How do we give resilience the hopeful booster shot it needs?

(and possibly a Post-Resilience rebrand)

I suspect there’s a weakness in the argument for greater resilience, ironically.

In many ways, resilience, aka “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties”, is more critical than ever.

But in other ways, I might like to punch the next person who suggests I need to be more resilient.

Learning to fight in my forties, using Krav Maga, taught me loads about getting back up again. But I’m convinced there’s more to just getting good at taking the blows the 2020s will bring.

I’ve been near tears more mornings in the last few months than I have my whole adult life. So I ought not to throw stones in my own resilience’s glass windows.

But with first-hand experience of needing my resilience, I see a flaw.

By focussing on resilience, we risk subtly shifting responsibility unfairly.

The narrative around resilience puts an onus on the shoulders of the individual to recover quickly.

The suggestion, therefore, is that under those strong shoulders, things will get better.

Which wait a god damn minute, mate. The problem isn’t the weakness of my shoulders; it’s the weakness of a system collapsing into a calamitous and unholy mess nearly pulling me under with it.

As if greater resilience at work overcomes broken ways of working.