Moving from Individual Survival to Collective Resilience

People come and go, but a resilient team retains its power in the face of change.

- Grace Flannery, ORSC Faculty

We all know what resilience is - it’s the ability to bounce back and recover quickly from difficult situations. And we know how that’s supposed to look like.

We’ve all been able to recover from difficult situations at some point in our lives. That bicycle fall as a child. Past separation from romantic partners. Moving beyond painful comments at school, work or at home. More often than not, we know how to bounce back as individuals.

But what does it mean to bounce back as a system?

Systems resilience isn’t dissimilar to individual resilience. Systems are resilient when they continue to carry out their function in the face of adversity; a resilient system does not break down when disruptions unfold. COVID-19 has been a huge stressor to most local, national and global systems.

And we’re learning a g