Independent Thinking^®

Andrew Zolli on Resilience

The management of complexity has become an essential feature of our times.

When everything is connected, and things bond together in ways that feel complicated and even subliminal, we see a challenge emerging to our collective resilience. How do we help ourselves, our families, and our organizations flourish amid this disruption?
 
Many of us are profiting from technology and, at the same time, finding ourselves challenged by the resulting political volatility and social upheaval. We are experiencing a very high number of stress symptoms. Now, some stress trains us for life; some adversity is good. But when we’ve had enough stress, it would be nice to be able to say, well, thanks very much. Because too much stress diminishes our capacities. Consider this: It takes a full 67 seconds to cognitively recover from every email you receive. We are even exposed to a lot of stress that is happening around us, not just to us. It still activates the same circuits in our brains.
 
Obvious defenses are genetic, such as a healthy body and brain. Another is a strong social network and a spirituality. And one of the greatest is a sense of narrative openness, that we are still resilient, still living our story.
 
As the length and breadth of a human life has expanded dramatically, we have invented an entirely new act in the human experience. We have started to see the core of this resilience in our third act, in our 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.
 
Editor’s note: Andrew Zolli is a futurist, an advisor to Facebook and other companies on the intersection of technology, society, and artificial intelligence, and the author of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. This is a brief extract from his presentation to Evercore clients in New York on March 8, 2017.