What is Resilience?

Resilience is the ability to adapt and thrive in a fast-changing and uncertain world. Resilience is essential for individuals, workplaces, organisations, sectors and societies to achieve a sustainable future.

Many aspects of our economy, society and workplaces would have been unimaginable only a couple of decades ago. Who, in the late 1980s, could have imagined the transformation of working lives brought about by personal computers, email and the internet? Who can imagine the types of competence, organisation or products which will be demanded by the world in which we’ll be working in ten years’ time?

Experts argue that the current recession was predictable, yet how many companies or their employees were prepared for the challenges it has brought?

Technological innovation, economic cycles and social change have one thing in common: they breed winners and losers. Resilient individuals and organisations can turn uncertainty, risk and turmoil into opportunity.

But individuals, their workplaces and wider society are highly interdependent. We explore those issues here.

Next: Why Resilience Matters