The Humpty Dumpty Problem

Why no amount of personal resilience can put a broken system back together

Over the last 15 years, there has been an epic amount of rhetoric about ‘resilience’. From the word’s origins in systems science, specifically ecology and engineering, it has been reframed and repurposed many times. The burgeoning wellbeing industry is notable in this regard. In the context of workplace burnout, resilience is bandied about as the primary solution. Similarly, it has entered the nomenclature of mental health, and health generally. Resilience is the default strategy for everything from bullying to anxiety, and from depression to postoperative care.

But there is more to it. This helpful and dynamic concept has led us astray, deeper into the very trauma many hoped it would relieve.

In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb disturbance and reorganise while still retaining its essential structure and functionality, rather than collapsing or flipping (bifurcating) into a different state. Once the capacity for resilience is breached, a new ecosystem emerges, one that is completely different to the original.

If you happen to be one of the organisms living in the ecosystem, several things can happen. You can adapt to the changing circumstances, or die. If you adapt, those circumstances will likely become increasingly hostile until you die anyway.

Another option is to leave the system altogether. Some organisms, including humans (but not trees, for example), have this option, even if it is often extremely challenging to take. The problem is when the system you’re trying to escape is the whole biosphere. There’s nowhere else to go. Even if you’re a techbro with a trillion dollars spare, your options are fantasies.

When the concept of resilience is applied to psychosocial systems (which are part of ecosystems), like employee wellbeing within an organisation, mental health within a community, or, in fact, any measure of health within a society, things start to get complex.

Let’s take the case of an employee who is burnt out and has been provided support to help them ‘build their resilience’ (usually access to a bunch of self-help books, websites and apps, and sometimes some counselling or sick leave). The assumption here is that the employee will become more able to remain functional in the organisational system. Often, despite the best efforts of those providing the support, this doesn’t happen. Instead, the employee leaves the organisation to escape the conditions that are causing the burnout, often, ironically, into another dysfunctional system.

There are assumptions buried here. One is that the issue is sited in the employee, not the organisation. The conditions of the organisation must be better adapted to, rather than made less inhospitable. Another is that changing the organisation to reduce employee burnout is impossible. Often, we can’t even imagine the new organisation: ‘it is what it is’, ‘what can you do?’

Some practitioners working with resilience would say both these are true. The employee needs support, and the system needs to change. Fair enough. Except, the system rarely gets changed, leaving the burden on the usually powerless and bewildered individual.

But how do you change the system? And if you could change one social system, your organisation, for example, how do you change the larger social systems it is part of, and on which it depends to survive? This is a Russian Doll problem the size of a planet. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

So far we have explored the example of an employee within an organisation, the experience of the organism within a system. But what about the system? Why might it have become so hostile to the organism in the first place? What has made the organism need to become more resilient?

The system is hostile because it is being moved further towards the limits of its capacity to maintain its present structure and functionality. It is doing this in response to its context (larger systems). External disturbances force systems to reorganise to maintain their present structure and function. This reorganisation process is facilitated by feedback (communication) loops within the system. In essence, the change process is stimulated externally and responded to internally. Several reasons determine how long this process can run. For example, the amount of energy available within the system, the efficiency of the feedback loops, and the nature, speed and extent of the external disturbances.

Psychologically, people (also systems) exist in communities and organisations (also systems) which exist in ecosystems (you guessed it, also systems), which exist in the biosphere (again) (Russian Doll). Personal wellbeing, the health of the organism, happens at all these scales.

As disturbances increase, the capacity for creativity (’novelty’ in ecology) gets increasingly diminished, feedback loops get more and more complicated and less effective, and the energy runs out. At the point just before the system fails altogether, we see ‘peak complexity’. The maximum amount of structure possible before no structure is possible. Once this happens, the system fails. And, as the Humpty Dumpty principle in ecology shows us, it can never be put together again. A new system emerges. The process starts again.

Individuals can never have the capacity to adapt at the scale of a whole system. The contemporary resilience movement is selling an impossible lie. Normalising people to this process through ‘resilience’ work is making them cope with increasing levels of stress within systems that are doomed, in the vain hope of maintaining them. This cannot work. It doesn’t work in nature. And we are nature.

However, it can create a whole multibillion-dollar wellbeing industry, one that feeds off the chaos of our social systems. One that depends on those systems continuing to generate the dis-ease of industrial culture. A form of disaster capitalism.

So what’s the solution? Sounds like these organisational and social systems will fail anyway, releasing us all from the misery of trying to live within them. I believe that’s true, because as ecology shows us - that is precisely how nature works when pushed too far. But letting them fail might not be a very nice experience for billions of people, as we are finding out in real time. It’s also one that we don’t need to resign ourselves to - it is entirely possible to live within healthy systems that respond to external stimuli, reorganise and adapt, all without the stress being sited in the individual as a personal health issue. After all, we humans have been doing this extremely well for in excess of 150,000 years, up until relatively recently.

In the meantime, we need to change the systems that are causing the harm, not destroy ourselves by trying to cope within them.

It is essential to support each other as our organisational and social systems become increasingly intolerable, in response to the increasingly intolerable world around them. But we must also fight to change these systems, including preparing for their inevitable collapse if they are already too far gone. We can bypass some of the personal pain and trauma by shifting our energy into imagining and building new systems, rather than wasting it all trying to maintain the old ones. And in my experience, this work heals at every scale, including the individual - true resilience.

Back to the Russian Doll problem and the systems change solution. How do you change systems at every scale simultaneously? Not with imposed models or frameworks, not with endless restructuring, not with ‘targets’, or leadership based on individualism and private power. No. You work in the domain of relationships. Creating healthy relationships within and between systems is how you change them at every scale, and how you make them resilient.

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