Why Resilience?
We’ve lived through 12 months of uncertainty, lockdowns, tiers and loss. Pandemic stress is now a thing. Resilience has become a necessary precondition for surviving our chaotic times. The Third Sector has faced unprecedented fundraising challenges at a time when our services and support are perhaps more urgent than ever before.
“But isn’t it a little late? We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, and talking about resilience seems a little belated, even redundant?”
Quite the contrary. As randomness, uncertainty and the ensuing chaos are a given in our world; pausing, reflecting and rebuilding in a way that enables growth through crisis, rather than mere survival, is smart. Failing to do so may even be fatal.
As obvious as it might seem, resilience bears fruit: “resilient companies suffer less from the impact of shocks, and recover more quickly, and these characteristics translate into financial performance”, as futurist Andrew Curry notes in summarising BCG’s recent investigation into “resilience”.
Resilience features prominently as one of the World Economic Forum’s top 10 most important skills of tomorrow’s workplace. We are even revisiting the literary canon to mine insights from fiction’s favourite stoics. (Who thought back in 2020 we’d be turning to Jane Austen to give context for recovering from a pandemic?!)
Understanding what resilience means and looks like today and tomorrow informs not just how we harness it internally, but how we support future growth and sustainability.
Designing for Future Resilience: Key Principles
We’ve looked back, forward and across to identify 3 key principles to help you think about and design for resilience in an uncertain and complex future.
1. Imagine the unimaginable
2. Embrace optimistic, long-term thinking
3. Think adaptively
Imagine the unimaginable
Author Charles Yu observed early in April 2020 that the pandemic had exposed ‘normal’ as a fiction. By describing the pandemic as “unimaginable” and “unreal” we’re showing the laziness of our collective imagination. “What we really mean when we say that this pandemic feels “unimaginable” is that we had not imagined it”.
So what?
- How can you use innovation as a safe space to start to imagine the unimaginable? To ask the unthinkable questions or consider the impossible futures?
- What could this mean for your mission, your services, your products and your core audiences?
- And how can you then start to prepare or pivot into these new spaces?
“Just as imagination can mislead us, though, it will be imagination—scientific, civic, moral—that helps us find new ways of doing things, helps remind us of how far we have to go as a species.” Charles Yu
Embrace optimistic, long-term thinking
From the human angle, Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Positive Psychology Center believes, “the essence of resilience about the future is: how good a prospector are you?” In simple terms, imagining a better future, whether it includes gigantic house parties or just more hugs, helps humans cope with difficult times. Indeed, the time spent fantasising and daydreaming about the future is by no means useless escapism. Rather its core to cultivating hope and resilience.
In the business space BCG’s study shows organisations that dedicated equal space to conceive of “opportunities” as risk, performed better. Their advice: “opportunity should figure as much as risk”. But what that also means is, lose the singular obsession with (quant-led) goals: embrace the longitudinal view, and begin to see “performance” through the lens of “consistent long-term value creation” too.
So what?
How can you get your boards to give equal weight to opportunity as they do risk when making decisions?
How can you move away from short-term cash-focused goals to embrace a more longview return? And what would those KPIs look like?
How are you talking about failure in your organisation? How can you reframe it to ensure it’s seen through a positive lens and part of a longer-term continuum of success? How can you take a portfolio approach to manage and balance the risk?
Think adaptively
Your organisation is not an island. In order to build in future organisational resilience you need to connect and adapt to your cause community. By embracing a model that functions more like a ‘biological system’, one that’s highly adaptive and interconnected, you can design-in future resilience.
“Five hundred years ago, Copernicus re-centered the universe away from us, outward. The COVID-19 outbreak is a reminder: The world isn’t for us; we are part of it. We’re not the protagonists of this movie; there is no movie.” - Charles Yu
Woodbine, a NY-based, volunteer-run, experimental hub, has been shaped by a relentless continuum of crisis (9/11, 2008 crash, Hurricane Sandy, Trump). They’ve created a flexible infrastructural network, founded on mutual interdependence, that’s evolved to thrive through uncertainty and destructive wake of disasters like COVID-19. This type of response is mirrored in the UK through the mutual aid groups that sprang up in March 2020, many of which continue to exist to serve the emerging and evolving needs of their communities as we enter month 12 of the pandemic.
So what?
How can you connect with your cause community to build new collaborations and deliver more impact for your beneficiaries?
What opportunities could this provide for income generation? For example, how could this transform community fundraising?
How can you let go of brand ego and engage and empower supporters to be connector nodes in your network in order to deliver impact differently?
You pivoted to respond to the crisis in unexpected ways. How can you retain those new agile approaches and ways of working and embed them into future organisational structures and governance?