The decisive interaction for your organisation's sense of purpose.

Resilience and purpose are now established and frequently used terms in the organisational context and have become indispensable in the context of organisational analysis and design.

At Coaching Change, we recognise the important interdependence between these two concepts and incorporate them into our solutions. This three-part series of articles is intended to shed light on the connection from a scientific perspective and provide you with a transparent overview of the debate on creating meaning in the working environment.

The basics of resilience

Since the 1990s, the terms resilience and vulnerability have increasingly been used outside their original context - to describe and analyse natural ecosystems¹. From a systemic perspective, resilience is the ability to successfully adapt to changes or disturbances that threaten the function, survival or development of the system². On this basis, resilience can also be derived at an individual level if the resources required for adaptation can be identified². However, the ability to be resilient cannot be viewed as an isolated characteristic; the idea of resilience as a supertrait has now been discarded. Instead, it is a variety of personal characteristics that favour resilience².

Resilience research generally focuses on potentially traumatised target groups such as war survivors, immigrant groups, adopted children, disaster victims, soldiers or refugees³. In addition, dedicated programmes for children are now being used at an international level to help them cope with trauma as a result of war, disasters or flight². Resilience training programmes are now also being used to strengthen the psychological resilience of soldiers in the German armed forces⁴. As early as the 1970s, Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith presented the first results of a long-term study, the well-known Kauai Longitudinal Study⁵, which significantly shaped the concept of resilience. On the island of Kauai, 698 children - 200 of them from families with low socio-economic status - were followed from birth in 1955. One third of the children from the vulnerable families developed into healthy and productive adults despite unfavourable starting conditions⁶. These children shared a number of common characteristics, which are discussed below.

Organisational and digital resilience

Resilience has only been used as a term for the resilience of organisations since the 1990s, albeit with a strong focus on companies⁷. The discussion was largely characterised by Hollnagel and his concept of resilience engineering⁸. According to this concept, the following four factors are decisive for the resilience of an organisation⁹:

• Ability to respond: describes the ability to react to regular or irregular changes, disruptions or opportunities with prepared courses of action or by adapting functions.
• Ability to monitor: describes the ability to search for or monitor factors that can positively or negatively influence the performance of the system. Both the performance of the system and its environment are monitored.
• Ability to learn: describes the ability to understand events and derive the correct findings from previous experience.
• Ability to anticipate: describes the ability to anticipate future developments, including new requirements, framework conditions or opportunities.

These four factors are interdependent and their interaction influences the performance of an organisation⁷. The Resilience Analysis Grid (RAG) developed from this is intended to provide an inventory of the organisation: "provide a well-defined characterisation (or profile) of a system that can be used to manage the system and specifically to develop its potential for resilient performance"¹⁰. However, the systemic implementation quality of the factors described depends on the people within an organisation. In this respect, their personal resilience plays a key role in shaping organisational resilience.

Digital resilience as part of organisational resilience is created via the following fields of action and the associated skills¹¹:

• Connectivity management (experience with permanent networking),
• Convergence management (expertise in the use of data),
• Privacy management (experience in dealing with data protection),
• content sovereignty (ability to assess information quality).

Psychological resilience

The foundations for psychological resilience are laid in childhood, but can also be developed in adulthood. The long-term study by Kauai⁶ and other studies have identified a number of characteristics that resilient children exhibit during their development¹²:

• Positive attachment to caregivers,
• Positive relationships with caring and competent adults,
• Good cognitive skills,
• Ability to self-regulate,
• Positive self-image, self-efficacy,
• Self-confidence, hope and ability to find meaning in life,
• Friendships or romantic relationships with supportive and helpful people.

In addition, there are external factors such as the socio-cultural milieu, which provides further support mechanisms in the form of social organisations, a supportive and relationship-oriented cultural environment with positive standards and rituals and other stable social communities¹². In the development of psychological resilience, the seven pillars of resilience¹³ are frequently mentioned in German-speaking countries, some of which were published in 2004 and largely overlap with Reivich and Shatte's seven resilience factors¹⁴. The seven pillars of resilience consist of¹³:

• Optimism (belief that the current state will not last),
• Acceptance (recognising the current state),
• Solution-orientation (developing solutions for the current situation),
• Abandoning the role of victim (recognising one's own ability to act),
• Taking responsibility (accepting responsibility for one's own actions),
• Network orientation (utilising a stable social environment),
• planning for the future (preparing for future developments by realistically assessing one's own competences).

Reivich and Shatte will not be discussed in more detail here, as in Germany the seven pillars of resilience are primarily known and applied in the corporate environment, i.e. in occupational health management¹⁵.

The perceived meaningfulness of one's own actions makes a decisive contribution to strengthening psychological resilience. This series of articles is primarily concerned with creating meaning in the working environment, i.e. a purpose-oriented meaning, which is often referred to as purpose in the organisational context. The perception of purpose in the working environment is closely linked to the perception of a fundamental meaningfulness of one's own life. The following parts of the article series will discuss the theoretical foundations and the function of purpose as an important prerequisite for resilience.