Community resilience is not a wellness app
Like many of my talks recently, this one started on twitter. And a couple months ago, I traveled to Boston to give this talk at DevReach 2022. Two months later, I am finally writing it out as a blog post to share! Thanks so much to the organizers at DevReach for inviting me to speak, and to all my friends and coworkers who let me rant about resilience for several months while I was researching for this.
Throughout most of 2020, I was working on a consulting team that was building a data visualization application for a large non-profit. Our team was structured in a way where we had a middle man between us and the client, meaning that there was a separate design agency who had contracted with the client to design the application, and was hiring my team of developers to actually build it.
In the beginning of the year, we had a lot of ambitious goals for what we would deliver and on what timeline we would deliver it. Things were going fairly smoothly, or so we thought. But then one thing happened after another. First, we had some turnover in team leadership.
Then we all got hit by a global pandemic, and everything about work changed. We went from being a team that traveled to different offices and worked together multiple days a week to working remotely, juggling home life and childcare, and spending a lot of our brain space trying not to get COVID. I think we all lived some version of this story.
So what does this story have to do with resilience? Well, we all kept showing up and working overtime and pushing full speed ahead and covering up our failures, and eventually we delivered a successful product and made a lot of money. We just tried really hard to overcome all these difficulties, and eventually we succeeded.
Yeah, no… just kidding. That didn’t happen.
Eventually the team disbanded, and to my knowledge the product we spent over a year working on never shipped. No matter how much we tried, we simply weren’t able to push through all these challenges and be successful.
I don’t think I was the only one who had this experience! Resilience was a hot topic in 2020. If you look at Google trends data for worldwide searches for “Resilience”, there was a 71% increase in searches for resilience between the weeks of March 8th and March 29th, 2020.
I’m not a mind reader, but I suspect this search data is due at least in part to company leaders who were predicting massive amounts of burnout and attrition and wondering how they can help teams to be more resilient. They were asking questions like “how do we recover from a global pandemic, improve retention, raise morale, deliver everything on the roadmap, and keep all the shareholder reports pointing up and and to the right?”
In fact, I did a bit of Google searching on my own to see what kinds of solutions are being marketed to companies that are struggling with retention and burnout. And do you know what I found? A lot of wellness apps and training programs to help employees deal with stress. But the more I have come to understand about resilience, the more I have come to recognize that another wellness app isn’t the solution.
As you might already know, I’m an engineering manager. I’m not a sociologist or a researcher myself, but there are so many things I wish I had known about resilience at work while I was dealing with really hard stuff. If you are in this place right now, I hope that some of the research around resilience in individuals and communities can help us build stronger and more supportive teams, and be more forgiving of our failures.
What is resilience?
According to the research, what is resilience? Multiple definitions of resilience have emerged in studies of child development. Psychologist Emmy Werner proposed three definitions of resilience in her 1995 study of child development.1
Good developmental outcomes despite high-risk status
Recovery from trauma
Sustained competence under stress
In the past several years these definitions have been summarized as positive adaptation despite adversity. 2
What is resilience at work?
This variety of definitions highlights what I believe to be a misconception about resilience, especially in the workplace. Often when we talk about resilience at work, we are talking about this one.
Sustained competence under stress
Essentially this means that when you encounter hardship, you can demonstrate resilience by pushing through and continuing to work effectively under stress. This is the trait we might also call grit. According to the research, grit is a part of resilience, but it is not the whole picture.
Lessons from community resilience
There are some important lessons we can learn from studies of community resilience. The most commonly-accepted definition of community resilience is “a measure of the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations.”3
Studies on community resilience often focus on groups who have been through large-scale trauma, like indigenous tribes or persecuted ethnic minorities. While I a little nervous about drawing direct parallels between tech teams and groups who have been through trauma, there are some learnings here that apply across the board.
“Resilience is a process, not a trait.”
One of the biggest discoveries to come out of my research on community resilience is the concept of resilience as a process, not an individual character trait. Dr. Michael Rutter made that point in his 1990 special report on psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms.4
In short, communities can be resilient because of the structure around them, and not just because of the individuals in them.
Protective factors
In this report, the observations were made that two people can encounter the same risk factors, and respond differently. Likewise, the same person can encounter the same risk factors and respond differently. Why is this?
While there are skills that individuals can use to be more resilient, groups can employ protective factors in order to reduce harmful effects of difficult circumstances. A protective factor is work done in advance to reduce harm in case something bad happens. For example, the airplane I was on last month provided a safety plan, oxygen masks, and floatation devices in case of emergency. These are examples of protective factors that can insulate people from harm. (If the airline just asked every passenger to learn to swim in case of a water landing, I think we would have something to say about that!)
Dr. Rutter cites three protective factors in his study. Resilient groups tend to be focused on:
Building a positive self-image among group members
Putting supports in place to reduce the effects of bad situations
Breaking a bad cycle to explore new opportunities
Let’s break down each of these points a little more.
Building a positive self-image among group members
In a workplace context, companies can work to provide feedback and recognition for members of the team. People also feel good about the work they are doing if they are doing things that are meaningful, and where they are able to measure their progress over time. It doesn’t feel good to be spinning your wheels and not accomplishing anything.
I’m going to choose not to elaborate too much here, because I have better things to say about the other two, and this one is fairly self-explanatory.
Putting supports in place to reduce the effects of bad situations
This one is fairly broad, but there is an interesting study I would like to talk about here.
It turns out that we can learn a lot about resilient workplaces from ants. Deborah Gordon is a biology professor who has spent most of her career studying ant behavior, and she has noticed that ant colonies are able to quickly adapt to changes in circumstance. Ants have many different jobs, and at any given time there are ants who are builder ants, forager ants, or ant soldiers protecting the nest.
In her TED talk, Dr. Gordon notes that if you look inside an ant hill (and know what you are looking for), you will also find a lot of ants sitting around and doing nothing. This “surplus workforce” can spring into action when they need to without sacrificing other work. I don’t know what the work/life balance is like for an ant, but given this strategy I would presume they have a lot of downtime.
Anyway, getting back to humans. While I am not advocating for companies literally hiring people to do nothing, this is why “take time off if you need it” so frequently doesn’t work.
When we tell people to take time off but don’t actually provide any meaningful reinforcement to cover for them while they are out, we are asking people to take on more work, not less. If I have to do all my regular duties, prepare a detailed plan for how the work should be done while I am out, then still come back to a huge backlog of messages, meetings to catch up on, and work that didn’t get done while I was out, there’s a good chance I’m going to feel more stress when I return than I did before I left. The way that ants prepare for changes in circumstance is to have a workforce that is not stretched so thin that one person leaving for the day throws off the entire operation.
This doesn’t just apply to people, either. If we are committing to deadlines so tight that one person leaving for a few days will make it impossible to meet the deadline, we are doing it wrong!
Breaking a bad cycle to explore new opportunities
Thirdly, we can respond to changes in circumstance by exploring new opportunities. Think about a time when something didn’t go the way you expected it to. Where did you end up? Did you end up in the place you originally wanted to?
Maybe you did end up in the place you wanted to go. Perhaps you twisted your ankle but still finished the marathon.
But maybe you changed course and ended up somewhere completely unexpected. Resilient teams don’t just stubbornly push through every difficulty, but they know when to pivot and change course. Like I said earlier, I am not a psychologist or a research professor or a business executive. I am a software engineer with a degree in Music Education. I spent five years trying to be a music teacher in Chicago before giving up and trying something completely different. If there is one thing I know about from experience, it about not ending up in the place you thought you were going.
It isn’t admirable to never give up or compromise. There have been so many times in my career when I wished I had the courage (or the authority) to say this. More often than not, pushing through endless adversity and making a bunch of compromises in order to deliver some feature on time ends with a team burning out, a product that doesn’t work, and a few jaded engineers or designers who saw the train wreck coming from a mile away.
So, what do we do instead?
I could (and probably will) write an entire second post about why it is so hard to stop and re-evaluate when things go wrong, and what kinds of things get in the way. Yes, capitalism is one of them!
What I can tell you right now is that we need more honesty and psychological safety on our teams to deal with situations where we just can’t push through for a few more days and make it to the other side.
If we’re really being honest, it might turn out that no, we can’t improve morale and deliver the product on time. Maybe we’re spending time and money chasing technology that’s just not technically possible today. Maybe the thing we wanted to build was doable with the team we had in 2019, but since then a lot of technical experts have left and we need to scale back our features. No matter what the situation is, the truth might be that the possibility of getting everything you wanted is already gone, and no amount of wishing and hoping and working just a little bit harder will bring it back.
I believe with every fiber of my being that there are ways to move forward after a pandemic, a great resignation, and its challenging economic aftermath.
It’s not simple, though, and I believe it has more to do with the team than the individual.
TL;DR
Resilience has more to do with the team than the individual. In order to build more resilient teams, we need to have:
Recognition and meaningful work
Capacity and realistic deadlines
Psychological safety
Honesty
Willingness to change
If you are in a leadership role, I hope this helps you to build more resilient teams without relying on wellness apps or other individualistic solutions.
If you are not in charge, I hope you are working on a team that already recognizes some of these things. If you are not, well, I wish I could tell you it will magically get better some day, but it might not. I hope that at the very least, you are able to arm yourself some of this knowledge of community resilience and look for these qualities in future teams and companies.
Maybe you’re like me and you’re somewhere in the middle. We might be dealing with genuinely hard circumstances, and we might not always succeed at delivering the right product and protecting people. But I hope that we have the faith to keep going anyway.
Werner, E. E. (1995). Resilience in development. Current directions in psychological science, 4(3), 81-84.
Luthar, S. S., Burack, J. A., Cicchetti, D., & Weisz, J. R. (1997). Developmental psychopathology. Cambridge, UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_resilience
Rutter, M. (1987). Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms. American journal of orthopsychiatry, 57(3), 316-331.
This is really brilliant, with wide applications. It made me think of many conversations I’ve had — and continue to have — about people planning their families. At some point you have to weigh whether the pursuit of a certain configuration of family, particularly where fertility or loss is concerned, is going to negatively impact your long-term resilience — your ability to respond to the needs of the family you already have.
In particular it made me think of this interview:
https://ryanroseweaver.substack.com/p/exit-interviews-jess-van-wyen-reproductive
And of this bit by Jess Van Wyen:
“When you imagine a certain future and that vision is your motivation, any other possibilities feel like failure, loss, consolations. But then, by choice or circumstance the future has to be different. It’s empowering to discover new possibilities and opportunities that also lead to happiness. Different, but not less.”