A significant distinction in any organisation reaching peak levels of performance is that they have resilience. More specifically, adaptive resilience. Adaptive resilience is when an individual, team and organisation retain the capacity to be productive, resourceful, creative and true to their core purpose while dealing with disruptive forces and adapting with integrity in response to changing circumstances.
A cornerstone of being influential in life is your ability to harness and build your adaptive resilience. One of the ways to develop adaptive resilience is by cultivating the ability to engage openly with the unexpected and adversity. Joseph Campbell (one of my favourite authors) sums it up in this great line: “The warrior’s approach is to say ‘yes’ to life: say ‘yes’ to it all”.
When there are disruptive forces at play in your industry or business, during these high-velocity situations you can get lost in the intensity and resist what is happening. You fight reality, and it holds you trapped. By saying “yes” you are not resigning or being in submission to the problem or situation. What saying yes does, is it affords you the opportunity to regain a sense of balance and become open to possibilities. You are then able to learn from the experience and develop wisdom, and with awareness and agility begin to create the desired outcome or at the very least move in the direction where the desired result exists.
Another way that individuals, teams and organisations prevent themselves from developing adaptive resilience is that they get stuck habitual thinking. They go with their reasoning to where they have always gone, trying to use their current level of thinking to fix the problem that possibly their thinking created in the first place. Habitual modes of thought are not merely individual but can be cultural. These are ways of thinking that are systemically entrenched as a core aspect of the culture.
The trap of habitual thinking is that you look for the quick fix, or you round the wagons for protection and wait for the storm to blow over as many of the clichés go. You may emerge on the other side, but you have not grown or developed a new way. At best, you have deferred the problem, or worse, compounded the problem, and you will ultimately experience that today’s quick fix is tomorrow problem.
To be adaptively resilient is to continuously question conventional thinking, actively looking at things differently. Adaptive resilience requires much more than learning new techniques and skills or different systems of thinking. It requires a shift in your way of being, the way you see and engage with the world around you. When you stop making the problem the problem and assess your response to the problem, then you can generate the required and sustainable solution.
When you and your organisation enter into the realm of adaptive resilience, you not only become happier, robust, creative and build better relationships. Your company also moves from being reactive and being the proverbial deer caught in the headlights to responsive and entering the space of generative learning, to creating new possibilities and sustainable outcomes.
Adaptive resilience enables organisations, teams and individuals to move from surviving to thriving to flourishing and operate at their peak performance.
Click here to watch a short video on Adaptive Resilience.
The good news is you can learn how to be and develop adaptive resilience; it is not something is only available to a select few. Join us at our next SOAR Institute Quarterly Business Breakfast, where our topic for discussion is “Peak Performance in Business” and learn the five steps to creating adaptive resilience.
Date: Wednesday, 08 August 2018
Venue: The Quatermain Hotel, 60 West Road South, Morningside, Sandton
Time: 08.00 to 09.30 (registration 07.30)
If you would like to book click here.
If you know anyone who may be interested to attend, click here to forward the event details.
If you are unable to attend this event, click here so we will know not to follow up further about this upcoming event.
PS. All attendees of the breakfast will be entered into a luck draw for 3 Organisation Health check assessments, including a one hour interpretation session with one of our consultants, as well as 3 individual Advanced assessments and interpretation session with a consultant.
For more information on these assessments click here
