Adaptable resilience

When the world of work is changing so quickly and unpredictably, two critical and related “capacities” stand out as essential for people and for the organisations they work in: Resilience and Adaptability.

To some, resilience and adaptability might seem like conflicting ideas. To others, they’re synonymous.

Defining Resilience & Adaptability

Resilience researchers, Sarkar and Fletcher (2016) provide a simple definition of mental resilience as “the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure”.

Adaptability, on the other hand, can be defined as “the capacity to adaptively regulate cognition, emotion, and behavior in response to new, changing, and/or challenging conditions and circumstances”. (Martin, 2017).

Although separate concepts, their definitions clearly show that they are related. For one, adaptability might be considered a “personal quality”, while pressure would certainly qualify as a “challenging condition”.

It is this intersection of the concepts that I’d like to explore further, as “adaptable resilience”, particularly as a function of resilience. 

Proactive and Reactive Resilience

The popular media tends to conceptualise resilience with the ability to “bounce back”. This ability to cope with and recover from stress or adversity is what is referred to as reactive (or rebound) resilience.

There is, of course, another form of resilience, which refers more to our ability to withstand pressure, which may or may not result in a stress response – or at least not a particularly unpleasant or debilitating one. This proactive (or robust) resilience involves being able to see pressure or adversity as a challenge – which is referred to in sport psychology as a “challenge mindset”.

In other words, it’s good to be able to deal with stress or adversity and come back from it, but it’s better to handle or even thrive under pressure in a way that negates the need to 

I’d like to go a little further, and separate proactive resilience into two different forms: Robust and Adaptable resilience. Before I do, I’m not suggesting that existing concepts of proactive resilience exclude adaptability. I’d just like to see it being called out more explicitly.

Robust vs Adaptable (Proactive) Resilience

First, if we think of robust resilience as the ability to approach potentially stressful situations as challenges, we can withstand and may even thrive on a certain amount of stress as we ‘lean in’ to it. This may because we are confident that have the coping skills and resources to deal with it, or we know what to expect. Our belief that the stress is temporary, and that we’ll ultimately be OK (safe), should ultimately help us to think clearly and manage ourselves through the pressure, for example putting more effort into preparation for an exam rather than wishing it wasn’t happening. 

Second, I’d like to propose adaptable resilience as the ability to anticipate or respond quickly to potential stressors, changing our mindset so that we can use the most appropriate skills and mental resources as the situation unfolds (so we may not experience stress at all). This requires a higher level of self-awareness and the ability not just to lean in, but to see and select from multiple ways through the challenge, flexing as the demands change. We might first see the exam as a challenge and up our preparation, but where a robust approach might focus on mastering the challenge, an adaptable approach might recognise when to take time out to recharge, to have fun, to socialise with friends, and so on. (This is a simple, task-based, example, but at work there are more social and organisational sources of stress that might need greater flexibility).

The two are not unrelated. The definition of robust resilience that I’ve proposed does mean being able to adopt a certain mindset to deal with pressure. However, I see adaptable resilience as something more dynamic still, adopting different mindsets as the demands of the situation change.

Is adaptable resilience ‘better’ resilience?

Although it might be implied that becoming adaptable is more desirable and useful than coping with or recovering from stress, I suggest that all three have an important role to play in life. It’s unrealistic to think that we’re never going to struggle with stress, and therefore reactive forms of resilience are no less valuable to us. If we can rely on different forms of resilience, then we’re ultimately more resilience.

Embracing adaptable resilience

Embracing adaptable resilience at an individual human level means accepting that we are not bound by our personalities, and recognising that we are dynamic, changeable and able to access a range of motivational and emotional states.

At an organisational level it means moving away from the idea that culture is totally pervasive and static, recognising that that organisations are also dynamic organisms and handling a new or unpredictable challenge means helping people to find common perspectives – to be adaptable together.

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The idea of Adaptable Resilience is rooted in the propositions and concepts that form Reversal Theory and the Apter Toolkit, which focus on motivation and emotion as dynamic elements of human personality and experience.

Martin (2017) - Adaptability-A-key-capacity-whose-time-has-come

Sarkar & Fletcher (2016) - Developing resilience in elite sport: the role of the environment