Somehow resilience is now at the forefront of the agenda for many. I just saw an email with an invitation to talk about resilience in businesses. The topic of the future. In the email there was a strong association with the word security. One of developed countries' favorite one.
Is resilience a natural reaction to security issues? Or is this about a new wave of expansion that also involves securing control of anything being considered as valuable? Why are we talking about this now? Is this for everyone?
Many respectable members of the academic community say that resilience so the next big thing. Making sure that your organisation and community lasts for sometime is now a key goal. So those interested in sustainability can see a new reincarnation of the term. The reincarnation is not about saving the planet, but surviving, and thriving.
Not sure what the term means though. Not sure what is behind it. Maybe we feel that something will have to give in the planet and something has to survive: Species, geographical areas, markets, (some) people.
And of course the bees...
In a world that has been recently struck by natural and non-natural disasters, it seems that resilience is about controlling or managing that which you can. It seems to be about preparing for contingencies. But what about those who cannot prepare, or have not even considering that there is a need to? Are we limiting our concern to just a few things and a few people? Have we become conformist, or anti-sistemic?
So in another email I see there is a project to assess the degree of resilience of disadvantaged communities. Sorry to say this, but at first sounds to me like the old readiness assessments about electronic government. Was your government ready to embrace the new way of managing government? Of course not, was a likely outcome. Why? Because you needed to be good in the first place. You needed you have good institutional capacity, you needed money, you needed good financial management. So you were not ready simpy because you were not one of those good ones. Sorry. You needed to radically change by comparison.
So it is about the resilient vs the non-resilient. It us about those who are prepared or can prepare and those who cannot. It is about a divide. Academics like it divide things, so we can claim we discover what can make you or your organisation jump from one camp (have nots) to the other.
The word resilience does not sound to me as offering much about changing in tune with who and I you are unless we say let us build a better place for everyone in the planet. But if we are going to build walls in order to feel more resilient, we are just contributing to our own demise. As if we could all survive on our own. As if we were not fragile. As if we were not human...
Being systemic makes me think we cannot just build a resilient organisation without a resilient ecosystem. If communities become fragile, it is also because their environment has become fragile. What are we going to do about it? We cannot just bury our heads under the sand, or build underground refugees or bunkers for our own people. Organisations will have to look at how to build resilience for the human systems that they are part of. And be critical to see how they contributed to make those systems fragile.
We can assess resilience, but that is only the beginning of a truly systemic effort to go over the crises we have experienced and will continue experiencing.
So next time you hear the word resilience, please think twice about who should really be talking about it.
You will need to think not only on your own household or organisation, but invite the neighbours too.
