Resilence training - where it came from and why it went so badly wrong

My bullshit word for the last couple of years has been 'Resilience'. It is what David Graeber, in his brilliant book, Bullshit Jobs, called making shit up to make money from assumed misery. If you have to attend a hokey conference or conference talk on 'Resilience' you don't and will never have it... to be fair, if you make it through a Resilience training course that should suffice!

Workforce learning professionals are in a state of perpetual angst. They feel they are not listened to and don’t have a voice at the top table. This is true HR and L&D have never had any sustainable influence to board level. Hardly surprising when we deliver courses on things neither the business nor its employees ever asked for. I have never, ever heard any normal person say what they need is a ‘course’ on ‘resilience’. It is something supplied by L&D not demanded by organisations, a chimera to make us look caring and important. This has been a worrying trend in workplace learning the delivery of courses based on abstract nouns that no one ever asked for. We supply things we think are relevant, rather than look at what the business demands in terms of goals.

Having beaten into people that they have all sorts of mental deficits, through billions spent on DEI, ESG and wellbeing training courses and initiatives, thrashing employees like piñatas, telling them they are weak and have deficits that need cured by courses. To remedy this, apart from the endless groundhog debates on the future of L&D at conferences, we come up with abstract concepts around which conference sessions and courses have to be built. The current obsession is with ‘Resilience’. These are too often bouts of over-earnest classroom courses or weird e-learning. All of this despite the overwhelming evidence, over many years, that this does not work, it continues. A ‘roll of the eyes’ is the most common reaction when you ask people what they think of all this.

So, as HR has turned into defending the organisation against itself, they then had the temerity to demand that we all need to man and woman up – we need more resilience. It’s like slapping people repeatedly on the face then them telling them to ‘pull themselves together’ before carrying on with the slapping. If your organisation is so dysfunctional that you need to train people to deal with that dysfunction - that speaks volumes about your organisation. Training people to deal with dysfunction is not going to fix it.

Curious history of ‘Resilience’ training

Resilience has deep roots in psychiatry, especially Freud and his daughter Anna Freud, on how individuals cope with trauma and adversity, who I discussed in detail in a recent podcast and whose theories are literally flights of fancy. also Bowlby and Erikson (wrong on most counts) pushed this forward in the 50s and 60s. But it was in the 70s and 80s, that Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith did longitudinal studies on children in adverse conditions. Their work, especially the Kauai Longitudinal Study, highlighted the factors that contributed to resilience in at-risk and sick children.

In training, resilience emerged from the positive psychology movement in the late 1990s when Martin Seligman emphasised the importance of building strengths and well-being, rather than just treating mental illness. Also discussed in detail in this podcast. He backtracked somewhat and more recent evidence shows that the training and wellbeing programmes are not effective at all.

Antifragility 

Modern Resilience training is a mishmash of all of this but there is one book that people thought promoted resilience but was in fact an attack on resilience and resilience training. That book was Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. 

Taleb was a derivatives trader then hedge-fund manager and anyone who has actually read the book will know that he hates resilience training. “The fragile want tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.” This is a man who is fiercely critical of certain elites and experts, particularly those he believes are detached from real-world consequences and has resonated resonate with populist sentiments.

He defines resilience as a mistake in that it promotes the ability to resist shocks but stay the same. A resilient system can withstand stress without significant damage but does not necessarily improve from the experience. By contrast, antifragile systems thrive and grow stronger in the face of stress and adversity. Taleb advocates for antifragility over mere resilience because antifragile systems benefit from disorder and challenges.

Taleb argues that resilience training, focuses on helping individuals or systems return to their baseline state after a disruption, an approach that misses the opportunity to leverage stressors for growth and improvement. It creates a false sense of security encouraging individuals and organizations to believe they are adequately prepared for challenges when, in fact, they are only prepared to endure them, not to improve from them.

We need to deliberate expose people to manageable levels of stress and variability to stimulate to build stronger, more adaptable capabilities. People need to continually seek out challenges that push their boundaries and enhance their capabilities so they can survive disruptions but actively using them as catalysts for innovation, embracing and leveraging stressors and challenges to achieve growth and improvement. In practice he doesn’t like HR, L&D as they are part of the bureaucracy of institutions promoting rules and rigidity, fixed outlooks and fixed career paths. Individuals should rather seek out challenges, embrace uncertainty and new experiences that push their boundaries and expand their capabilities.

Conclusion

And so we end up with a hotchpotch of stuff wrapped up into a disjointed PowerPoint and call it Resilience training. We need to stop building empires around ‘big words’ and get back to training competences to solve the skills shortages that all employers report.