Resiliency: Increasing Capacity Through Adversities and Challenges

 In a 1992 essay in the Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker wrote that “Every few hundred years thoughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred.”  He went on to say “In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself – its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.”  What he was referring to is the shift to a knowledge society, but it is very applicable to the shifts and challenges that the education profession has overcome during Covid.  In a nutshell, that human beings and society are resilient in the face of adversity. 

 

Resilience is the human capacity to face, overcome, and ultimately be strengthened by life’s adversities and challenges.  This is not something that people either have or do not -  resilience is learnable and teachable and as we learn we increase the range of strategies available to us when things get difficult.  This is one of the lessons we’ve learned through Covid challenges in the past year.  The goal should be to be better, as an organization, at the end of Covid than we were at the beginning.  Schools should be learning organizations where every moment is a teachable moment and everyone in the organization is continually learning and improving.  Six things every organization can do to adapt and face new challenges head on are:

1.       Figure out what information is needed.

2.       Actively prune what is past its prime. 

3.       Embrace employee autonomy.

4.       Build true learning organizations. 

5.       Provide a much stronger sense of purpose.

6.       Be more mindful of those left behind.

As we face larger number of quarantines in one grade level, the question we must address is how to best work on the most advantageous solution and how to prevent it from happening again.  Everyone must get past the “blame game”, accept responsibility and ownership of the solution, and move forward on the solution together.  In Drucker’s 1992 article he said, “Ours is “the first society in which ‘honest work’ does not mean a callused hand,” Drucker noted. “This is far more than a social change. It is a change in the human condition. We’ve been headed down this path for more than half a century.”  Technology and outside-the-box thinking are critical to adapting to change to be serve our students during challenging times.  Change is inevitable and a guarantee in all parts of life.  Resiliency is key to adapting to change and overcoming obstacles and adversity.