Our Department works with clients to build their capacities and enhance their stamina to “stay with the trouble” in the words of Donna Haraway. Resilience is not just about how you respond to unforeseen destabalization—often thought of like the rate of descension and ascension. You are not a yo-yo, and neither should your resilience be gauged by the speed of return. Resilience is about how we can do more difficult, complex solving rather than making the process of solving more comfortable or technical as a coping strategy.

What do you do when the problems aren’t just technical and complicated, but adaptive and complex? How do you prepare yourself to think and hold complexity? What happens as you recognize the problems out there are also in here? How far can you bend without breaking?

Often the punchline of all this resilience work is missed. The goal of resilience isn’t to stay afloat above complexity but rather to swim in its uncertain waters for longer. In their Adaptive Leadership research, Heifetz, Linsky, and Grashow identified that many teams and organizations reconstitute adaptive problems as technical ones because, well, certainty and piecemeal solutions often feel more reassuring than being in the complex, adaptive problems. They called this the Zone of Disequilibrium, which can often require the resilience to stay there for months or even years. Our Department helps resource you and your team to remain in the Zone so your solutions might actually come to solve some of your most pressing problems.