of reality that matter for survival
• Train how to survive as well as always prepare for contingencies

Values & meanings

• Losers are heard always asking, "Why me"
• Survivors would ask, "Why not me?"
• This is the propensity to make meanings of bad times
• It helps to devise constructs or the dynamics of making meaning to link the road between the present hardships & fuller future
• It provides the scaffolding (temporary support) in times of trouble
• This value system rarely changes, like corporate culture - UPS has been known to send mail one day after a hurricane destroyed the area
• This has been institutionalised in resilience training known as meaning therapy - a way of niche-finding

Ability to improvise

• Improvise or create/modify in order to suit needs & uses without the luxury of the obvious tools, materials or help
• Bricoleurs are people who continually improvise
• They are always tinkering
• They display the inventiveness to improvise
• They muddle through, imagining possibilities, where others are confounded
• They see improvisation as a core skill, especially turning to improvisation under threats, like UPS did during the hurricane