Change resilience: skills for the future that we need right now
Helen Babb, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Daniel Bluzer-Fry and Courtney Guilliatt on change resilience.
When Taylor was starting out as a teacher, they were told that the skills that were essential for success were communication, classroom management and subject matter expertise.
What Taylor didn’t realise until they got into a classroom was that teaching needed something quite different.
The key skill that Taylor needed to succeed as a teacher was being able to adapt to change and manage things outside of their control while still doing their job: or change resilience, the ability to adapt and deal with change in a healthy way.
We’re living in a time of increasing complexity. Compared to any previous generation, we’re living longer and working longer. Jobs and skills are no longer linear or stable: technology and globalisation mean continuous upskilling and reskilling are the norm. None of this is changing anytime soon.
Our capacity to adapt to change is more important than ever. And building change resilience has a multiplier effect: it supports both learning the skills we need for work, and has outcomes for health, wellbeing, innovation, lifelong learning and more.
Why is Change Resilience needed?
That humans need to adapt is nothing new. We’ve adapted from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and now we’re adapting to the information age.
What is new is the accelerating pace of change.
Cognitive Load Theory tells us that we have limits on how much information we can process. The more things you have to do that are new, especially when you need to think deliberately about them, the more overloaded you become.
Before COVID-19, heading into work would be a similar routine each day. But now, for anyone having to follow changing rules around social distancing or mask-wearing, there are many new things to think about. When do you put your mask on or take it off? Is that person too close? When did you last sanitise your hands — and did you accidentally touch your face before sanitising? Anxiety, stress and uncertainty add to cognitive load.
And context matters. The volume of information we are bombarded with is not what our brains were designed for — even if, as neuroscience has revealed, we have neuroplasticity: as neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin says, “Our brains evolved to focus on one thing at a time”.
Technology is a major source of that firehose of information. Dings and pings and notifications fragment our attention, which in turn makes it harder to concentrate and so to learn. A University of California study showed that after a distraction, it can take up to 23 minutes to get back on track and can increase stress and frustration, as anyone who has been in a meeting while trying to attend to notifications knows.
Taylor was familiar with the term burnout when the school year started.
But they definitely started feeling that something was off about six months into the job.
Each day, Taylor faced teaching young people with complex needs, a pressure to ‘teach to the test’, and at the same time was faced with the challenge of finding their feet and working out what they wanted in their career.
Inevitably the question ‘can I really do this?’ kept coming up.
This left Taylor feeling depleted.
According to the World Health Organisation, burnout is characterised by three dimensions relating to work:
- Feelings of depletion or exhaustion
- Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism
- Reduced professional efficacy
The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the first scientifically developed measure of burnout, aligns with the WHO’s definition of burnout as an occupational experience that organisations need to address. The WHO and Maslach, a pioneer of research on job burnout, says is not a medical condition — it’s a work-related one, even if the symptoms of burnout can manifest in the form of high blood pressure, headaches and herniated discs.
That more people are feeling burnout is perhaps an inevitable part of the pandemic. New stressors have been introduced —disrupted work hours, increased demands at home and concerns about health. Many of these stressors are persistent and indefinite and increase everyone’s risk of burnout. This seems to be especially true for people in professions such as education and healthcare. Gender may also play a role.
Dealing with burnout is a challenge for everyone.
Taylor’s school holidays as a teacher were not really holidays.
They were necessary breaks from the daily challenges of the classroom.
A time to renew, recharge and focus on mental wellbeing.
In the past, mental wellbeing was individualised and medicalised — and shrouded in shame. This is changing, but perhaps not enough — or in the right way — and what is needed is a recognition that a full emotional range is normal in response to change.
A lot of attention has been focused on how we navigate adversity, setbacks and challenge. But, far less has been given to adaptability and helping people build capacity to respond and adjust to change, novelty, variability and uncertainty.
For many people, COVID-19 may have been the first time that people have seriously been asked ‘how are you?’ at work — or answered that question truthfully in the presence of colleagues. It may have been the first time they saw leaders sharing openly about their wellbeing. One positive legacy of the pandemic could well be the normalisation of ‘how are you?’ and that wellbeing impacts everyone in different ways and at different times.
The breakdown of familiar working practices through hybrid working means some employees have more autonomy and flexibility. But this also creates new challenges — uncertainty about status, new etiquettes and uncxertainties about about our role in teams. Remote and hybrid working requires considerable self-control: “Exercising self-control and re-adjusting focus can be psychologically exhausting, and as energy levels are depleted, self-control becomes harder, which leads to a vicious cycle”, as psychologist Gemma Leigh Roberts says.
Building change resilience
Building change resilience can have positive outcomes — not just for individuals but for organisations and for society at large.
For organisations, building change resilience may increase the speed that employees and teams can adapt, lessen the negative impacts of change and so reduce burnout, increase employee engagement and promote high performance. Societies that are more resilient to change may reduce the burden on support services, or make them more effective. And in an educational context, learners who build their change resilience capacity may find it much easier to learn both technical and non-technical skills.
The power of humility and learning
Learning from the past — and from different cultures — can bring wisdom to our current challenges.
Aboriginal ecological knowledge, honed over 50,000 years, is increasingly being recognised as essential to solving complex ecological challenges in Australia. First Nations cultures also bring a deep understanding of how parts of an ecosystem, or set of knowledges, relate to one another and are continuously shaped by each other. “When we consider knowledge systems from a First Nations perspective, we are looking at many interconnected relationships or pieces of knowledge that overlap and interact with each other without conflict”, says Bundjalung, Thunghutti and Muagal man Leeton Lee. “This is often referred to as kinship or balance.”
Similarly, ancient rites of passage — which often take similar forms around the world — encourage the safe transition from one stage of life to another. These rites can be adapted to modern contexts for healthy transitions in children and adults.
Allow space for reflection, learning, honesty and discomfort
Change cannot happen in an ‘everything is fine, nothing to see here’ environment.
In Western cultures, there seems to be a tendency to view reflection as a waste of time — an impediment to the quest for productivity, a long-standing and outdated hangover from the Industrial Revolution.
All change, no matter how many positive benefits it drives, comes with letting go of the familiar and coping with discomfort and loss. The benefits of automating a task may free up time or make it safer, but that doesn’t mean there is no loss. The loss may be of comfort (‘I’ve done the same process for two years and now have to do something new’) or something bigger, like a sense of identity.
People need space to process the emotional journey of change. Prof. Samira Rajabi makes this point in relation to the pandemic and grieving process for what has been lost, what she calls ‘ambiguous grief’:
“We just don’t have a script for this grief, and many people feel like they’re not entitled to it. But again, this loss is not meant to stand in contrast to other, more concrete and tragic losses that are so full of injustice and so marked by racism, class and power, because those losses matter and are deeply worthy of our social, cultural and political attention. Rather, I think recognising ambiguous grief as a real grief is just a means to be able to say ‘I don’t know why these changes and ruptures feel so painful, but they do and it’s okay to feel that’.”
Using the language of ‘grief’ in the context of work may suit some people or can fall flat with others. An alternative could be to acknowledge that any loss, change or discomfort that has occurred is part of a collective experience.
Processing adversity with a broader group makes it a collective rather than individual issue. Researchers from universities in the US and UK explain that this can maintain and strengthen connections, rather than send the message that processing an event relies an individual coping alone (which can lead to isolation, loneliness or shame). Creating space and time for relational pauses — a break from ongoing task work — can bolster genuine and authentic connections between employees and enable individual wellbeing. The HBR piece says:
“Practically speaking, a relational pause is a temporary, often brief, break from ongoing task work, in which people are invited to ask and answer the question, “How is our work affecting us as human beings?” In some ways, this is similar to other reflective breaks a group might take — medical teams use a “safety huddle” to check that everyone is clear on an upcoming procedure, and military teams use a “tactical pause” to verify data and check assumptions. However, unlike these, a relational pause is designed to provide a window into the emotional and relational realities of work.”
A similar process could be used when a team experiences a restructure, a person changes roles within an organisation or leaves a company, a large organisation undergoes a transformation, or a person is required to re-skill by necessity rather than choice. Acknowledging and allowing space for reflection, learning, honesty, and discomfort may smooth the path to change.
Or consider what happens when someone is injured at work and may not be able to return to their previous role in the same way, or ever. A relational pause to acknowledge this change (or loss, depending on how the person feels) and connecting to a collective experience may be one way to mitigate some of the negative feelings.
Focus on developing and boosting the skills of change resilience
We're building an understanding of some of the skills of change resilience.
These include adaptability, self-awareness and emotional regulation — the key skills necessary for healthy change resilience — that can be taught, supported and/or recognised by organisations and individuals. Here are some of them:
- Attract, embrace and recruit for employees who are already change resilient or who are willing to learn.
- Building the ideas, skills into organisational culture and using the language of change resilience
- Making time for developing these skills, with dedicated learning time, resources and acknowledgement of their importance
- Adapt systems to support change resilience skills, for example, having focus or meeting-free hours that are actually observed to support developing focus
- Providing reward and recognition for employees who learn, practice and develop these skills as part of review and reward mechanisms
- Instituting hiring and promotion practices that screen for change resilience skills like adaptability, empathy and vulnerability
- Encourage self-awareness practices in employees, like asking for feedback, debriefing and sessions or practices on unconscious bias
Skills like adaptability, empathy and cognitive agility will assist people like Taylor to be more successful in a rapidly changing world and provide positive outcomes for individuals’ health and wellbeing, as well as promoting innovation, lifelong learning and much more.
In their years of teaching, Taylor realised that the key skills required of a successful educator were not what they thought on the first day.
Taylor now accepted that the ability to respond to what is happening in the moment in the classroom, having perspective, meeting students where they are, recognising stress triggers and knowing to how to recover are as important as any other skills.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
