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“The victorious futurist is not a prophet. He or she does not defeat the future but predicts the present” (Bruce Sterling). Long before the COVID-19 outbreak, this quotation, cited in Matthias Horx’s “Handbuch für Zukunftsagenten” (Handbook for Agents of the Future; Zukunftsinstitut, 2016), pinpointed the challenge we now face. In the handbook, Horx – well known for his bold theorems, his courageous but well-reasoned perspectives on what we call “the future” – predicts that the concept of sustainability will be supplanted by resilience.
Horx is an all-round prognosticator who takes a very different stance from futurologists; his theorem was already groundbreaking long before the pandemic. Because this is precisely the scenario the world is currently experiencing. Before the virus became the dominant global issue, ecological issues dominated the news, media networks and debates. “Fridays for future” became a worldwide mass movement with “sustainability” as its watchword. And yet sustainability stood for a kind of illusory harmony, basically describing a striving for equilibrium – the need to find a balance with “Nature” and repair the current imbalance.
Since early 2020, a submicroscopically tiny structure has been showing us how complex (hence often also fragile) systems generally – and in this case, unpredictably – tend to self-regulate. At present, nobody can guess what the long-term impact of lockdown will be on business or the economy, or what social challenges we still have to face. We’ll simply have to deal with them. Crises and challenging times are nothing new. But if you examine the things that have, ultimately, always been the keys to overcoming crises, you quickly realise that they’ve never been about actions as such, but about mental attitude, about mindset. Mindset is the intrinsic substructure that governs our behaviour – especially in challenging, threatening situations. And resilience is the term that precisely describes this mindset.
Resilient people and systems have one thing in common: the conviction that complexity – hence also fragility – always goes hand in hand with variance and tolerance. They’re able to tackle and clearly describe crises, recognise threats, and – thanks to their intrinsic motivation and ability to achieve the right mindset – take actions that result in solutions. This is explicitly demonstrated by the “Atlas of Economic Complexity” (Hausmann, Hidalgo et al., 2014), which shows that economies characterised by a wide variety of networked activities are the most flexible when reacting to or coping with crises, ultimately succeeding in overcoming them. The same applies to every individual. Resilient people have a broader range of options for taking action, termed “resilience competencies” in the resilience model. For over 50 years, resilience researchers have been exploring what separates individuals who cope better with challenging or existence-threatening life situations from those who tend to go to pieces in the same situations. What are their special attributes – how and why do they act differently, emerging from such crises stronger than before? In simple terms, resilience is made up – to varying degrees – of eight fundamental areas of competence:
The common factor in all these competencies is that people can be trained to acquire them, through systematic, continuing education. Building a resilient mindset – for the long term, so that it is sustainable and dependable – is the true challenge we should all be confronting. Right NOW at the very latest.
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