Old and new notions of resilience
Hardy people, crumbly concrete and reframing your attitude towards stress
TLDR: This post explores different concepts related to resilience including grit, antifragility and mindsets which foster resilience. It covers specific actions organisations and individuals can take to build true resilience. This will help you bounce back from set-backs that you’ll inevitably face in the pursuit of meaningful impact.
As many of you know I’m in the process of building out my business. Overall, this has been exciting and I’ve been learning a lot. However at times, it can also be frustrating, especially because I’m currently a one-man-band and I’m trying to grow the company quickly. Frustration is a routine occurrence when it comes to difficult yet meaningful achievements, but that knowledge doesn’t make those frustrating moments go away.
Today’s post is about how people respond in those frustrating moments, the idea of resilience, and what that really means in terms of individual and organisational behaviour. Resilience can be best characterised as the ability to withstand or even bounce back from difficulty. Building resilience is frequently cited as a goal of individuals, parents and CEOs. In fact, over the last few months, a couple of my clients have asked me if I know how to help them make their company or their people “more resilient”.
In it’s purest form people talk about resilience as a kind of vaccine. In the past you experienced small bouts of difficulty and you gain a psychological “immunity” to future periods of difficulty. But, the evidence about this conceptualisation of resilience is mixed. Individuals who experience significant adverse events or prolonged periods of difficulty tend to experience worse outcomes than people who did not have those adverse experiences. However, while it’s clear that large amounts of difficulty do not create positive outcomes, it must be true that to succeed individuals have to overcome frequent smaller periods of difficulty. It is also true that individual resilience and hardiness can change over time, with some evidence that practices like CBT training can help.
A deeper understanding of resilience requires us to acknowledge that it is highly dependent on that person’s wider context. This 2014 paper by Public Health England highlights the role of factors such as environment, economic stability, relationships and experiences in shaping the degree of resilience young people build as grow older. Hopefully, this isn’t too surprising. If a child is struggling with difficulties learning, having a stable home will help them respond more effectively to those challenges. As an adult, if you are struggling with your mental health, being able to talk those things through people you trust will help you cope better. If you are dealing with frustration in a job, knowing your family has economic stability gives you more perspective and mental bandwidth to deal with that stress. Conversely, having fewer stable relationships will inevitably make building resilience to set-backs more challenging. In my recent post about loneliness, I mentioned how loneliness can lower life expectancy - well one big reason for that is lonely people lack the social structures which help deal with physical, mental and economic adversity.
The context an individual finds themselves in has an overwhelming impact on their ability to deal with adversity.
But the importance of that wider context in building resilience is actually a positive result. It means that as decision makers in companies or other organisations, we can influence the degree of resilience in our individual employees by changing the context in which they operate. Changes in how we think about company missions, team structures, appraisal processes and how we communicate can all impact the resilience of our staff. But to understand how we can best do that, we need to understand three more recent psychological concepts linked to resilience:
Grit - how passion influences our ability to persevere in difficult tasks
Antifragility - how adversity can lead to us making positive improvements
A stress enhances performance mindset - how our beliefs about difficulty and stress impacts our response to those challenges
Grit
Angela Duckworth, an American psychologist, published a booked called “Grit: the power of passion and perseverance” in 2016. In it she argued that achievement was largely a function of effort. Effort in turn is manifestations of grit, which she argued was “the passion and perseverance for a particular long-term goal”.
This grit tends to manifest itself in common patterns of individual behaviours, such at the tendency to regroup, and thinking patterns, such as the tendency to return to the same set of goals rather than switching course frequently. As a result gritty people are more able to navigate the frustrations and difficulties that tend to regularly occur along the path towards achievement. Crucially, this conceptualisation of grit suggests that success is not just a function of resilience but it is also a function of a deep desire to achieve a specific goal or mission.
So how do you build grit? A 2021 paper looked at grit in the workplace and found 5 things really influenced the development of grit in company settings:
Leaders role modelling grit has a big impact on how other individuals perceive the value of effort and perseverance plus how much they feel passionate about the organisation’s purpose.
Building Growth Mindset approaches into learning & performance appraisal processes can support the development of grit. Creating incentives and opportunities for people to develop mastery of long term skills and rewarding the effort required to make progress seem important to overcoming short term set-backs. Making space for deliberate practice & focus also contributed to a positive learning environment (e.g., one study suggested having daily “quiet hours” to focus and make progress).
Designing jobs which link people’s purpose and interests together can build this long term goal seeking behaviour. For example, 3M (the multi-billion-dollar industrial & consumer goods conglomerate) encourages employees to use 15% of their time to “proactively cultivate and pursue innovative ideas that excite them”. Equivalently, companies can shape the goals of specific roles around how an employee wants to learn and progress.
Outlining an aligned goal hierarchy makes the purpose of sub-ordinated goals clearer to individuals on a day to day basis. I.e., cascading your company mission or strategic priorities into a well-defined set of sub-goals which align with those priorities can help people understand how their day-to-day work contributes to the bigger picture.
Creating a culture which is both supportive and demanding is also important. In practice this involves employees having autonomy in how to achieve their specific goals and support where they need help, but also striving for excellence and being direct in the feedback given. This balance between support and high standards appears to encourage persistence and pride & care in high quality work.
If you can do this effectively, the authors of the paper suggest you should be able to boost job performance, retention and engagement. All whilst contributing to the individual’s perceptions of self-efficacy, their beliefs about how they can learn and improve.
It is worth noting that the factors we can control to encourage grit are largely about shaping the context in which your staff work rather than putting the burden on individuals in “overcoming” stress or difficulty. This reinforces the evidence we discussed earlier about resilience being a system attribute more than an individual attribute.
Antifragility
We can extend the systems-oriented thinking a bit further, by looking at the concept of antifragility - systems that get stronger when they are under pressure or experience difficulty. But this is a nice moment to take a step back and re-think what outcomes we are trying to strive for when searching for resilience.
In the UK right now there is a massive crisis in the quality of school buildings. Building work in the 1950s used Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC), which has a limited shelf life and a tendency to crumble (especially when exposed to water). I’m about to leave the UK to visit Italy for a few days, and we’ll be staying in an area with aqueducts made out of Roman concrete - originally put in place in ~100 CE. So how come we’re building crumbly concrete now and the Romans knew how to build concrete that lasted almost 2000 years.
In January 2023, after over a decade of work by historians, a group of researchers finally worked out how the Roman concrete had lasted so long. It turns out Romans had been mixing small chunks of lime clasts (pieces of calcium carbonate) into their concrete mix. Previously historians thought these chunks were due to sloppy construction, but this new research showed that these small chunks were actually crucial to the strength of the concrete. As small cracks emerge in the concrete over time, these cracks are hit by rain or other sources of water and the lime clasts dissolve out of the concrete then reharden to fill the gaps. These rehardened areas were in fact stronger than the original concrete which had cracked.
In other words, in modern times we were building concrete that crumbled and cracked when it got wet and in ancient Rome they were building concrete that got stronger and self-healed when it got wet.
Where the early notions of resilience and grit focus on withstanding adverse events, antifragility is about systems which can turn negative experiences into positive outcomes. The term was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book which covered a number of key principles to build antifragility. Since the book was published research has focused on three of these principles across the lifespan of any system:
Proactive redundancies - systems that can withstand breakage
Reactive flexibility - systems that can respond quickly and adaptively to breakage
Retrospective learnings - systems that are good at learning from breakage
Proactive redundancies tend feel a little bit wasteful during periods where everything is going well, but become crucial when things start to go badly. They are insurance policies, but they can also be valuable in the good times. The incentives for many companies are to build overly lean, “just-in-time” solutions which can’t survive any stress or disturbance. One good example of this is where a single individual in a company is the only person who can understand or run a crucial company process. Single points of failure like this tend to encourage bad habits - poor documentation, intricate processes that only make sense to that one person, and inefficiencies that accumulate over time. Part of the issue is that this person doesn’t have anyone to explain their work to or to collaborate with, which means they deprioritise the “explainability” of their work. Moreover, working alone on a process means the complexity of these processes starts to creep up on you. Like a frog in slowly boiling water, it's hard to realise how complex a process has become until you have to explain it to someone else much later down the line. An antifragile approach would involve more slack in the system: this could be two people “pairing” on a particular process, it could be a process where the individual has to do a monthly “show & tell” to another group in the company, or it could be a bigger team where multiple people know how to run each others’ processes. All of these options admittedly cost more money in the short term, but they drive better immediate results and if/when something does go wrong the cost will be worth it.
And things go wrong all the time! People leave their jobs, loved ones get ill, systems break down and the needs of a given processes evolve. It’s unwise to have systems that can’t cope with these unlikely events, because at least one of them will eventually occur (see my recent post on making predictions about the future if you want to read more about how likely unlikely events are).
The second common feature of antifragile systems is the way they adapt to things going wrong. Building more optionality and flexibility can allow you to take advantage of bad situations. In his book, Taleb focuses on financial markets - asset managers who had spare cash during the 2008 financial crisis could buy up assets on the cheap and make a killing. The same kind of idea applies to companies. Hiring top talent while other companies are doing lay-offs, buying advertising space affordably when others are struggling financially, doubling down on customer relationships when those customers having a tough time with your competitors - all of these activities require companies to have retained flexibility for when times are tough. These instances highlight that overextending company resources can have a cost in terms of your future agility.
The third feature of antifragile systems is the ability to re-evaluate and learn when things go awry. In Adam Grant’s book Think Again he highlights the importance of challenging your assumptions in the face of new information using a range of organisational examples; from Blackberry who’s CEO refused to believe people wanted to type on a screen, to the Challenger Shuttle disaster where the NASA programme managers didn’t learn from a failed test of a crucial part of the shuttle. A whole host of cognitive biases make it harder to change our minds, especially in the face of failure. But re-evaluation is a skill which can be learned and embedded into company organisations. Here are a few approaches to help companies to think again:
Regularly document the things you don’t know as an organisation and identify ways of testing hypotheses in these areas - this builds the “rethinking” muscle which makes you better at adapting when things go wrong (Grant refers to this approach as “thinking like a Scientist”).
Use post mortems to evaluate where things went wrong, what assumptions you need to rethink, and how you can adapt after a negative outcome has occurred.
Include independent voices who aren’t as emotionally tied to the actions you may have taken in the past. This can be done by bringing in a team from another part of your company or by bringing in someone external.
Interestingly, Taleb and Grant both view failure as inevitable and in some ways positive. Negative outcomes tend to be more “data-rich” than positive ones, and provide more opportunity for learning. Failures are also inevitable if you are trying to deliver anything of real value in our complex and ambiguous world. Resilience is about building redundancies, creating optionality and introducing processes to learn from failure so that you can bounce back better after adverse events inevitably occur.
A stress-enhances-performance mindset
I imagine a few people who are reading this post so far are thinking: “so resilience is all about environment and organisational factors, what about individual willpower, hardiness and discipline?”
The reality is that individual responses to adverse events still do have a big role. One of the key factors that determines how you respond to frustration or setbacks is the mindset with which you approach those situations.
Recent research from Stanford Psychologist Alia Crum and her team has significantly increased our understanding of the role of mindset in the face of frustration. In a series of studies following Navy SEALs candidates, athletes, and experiments with ordinary people, they found an individual’s appraisal of stress predicts how they respond to it; if you see stress as a positive indicator of the fact that you are stretching yourself, and performing a valuable task then you are more likely to persist through that frustration and stress. If, on the other hand, you see stress as a signal you are struggling and that stress is detrimental to progress then you tend to give up.
They also found that some relatively low cost interventions can help people reevaluate the role of stress, and positively improve their resilience. Their team has open sourced these training videos and they run about an hour in total. I highly recommend people give them a watch here, but for those who don’t have an hour to spare here is a quick summary:
The evidence on stress and challenge shows that, under the right circumstances, stress can improve performance, physical health & recovery, and psychological growth. Moderate stress triggers processes to mobilise resources to act quickly, which can be helpful under many circumstances but this is an non-specific response which may not be proportionate to the challenge you face in a given moment. When this stress is helpful it’s called Eustress and when it’s unhelpful and disproportionate it’s called Distress.
Across a range of settings, the mindset you have changes your psychological and physiological response to different situations. Perceiving stress as an entirely negative response, which we should avoid or control, results in people being stressed about stress. This creates a spiral which in turns results in distress. If instead we can see the value of stress and challenge, we can take advantage of it and generate a positive cycle of eustress.
Stress can be enhancing if you have the right mindset, even if it feels counterintuitive at first. The three steps to this are to acknowledge your stress, welcome your stress and use your stress for positive ends.
Recognising stress requires practice. You need to get used to identifying which emotional, behavioural and physical responses you tend to experience during bouts of stress and consider their impact on you. Unconscious stress triggers cortisol release which results in higher levels of adrenaline and heightened physical responses, whereas recognising and considering your stress activates your prefrontal cortex which gives you more choice over how to best respond.
Welcoming stress generates energy & momentum towards important goals. Stress tends to occur when you are pursuing meaning. One of the most effective ways of welcoming stress is by asking yourself to complete the following sentence: “I am stressed about this because I care about…”. Avoiding stress may result in preventing progress towards those things you care about most.
Using stress requires us to recognise and optimise opportunities that come from stressful times. Stress can generate energy to act, it can create external urgency which helps to unblock progress, and challenging events can encourage you to seek more creative answers to problems. Stress also indicates difficulty and progressing through that period leads to greater learning and mastery of skills, which you will appreciate in hindsight.
Note: this doesn’t mean you should pursue stress. Developing a stress-enhances-performance mindset isn’t about creating additional stress in your life, it’s about reframing the stress you will encounter regularly to generate benefits from it.
Here’s what that process would look like in my earlier example of feeling frustrated:
I am frustrated about… wanting to generate more projects for my company
This frustration is because I care about… growing my company as fast as I can and helping more organisations to improve their workplaces for their people
I can use this stress to… generate more momentum and find more creative ways of getting in touch with clients who may want to use my services
The mindset shift isn’t a catch-all solution for set-backs, challenges and feelings of frustration. But it is an evidence-backed set of solutions to make the most of those challenges. I mean, having a bit of extra energy from the frustration has helped mobilise me to write this article! As an individual, there are limited aspects of your life which are totally within your control - however your mindset is one of those areas.
If you are a decision-maker in an organisation, you also have control over the systems in place. This post has covered some key ways you can foster grit through your behaviour as a leader, the learning processes you put in place, the roles you make, the goals you set and the culture you create. We’ve also covered the importance of building systems that don’t just survive adversity, but can actually benefit from it by creating redundancy, flexibility and willingness to rethink. Collectively these practices can build true resilience in any organisation.
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If you would like to work together on any people issues your organisation is facing, drop me an email at Isar@Uncover.business!
