The Resilience Illusion: What we keep getting wrong

The really interesting thing about high-performing teams is that they tend to draw so much from the participants that sooner or later it leaves the individual to pick up the pieces. And I am talking about the pieces of their own eventual system malfunctioning. Polo players have a number of ponies for each game so that they can ride them at full capacity and then change them out before the pony gets too tired. In high performing teams however, there is no change of ponies, and the team members ARE the ponies. Now the organisations that are the most guilty of this will likely not be reading this article, so this is for the ones that believe there is a better way towards success that is more aligned with our human biology and therefore more sustainable.

The Trouble with Resilience

There is an underlying problem with how most organisations think about resilience, because they are not concerned or invested in building anyone's capacity, they are simply expecting it to be endless. They never ask what condition would be required and what recovery would need to look like for that capacity to hold up over time. Well, these are fundamental questions, and we need to start asking them.

The way we tend to think about resilience without rest and recovery is, in fact, not resilience at all. As resilience, by its very definition, is the ability to recover well and return to baseline functioning after a stressor. When we don't get this reset, our system stays in an elevated stress state and it increases the wear. This cumulative wear on the body and the brain that comes from the absence of recovery between them is described in Bruce McEwen's work as allostatic load.

So what happens over time? Usually, the accumulated cost does not come as a single dramatic collapse. It more often shows up under the radar, perhaps as decisions taking slightly longer to make, or finding it harder to manage our temper, and by the time it is visible it has usually been accumulating for a while. We need to get better at noticing.

The Collective Impact

This is not just a story about individual well-being, although it is certainly that too. The McKinsey Health Institute and World Economic Forum's Brain Capital work (which draws from the work of Michael Wilson and Bill Wilkerson) makes the same point at the level of an economy rather than a single career, arguing that the cognitive and emotional capacity of a workforce is itself an asset worth protecting and building, rather than something that simply exists in the background regardless of how it is treated.

This is a collective cost that needs a collective solution.

We used to look at an organisation who ignores allostatic load in its people as a culture that is tough-minded about performance. However, what we now know is what these organisations are in fact doing. They are approving to spend down an asset they have no ledger for, no way of measuring, and no way of noticing that the balance is off until it is already low. In other words, the organisation is saying it is acceptable to keep the tired pony in the game indefinitely, till it shows up lame or otherwise injured. Or perhaps runs away to join the circus…

Nobody would run a business by tracking revenue and ignoring cost, waiting to be surprised by a number at the end of the year. Well, some people might but probably not for long, and that is not the point. The point is that this is more or less how most organisations treat the people doing the work, celebrating the output and staying oblivious about what it took to produce it. However, the data suggest that we are much better off if we build the discipline of watching that balance before we reach a point of no return (and I mean that in both senses of the word). In other words, it means building a culture where the load itself is visible enough to be managed, rather than a culture where the only sign of trouble is someone who has already left. And people frequently leave without actually leaving. It can take even longer to spot but has immediate negative impact both on their performance, which is obvious, but also on the morale of the team as a whole, creating team wide complacency.

None of this means abandoning big ambition or pretending that great work does not ask a great deal of the people doing it. On the contrary, and I think that might be the most important point.

In high performance it becomes even more important. It means building the kind of organisation that can see the cost as clearly as it sees the output. That might look like leadership that respects recovery as a legitimate part of performance rather than a distraction or a hindrance. A culture where everyone thinks twice before emailing someone who is at home for the night or on holiday, and a culture where someone can say they need a break before they are already spent.

The organisations that will do this well are the ones willing to ask an uncomfortable question of themselves before they sign up for the sophisticated well-being app. And that question is not “how resilient are our people”, but rather “how honestly do we actually know what we are asking of them, and what it is costing them to keep saying yes”.

Thanks for reading! I would love to hear your thoughts 💜