It was the fall of 1984 when I first experienced the swaying of the east upper-deck of Williams-Brice Stadium at the University of South Carolina. The Gamecocks were having their best football season ever, and the crowd responded with intense energy. The energy was so forceful that one of the two upper decks, which was full of students, would move. You didn’t just feel it; you could see it. Some said the movement was as much as one foot.
The first time it happened was in the fall of 1983, during a game against Southern Cal. Joe Morrison, the head football coach at the time, declared, “If it ain’t swayin’ we ain’t playin’!” His declaration quickly became a popular bumper sticker, and the phrase remains in use over thirty years later.
Engineers inspected the structure and reassured everyone about the movement, explaining that it was intended to move, thereby mitigating the shockwaves. The movement was architectural resilience. If it didn’t move, it would crumble.
Resilience theory examines how individuals and systems respond to, adapt to, and recover from adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Diving into all the research on resilience can lead to seemingly endless explorations. The areas of resilience study and preparedness are found throughout the fields of neurology, psychology, technology, ecology, and sociology.
I find the image created by the physics definition helpful, where resilience refers to an object's ability to absorb energy and return to its original shape after being deformed by an external force.
Every aspect of our lives has a resilience factor because life is full of turbulence. Our technology even requires “bounce” capacity. Consider your choice of mobile phone case and the extent of your phone’s resilience. Lack of bounce can cost you.
The ability to bounce back from difficulty or disaster relies on personal qualities and preparation, as well as factors such as resilience, adaptive capacity, stretch capacity, and flexibility. How would you rate your and your community’s bounce-back capacity?
This article is intended to prompt thought and encourage you to join or initiate conversations about personal and community resilience. Lives may depend on it. Unfortunately, thoughts about resilience often arise during situations that require our resilience. If we took notes at those times, it might guide and fuel our work. Hopefully, this article will provide the spark and fuel you need to get started.
Personal Resilience
When you endure a tremendous life-shaking or traumatic experience, how are you at adjusting? When you bounce back, how do you bounce back? Is the bounce-back a force that impacts those around you, like a ball bouncing off of you into the face of someone nearby?
Some people are more resilient than others due to their personality, while others develop resilience through training and personal development, and some may even fake it. Those who fake it eventually reveal that their personal resilience capacity isn’t genuine.
For all of us, there is a continuum of resilience needed based on the depth and extent of impact:
Need (hungry and no food) -> Crisis (loss of job) -> Disaster (home burned)
When affected by these life events, how do you handle the effects? Self-care is a skill we always need to cultivate, but it is particularly critical where added resilience is required.
In an article examining research on resilience, the researchers noted that “an individual who adapts well to stress in a workplace or in an academic setting may fail to adapt well in their personal life or in their relationships.” They noted that “resilience more likely exists on a continuum that may be present to differing degrees across multiple domains of life.”[i]
We must have a way of processing all that they are absorbing as human beings. Using the physics-based concept of resilience, if you are absorbing energy from external sources, even your physiology can be impacted, and you may not be aware of it until it manifests as pain and disease. The impacts of needs, crises, and disasters can have compounding effects on the whole person, affecting them physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
For instance, your neighbors are fighting in the driveway, a tornado hits your hometown, your child breaks a precious memento from your grandmother, or a horrible car accident happens in front of you. You feel it in your gut, right? How are you going to handle that very real impact upon you? That is a question of resilience.
It is challenging to bring resilience to your community without personally being resilient. Delivering what you don’t have seems impossible. But that’s the difference between seeking resilience based on responding with “things” and not considering the person delivering those things.
Community Resilience
Resilience as a community begins with the connection of resilient individuals. The nature of that bond affects resilience capacity.
Connection is the beginning. The problem is if we connect and nothing else comes from it. But, resilience necessitates options. Those options may be recognized in the moment. But being connected ahead of time is a significant part of the resilience equation. Here’s how it happens:
Connection -> Communication -> Coordination -> Collaboration
Have you ever watched a spacecraft connect to the International Space Station (ISS)? Up to eight spacecraft can dock at any time. To increase the resilience of the ISS, the connection must lead to open doors for the movement of resources. Similarly, we can have pockets of resilience within our communities, but what happens when we connect those pockets? Connectivity leads to multiplied resilience capacity.
Zolli and Healy, in their book Resilience, cite Sinan Aral, an information economist, who distinguished between weak ties and strong ties. He highlights the importance of both of these levels of connection to resilience: weak ties can afford information, while strong ties are “essential for the intense, collaborative work of creating or synthesizing.”[ii]
Getting prepared versus preparing to prepare. An abundance of meetings and conversations about being a stronger and more resilient community can fill our calendars. I recall a series of facilitated gatherings that I participated in years ago. Our work primarily focused on assessing the state of resilience in our region.
Although I don’t recall why the work ended, I remember being disappointed when it did. I have no idea what was produced from our conversations, even tangentially. It would be great to have those notes if they still exist. I’ll have to ask around.
This resilience work is highly contextual. Although every person, family, and community will have their own plans, there can be some duplication of structures and systems. We can learn from each other.
The quantitative nature of need, crisis, and disaster puts demands on the qualitative nature of our resilience. There is much complexity to the resiliency equation for a community. Consider the quantitative nature of need, crisis, and disaster. The more issues, the more people affected, the higher the quality of resilience required.
Amidst all the complexity, what if we simplified the process of helping? What if we did a better job of just coordinating people helping people? Decreasing recovery time comes through an investment in preparation. I am testing various approaches to cultivating resilience in my region, which I will share more broadly in the future as we experience the results. What are you doing to prepare?
Resilience through Shared Preparation and Shared Recovery
Those deemed responsible for being prepared are those who participate in exercises and do the work to ensure that the practice leads to improved systems and processes when a real crisis or disaster occurs. We expect first responders and government emergency management systems to do their job and be prepared.
If more of us shared in the preparation, we would be better off. Shared preparation for disaster response can take the form of regularly responding to community needs and crises in a coordinated manner. The more frequently we are mobilized together, the more easily we can be mobilized in the event of a disaster. That is resilience.
An established community-wide network using CharityTracker can empower this shared recovery at a very high level. If your community is not using CharityTracker, ask for a demo here and start building your network. If you are using CharityTracker, don’t forget the resilience it can bring when coordinating responses to the bigger events in your community.
Resilience doesn’t promise getting back to the original state. It may be a new reality. Think about your world prior to COVID-19 and what it is like now. The key to resilience is the ability to bounce back. What we bounce back to may not be exactly the same, but let’s be sure that hope and community always bring us back from disaster and despair.
Who do you need to contact today to join or begin a resilience conversation?
[i] Southwick, Steven M., George A. Bonanno, Ann S. Masten, Catherine Panter-Brick, and Rachel Yehuda. 2014. “Resilience Definitions, Theory, and Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 5 (1). doi:10.3402/ejpt.v5.25338.
[ii] Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. (New York: Free Press, 2012), 186-187.
Do you desire to strengthen your CharityTracker or OasisInsight network and achieve new levels of collaboration and impact? Reach out to Chuck today to schedule your conversation: chuck@simonsolutions.com.