by John Brooker | Sep 9, 2014 | Overcome Challenges, Solution Focus
What are the dimensions of challenges and how might you begin to build resilience? “There are no rules and regulations so rigorous, no organisation so hierarchical, no bosses so abusive that they can prevent use of your energy, ability and ingenuity. They may make it more difficult but they can’t prevent it. The real power is yours, not theirs.” Dee Hock – founder of Visa Do you or your teams need to be more “resilient”? This is a popular term in organisations at present and a recent Open University alumni course on the topic of Motivation, Mindset and Resilience stimulated my thinking on it. A while ago, I wrote a practical article (find it here), which explained a Solution Focus way to facilitate teams through difficult times. It did not though, refer specifically to resilience, which is “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” However, some people on the course thought that “recover” should be “recover and move forward quickly from”. I wrote this article to encourage you to think about resilience and also to help me reflect on the course. I realise I could read a book on resilience, but I like to think topics through myself before turning to the experts. Your constructive feedback on my thinking would be most welcome. During the course, Barry Russell, from the Environment Agency, gave a talk on motivation and resilience, using the severe flooding in the UK as his context. He explained that Environment Agency staff had been so motivated to help, many had worked too many long and repeated shifts, to the point that there was a need...
