Rebrand and Recipe for Resilience
How did that happen? One minute resilience is the panacea for all ills. An aspirational virtue featuring centrally in my and many others’ professional practice. Now I hear tales of it morphing into a shadowy, corporate act of manipulation, designed to load ever more work on to individuals. What’s going on?
This was the questions I found myself wrestling with at Sadler Heath in April 2025 in a session facilitated by the rather wonderful Rowan Gray. Rowan has built his own business, Made to Move, on (among other things) “focused interventions for building resilience as a tool for change”. It says much about his courage and hunger for learning that he was willing to put everything he knows about resilience – which is lots let me tell you - on the metaphorical table so that a bunch of willing participants could frankly pull the whole construct apart. The session was subtitled “awakening to the shadow of resilience”, and I found it both eye-opening and mind-bending.
Let’s get into the brand first. There were quite a lot of corporate voices in the room, who spoke disparagingly about the way ‘resilience’ is increasingly showing up at work. In the same way ‘sustainability’ has been adopted, assimilated and undermined by large organisations, now we find ‘resilience’ heading down the same path. The reductionist, profit-focused mindset has apparently made resilience an individual development goal, designed to drive up productivity. An increasing number of companies are championing resilience programmes, whose unstated aim seems to be to squeeze a little more out of their already overloaded workforce.
And so it seems the word ‘resilience’ is itself now a problem, and in need of a bit of a rethink. On the day, I got as far as ‘regeneration’ which clearly isn’t going to catch on but seems to be my go-to word for 2025.
The other aspect of resilience that Rowan had us focus on is as a tool for change. He made brilliant, embodied use of the Ralph Stacey model on creating a disturbance to help us see some potential that I’ve not really thought about before. As you’ll read if you click the link, I’ve invoked Stacey when exploring change but have never really made the connection to resilience that Rowan was shooting for.
We played and explored and I had something of a breakthrough by moving my focus from individuals to systemic, and from wellness enhancing to change catalyst. This enabled me to concoct a recipe for my hopefully-soon-to-be-renamed resilience practice. Proudly stealing and adapting Rowan’s own model I ended up with three basic ingredients:
Bouncing forward – this replaces the footballer Ian Dowie-credited ‘bouncebackability’ virtue, by suggesting that when we recover it should not be to simply return to the previous status quo
Thriving in turbulence – the idea that constant chaos has replaced unfreeze-change-freeze as the new normal for all systems and that thriving in it is a prerequisite
Learning and growth obsessed – a sort of childlike desire to play, experiment, absorb, adapt and develop
Looking at the recipe and my current personal performance, I managed to score myself a seven out of ten, which became a six when I discounted my innate cockiness. Rowan helped me go further by explaining the binary red (sympathetic, stress-based) and green (para-sympathetic rest and digest-based) systems that run me. In a nutshell I need to reduce my stressors and amplify my recovery areas if I want to improve on my six/seven. This led to two more ingredients for my recipe:
Inner work on my stressors – mindset management in other words, e.g. loss of control, upsetting others, feeling disconnected (it always ends up here for me)
Outer work on my recovery areas – manifesting the things the help me recover, e.g. helping others, movement/exercise, the sun (the big yellow thing, not the newspaper)
I’m not saying I’ve stumbled on a universal recipe here but I am pretty confident it works for me and hopefully something in my writing might appeal to your palate too. If it does, steal it with pride and contact me if you need any help. And I’m particularly keen to hear from you if you can think of a replacement word for resilience.