RESILIENCE

“Resilience—it’s an over-used word that means nothing.”

So said a disgruntled participant at a recent community workshop.

 

Resilience is a polysemous word. Far from meaning “nothing”, resilience has many related meanings. And that’s where the trouble starts.

 

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When you hear a word, it evokes an associated concept in your brain. To help us make sense of the concept, we draw on a prototype or exemplar.

 

For many people, their prototypical sense of resilience involves bouncing back. This entails a return to normality, to how things were.

 

When this simple meaning of resilience is applied to the complex systems in which we live, we immediately face a schism. Bouncing back is a false and, at times, cruel promise because there is no ‘back’. Complex systems only go forward.

 

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Expecting things to bounce back to normal when they can’t causes cognitive dissonance, an unsettling feeling of irritation and frustration when concept and context don’t align. It leads to comments such as that expressed by the workshop participant. But it’s like trying to put a square peg in a round hole then getting annoyed when it doesn’t fit.

 

Instead, we can embrace related, but less well-known meanings of resilience that are purpose-built for thinking about, navigating and creating change in complex systems, including post-disaster systems with all their flux and uncertainty.

 

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Let’s hold that thought for a moment to explore the roots of the word resilience and consider how distinct but related meanings of the word have evolved over its long history.

 

Resilience stems from the Latin resiliere: comprising re (back) and salire (to jump, leap).

 

Resilience entered the English language in the early 17th Century. It maintained stable conceptualisations around retracting, recoiling, rebounding and elasticity until the 20th Century when its meaning broadened through application to literature, law, mechanics and especially ecology.

 

Bouncing became more aligned with perturbations and fluctuations. Instead of bouncing back, the emphasis shifted to the magnitude of disturbance, shocks and stressors that a system (be it a population, a community, an ecosystem, etc.) can absorb before coping capacity is exceeded.

 

When such tipping points or thresholds are surpassed, the ability to maintain function and identity are lost and the system flips into a new state – a new identity – subject to different processes.

 

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Resilience is often accused of being a buzzword. But if we step behind that accusation, a need is revealed. A dire and rapidly emerging need for a concept that encompasses complexity, capacity and disruption, as well as nested concepts around diversity, connectedness, persistence, flexibility, adaptability, stability and growth.

 

No wonder its use proliferated. This is a word for our times!

 

Previously separate, and rapidly coalescing, fields from ecology to commerce to psychology to health to economics and beyond, embraced the word resilience because no other word can convey its broad notion and aspiration of coping with change.

 

Context exerts an influence on concept and hence distinct but related meanings of resilience have emerged across disciplines and settings.

 

• Engineers talk of resilient materials tolerating variable conditions through flexibility of form.

• Ecologists talk of resilient ecosystems absorbing disruptions and maintaining core functions and identities.

• Executives talk of resilient operations adapting to supply chain disruptions and market fluctuations.

• Psychologists talk of resilient mindsets coping with stress and pressure.

 

Meanwhile, resilience has also popped up in myriad and unlikely places in pop culture to further stretch and dilute our sense of the word.

 

• Loreal markets ‘Resilience Lift’, a cream to improve your skin’s ‘bounce and firmness’.

• Nike’s ‘Resilience’ running shoes will give your feet a ‘springy, bouncy feel’.

• Sherwin-Williams’ ‘Resilience’ exterior paint will withstand the midday sun.

• Sealy's ‘Posturepedic Plus Resilience’ mattress will sort out your back problems.

 

Resilience is undergoing a classic case of semantic broadening. As multiple related meanings are applied to many and increasingly unrelated contexts, the concept is becoming s t r e t c h e d.

 

Where could the word resilience go from here?

Over time, new words may be coined (neologisms) or co-opted from other meanings or other languages to cover the cluster of meanings we currently expect from the single word ‘resilience’. Compounds, such as ‘psychoresilience’, and prefixes like ‘eco-resilience’ may become more common to better denote the referent of the concept. Such change is a normal, expected part of language evolution. Specific trajectories and the speed of change are harder to predict because these are subject to less predictable social, cultural and technical influences.

 

In the meantime, does it matter how we conceptualise and apply resilience?

The short answer is yes, it does.

Conceptual precision aids thinking. Using the right cognitive tool for the specific real-world context facilitates cohesion and logic. And if concept and context are misaligned or entail contradictory logic, it’s like hitting a reasoning brick wall.

 

The longer answer is yes, but.

Some conceptual vagueness or fuzziness can be productive because innovation arises at the edges. Applying conceptualisations of resilience from one system, say ecology, to describe another, say economics, can offer novel perspectives that generate insights and unexpected ways forward. The trick is to do this with intention and awareness. Keep your audience in mind. How are they conceptualising resilience? Are you on the same wavelength? If the concept is stretched too thin across purposes and contexts it will, “mean nothing”, as the workshop participant said. It will not make 'sense’.

 

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How you conceptualise resilience will determine how you feel, think, speak and act about it. Be curious about resilience. Explore its principles and applications.

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Resilience is a deep, rich, fascinating and endlessly applicable domain underpinned by 50 years of research and practice. Don’t foreclose valuable options for your changemaking because you don’t like the word, or worse, you assume your collaborators don’t.

 

In a simple but significant frame flip, try reconceptualising resilience from bouncing back to bouncing forward to match the momentum of the systems you work in.

 

If you’re still not convinced, convert back into backwards to parallel forwards. That’s clearly an undesirable state. No-one wants to bounce backwards.

 

So, what does resilience mean when the concept is applied to our context being complex adaptive social-ecological systems?

 

Resilience is the capacity to cope with disruption and continue to function in desired ways.

 

Bounce forwards.

 

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Go Deeper

 

Australian Resilience Centre

 

Wayfinder: a Resilience Guide for Navigating Towards Resilient Futures

 

Alexander, D. E. (2013). Resilience and disaster risk reduction: An etymological journey. Natural Hazards and Earth Systems Sciences, 13, 2707-2716.

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Enfors-Kautsky, E., Järnberg, L., Quinlan, A., & Ryan, P. (2018). Wayfinder: A resilience guide for navigating towards sustainable futures. GRAID program, Stockholm Resilience Center.

 

Gupta, A. Y. (2024). Polysemy and the sociolinguistics of policy ideas: Resilience, sustainability and wellbeing 2000–2020. Journal of Computational Social Science, 7, 331-360.

 

Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1-23.

 

Humbert, C., & Joseph, J. (2019). Introduction: The politics of resilience: Problematising current approaches. Resilience, 7(3), 215-223.

 

McGreavy, B. (2015). Resilience as discourse. Environmental Communication, 10(1), 104-121.

 

Rockström, J., Norström, A. V., Matthews, N., Biggs, R., Folke, C., Harikishun, A., Huq, S., Krishnan, N., Warszawski, L., & Nel, D. (2023). Shaping a resilient future in response to COVID-19. Nature Sustainability, 6, 897–907.

 

Strunz, S. (2012). Is conceptual vagueness an asset? Arguments from philosophy of science applied to the concept of resilience. Ecological Economics, 76, 112-118.

 

© Trudi Ryan, Words for Change

wordsforchange.com.au/resilience