“Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back” by Andrew Zolli and Anne Marie Healey is aa study of the idea of resilience from many different areas of knowledge or fields. The book uses lots of real-life stories to show how resilience works in different situations – like in individuals, nature, and even the economy. By reading this book, you’ll learn a lot about resilience and get some great ideas on how you can make yourself, and the people and places around you, more resilient.
If you find this book summary helpful we encourage you to buy Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back.
Key concepts covered in the book include:
- Systems Thinking
- Adaptation to Change
- Learning from Failure
- Diversity and Redundancy
- Self-Regulation
Let’s explore these concepts in more detail:
Systems Thinking
In “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back”, Zolli and Healey talk about the idea of “systems thinking”. This is about understanding how different things connect and affect each other. It’s not just about looking at a problem and its direct result, but seeing the whole picture and how things change over time. They suggest that thinking this way can make us more resilient, because we’re prepared for a variety of linked challenges.
When we use “systems thinking”, we see problems as part of a bigger system. We don’t just focus on small parts or results, but instead look at how everything interacts together.
The idea behind this is that we can better understand parts of a system when we see how they relate to each other, rather than just looking at them on their own. It’s like trying to understand both the forest and the individual trees at the same time. This can help us avoid unexpected results, see how changes might affect different areas, and understand how small actions can lead to big changes over time.
For example, in a company, instead of looking at low employee morale, unhappy customers, and falling profits as separate issues, systems thinking would see how these problems might be linked and affect each other. Maybe low employee morale led to bad customer service, which made customers unhappy and led to lower profits.
Systems thinking and resilience
In terms of building resilience, systems thinking can help people, communities, and organizations predict how changes might affect different areas. This allows for quicker and better reactions. It also helps us to see challenges as part of a bigger picture, rather than isolated incidents.
For example, if someone is dealing with a personal crisis, a systems thinker might consider how different aspects of their life – like physical health, mental wellbeing, social support, and spiritual beliefs – are linked. They might then come up with a plan that covers all these areas, instead of just focusing on one.
By encouraging us to look at connections and relationships, systems thinking can help us come up with better and longer-lasting solutions. This can make us more resilient when facing complicated and changing challenges. It’s an important skill for navigating our interconnected world.
Adjusting to Changes
Zolli and Healey talk a lot about the need to be able to adjust when things change. They believe that our ability to deal with different situations – whether they’re personal, social, or environmental – plays a big role in our ability to recover from tough times. The examples they give in “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back” highlight the need to be flexible and open to new ways of thinking and doing things.
Being able to adjust to change means we need to be flexible, open-minded, and able to change our actions, thoughts, and viewpoints when needed. It’s about understanding that change is a normal part of life and that our ability to deal with and thrive in change helps us be more resilient.
On a personal level, adjusting to change might mean changing how we act or think in response to a change in our life – for example, learning new skills after losing a job or finding new ways to cope after losing someone close to us.
On a bigger scale, like for an organization or a community, adjusting to change might mean changing strategies or ways of doing things because of changes in the world around us, like changes in the market or changes in society. For example, lots of businesses had to quickly adjust how they did things because of the COVID-19 pandemic, like switching to remote work or changing their services to match what customers needed.
There are a few important parts to adjusting to change:
Awareness
The first step is realizing when things are changing. This means noticing changes in the world around us and also changes in our own feelings, thoughts, and reactions.
Flexibility
Being able to change our actions, plans, or ways of thinking in response to change is a big part of being able to adjust. This could mean trying new things, letting go of old ways that aren’t helping us anymore, and being open to different viewpoints.
Learning
Often, adjusting to change means learning – from our experiences, from other people, and from the world around us. This might mean learning new skills, getting new knowledge, or thinking in new ways.
Resilience
Being able to adjust to change is a big part of being resilient. When we can effectively adjust to change, we can better handle problems and recover from tough times.
Adjusting to change doesn’t just mean accepting whatever happens. It involves actively working with the change, finding ways to learn, grow, and thrive even when things are changing. This is a very important skill in a world that’s always changing and evolving.
Learning from Failure:
In “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back”, Zolli and Healey say that failure, although often seen as a bad thing, is actually a very important part of being resilient. They believe that failure gives us great chances to learn and can push us to come up with new ideas and get better. They encourage us to think of failure not as a dead-end, but as a stepping stone that leads to success and resilience.
Seeing failure as a chance to learn changes how we think about it. Instead of seeing it as a terrible end, we can view it as a great source of knowledge and a stepping stone towards success. This change in how we think allows us to learn from our mistakes and use what we’ve learned in the future to avoid making the same mistakes again.
Learning from failure includes:
Having a Growth Mindset
This idea, made popular by psychologist Carol Dweck, says that our abilities and intelligence can get better with hard work and dedication. With a growth mindset, failures aren’t seen as a sign that we’re not smart or not able, but as a chance for us to grow and improve what we’re already capable of.
Thinking about and Analysing
After a failure, it’s important to take time to think about what went wrong and why. This might mean looking closely at the situation to see any mistakes we made, any wrong judgments, or things we overlooked, and thinking about what we could do differently next time.
Using Feedback
Learning from failure also involves asking for and using feedback. Other people may have helpful ideas and viewpoints that can help us understand our failures and learn from them.
Building Resilience
At the end of the day, learning from failure is a way of building resilience. It teaches us how to recover from difficulties, encourages us to keep trying, and helps us to build a deeper level of resilience that prepares us for future challenges.
Remember, every successful person or organization has had failures. What makes them different is how they see and react to these failures. By seeing them as chances to learn, they’re able to use these experiences to grow, get better, and build resilience. In this way, failure can indeed be the first step towards success.
Diversity and Redundancy:
In “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back”, the writers talk about how important it is to have diversity and redundancy when trying to create strong systems. Diversity means having a variety of views and ways of doing things, which can help a system deal with many different types of challenges. Redundancy, which is having extra parts or backups, means that if one part of the system stops working, there are others that can step in, allowing the system to keep running.
In this case, diversity means having a lot of different parts in a system, whether that system is a natural environment, a business, or a community. This can include a mix of skills, viewpoints, experiences, and strategies.
Why is diversity helpful?
New Ideas: A system that has a lot of diversity will have many different ideas, which can lead to creative solutions to problems.
Ability to Change: A diverse system is better at dealing with changes because it has many different resources to use.
Strength: A system with lots of different parts is less likely to completely fail if one part stops working. Other parts can step in to take over.
On the other hand, redundancy means having extra, backup parts in a system, all capable of doing the same job. Even though this might seem wasteful at first, it is really important for resilience. Some benefits of redundancy include:
Dependability: Redundancy makes a system more dependable. If one part stops working, others can step in to keep the system running.
Ability to Handle More: Redundant systems can deal with increased work or stress more easily because they have extra capacity built in.
Safety: In risky situations, redundancy can provide a safety net, reducing the chance of the entire system failing.
To give an example of these ideas, think about a company dealing with a big change in their industry. If the company has a diverse team with different skills and viewpoints, they’re more likely to come up with creative ways to handle the change. If the company also has redundancy, such as multiple people who can do important jobs or backup systems for critical tasks, they’re better prepared to deal with possible disruptions or increased work.
In conclusion, diversity and redundancy are important parts of resilient systems. They increase a system’s ability to handle problems, adjust to change, and keep working effectively, even when things get tough or things go wrong.
Controlling Yourself – Self-regulation:
Lastly, in “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back”, Zolli and Healey talk about the idea of self-regulation – this is when systems can keep stable by adjusting and controlling themselves. When talking about people, this means our ability to control our emotions, actions, and use of resources in a good way when things change.
Self-regulation means that a person, organization, or system can keep balanced by adjusting and controlling what they do, how they feel, and what they think. It’s about being able to use our resources well, control our urges, handle our emotions, and stay focused and calm when faced with challenges.
There are a few important parts to self-regulation:
Controlling Emotions
This means dealing with emotions in a healthy and helpful way. For example, if you’re really stressed, controlling your emotions could mean using things like mindfulness, deep breathing, or changing how you think about the situation to manage your stress.
Controlling Actions
This means doing things that match with what you believe, what you want to achieve, and what is expected in society. For instance, it might mean stopping yourself from getting angry and instead expressing your feelings in a calm and helpful way.
Controlling Thoughts
This means controlling and managing how you think. It could mean shifting your focus from negative thoughts to positive ones, or using problem-solving skills to deal with a difficult situation.
Managing Resources
This means using your resources, like time, energy, and attention, in a balanced and effective way. For example, it could mean setting priorities, making sure there’s a balance between work and rest, or using your resources in a way that helps you reach your goals and keeps you well.
In the context of being resilient, self-regulation is very important. When we face challenges or hard times, our ability to control our emotions, actions, thoughts, and resources can greatly affect how well we handle the situation and how quickly we recover.
For example, if we’re dealing with a personal crisis, being able to manage our emotions can help us stay calm, stop us from making rash decisions because we’re upset, and let us deal with the situation in a thoughtful and helpful way.
In the same way, for an organization, being able to manage resources well can help it deal with a crisis, adjust to changes, and keep functioning well.
To sum up, self-regulation is a key part of being resilient. By improving our skills in self-regulation, we can improve our ability to deal with life’s challenges, recover from hard times, and thrive when things change.
“Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back” provides an interesting and detailed look at resilience. It helps readers understand that resilience isn’t just a personal trait, but is also a quality of systems, communities, and societies, providing a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of this important idea.
Don’t forget to check out our own book “Unbroken: Navigating Life’s Highs and Lows with Resilience and Grit”