SSI Thought Letter: Vol. 1 Issue 12
Strictly speaking, the core meaning of resilience, as derived from its etymology (Latin resilire, “to leap back”), focuses on recovery and bouncing back, rebounding, springing forward after deformation, a challenge, or harm. This recovery-oriented essence aligns with the temporal prefix “Re-”, which indicates an after-the-fact action or matter.
In recent usage — particularly in fields like organizational safety, psychology, and systems thinking — the terminological boundaries of resilience have been creeping beyond mere recovery. Psychologists, in particular, are increasingly ignoring the prefix and wedging in the insinuation of an adaptive capacity and preparedness in advance of anticipated physiological or psychoemotional harm. These expansions, while not strictly part of the historical or dictionary definition, reflect how resilience is practically applied in modern contexts, where prevention and mitigation play essential roles in ensuring the capacity to withstand and recover.
It’s become a semantic wedgy, yanking the future into a term that has traditionally been applied to addressing the past. From various dictionaries, resilience generally refers to:
- Physical/material resilience: The ability of a material or object to return to its original shape after being bent, compressed, or stretched.
- Human/psychological resilience: The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, adversity, or trauma.
- Systemic resilience: The ability of a system, organization, or community to withstand, adapt to, and recover from disruptions, ensuring continuity and functionality under stress or after a crisis.
Prevention, adaption, and mitigation aren’t strictly part of resilience’s dictionary definition, etymology, or morphology. Yet, they are systematically being conceptually tied to resilience in practice. Why?
It’s the growing recognition that reducing the need for recovery is itself a hallmark of resilient systems. So, while the original meaning doesn’t demand these elements, their inclusion represents an applied, pragmatic broadening of the term to suggest a two-fold approach to resilience:
- Prevention and preparedness to minimize harm and enhance adaptability, and,
- Acknowledgment of limits in the face of catastrophic outcomes and the importance of addressing structural safety and risk.
In essence, resilience is increasingly used to insinuate a balancing act between proactive systems-level strategies and the humility to recognize the finite nature of human and material recovery.
Let’s face it. There’s an unabated onslaught of bullying and other forms of interactional violence in the workplace and on the streets. There is also the need for more durable structural integrity for material systems (buildings, bridges, nuclear plants, etc.) in the face of environmental threats ranging from earthquakes to terrorism. We could even apply this need to abstract systems, like resilient economies, ecosystems, cultures, and more! It represents the next evolution in resilience thinking, where the focus isn’t merely on surviving adversity but on designing systems that rarely need to recover because they’ve avoided collapse in the first place.
But — Is Resilience Resilient?
Yes, it’s a great word, and even the great ones can shift in meaning over time. It happens. Still, before violating the integrity of a perfectly good word, we should consider the also popular alternative of inventing a new one. After all, it’s unlikely that in any foreseeable future, there will no longer be a need for resilience to recover from things we didn’t anticipate.
Enter “Presilience.”
Simply by adding the letter “P,” we create a new rhetorical device that’s powerful in several ways.
- It embraces the proactive nature of preparation, risk mitigation, foresightedness, and collapse avoidance.
- It’s a soundbite of a quality that allows for marketing, branding, and sales of an impressive array of goods and services.
- It’s intuitive, and instantly makes its point without much mental energy required.
- It preserves the integrity of the original term resilience, yet unmistakably links that old popular term to the new proactive version.
It’s taking resilience “Back to the Future.”
But Not So Fast—Maybe It’s Not That Simple
Presilience may initially sound like a slam dunk. But there’s still an issue or two to address. The all-in-one device to describe preparation for a fight with your neighbor, the whole neighborhood, or with nature, and surviving it is semantically convenient.
Remember the phrase “New and Improved”? It was a marketing hit in the last century. It feels like an oxymoron at first glance because it juxtaposes two seemingly contradictory ideas: how can something be “new” (entirely fresh) and “improved” (a better version of something that already exists) at the same time? Technically, it doesn’t meet the strict definition of an oxymoron. An oxymoron combines two contradictory or opposite terms to create a paradoxical or intriguing effect (e.g., “jumbo shrimp,” “deafening silence”). “New and Improved” doesn’t quite fit because it isn’t inherently self-contradictory, and they aren’t opposites.
Presilience, while internally troubled (a malapropism, for sure), doesn’t feel inherently self-contradicting. We do get it when we hear it. It satisfies two psychological desires, certainty and assurance, our being prepared for what’s coming and our ability to survive it. It is probably most accurate to see it as paradoxical, hyperbole designed to appeal emotionally rather than logically, making us feel like we’re getting the best of both worlds.
Here’s the rub. The biggest, loudest, and most valid complaint about resilience is that it leaves the onus of addressing harm to the target of the harm. The victims are given the responsibility of building in themselves the ability to recover from inflicted psychoemotional injury or physical harm.
Clever as it may be, “presilience” doesn’t alter that. If harm is on the way, the onus for anticipatory preparation and survival is still on you, not the perpetrator. Importantly, perpetrators prepare in advance as well. And they intend to win. Your presilience cannot change that either. Yet, this temporal mirror image of resilience is what some seem to be trying to create.
The hyperbolic phrase “New and Improved” was a way of making consumers feel like they were getting the best of both worlds when they were likely getting neither both nor the best. It wasn’t illegal. It was just marketing. While presilience might not technically be an oxymoron, it could easily become a paradoxical, emotionally charged marketing phrase used by psychologists and coaches to play on the psychology of the embattled. (No…I’m not going to trademark it.)
If we spell it as presillience, with two Ls, it might suggest a connection to “silence” (due to the visual resemblance), adding a subtle layer of meaning, implying not only proactive resilience but also a quiet, deliberate strength in preparation, silence, subtlety, or stealth — acting without noise or unnecessary visibility.
The double-L could serve as a deliberate modification to emphasize proactive preparation. This appeals in contexts where foresight is strategic and understated, geared toward protectiveness, the proactive design and functionality of complex systems that anticipate disruptions, mitigate risks, and ensure continuity with minimal turbulence. More than just resilience, it implies strategic foresight embedded into a system.
But, this is just having fun with language, as an example of what’s happening with marketing, differentiation, and the resulting obfuscation that takes us off task and into the weeds of faddishly branded interventions.
By muddying terms like empathy, grit, resilience, and others, we risk intervention clarity where life, health, and safety are at stake. That’s true for both human and material resilience. Then, is confounding, corrupting, conflating, or collapsing words and meanings into one another really what we want to do in times like these? Is that what we need?
A Closer Look At The Structure of Resilience
The next issue of the Sociological Safety® Thought Letter will delve into resilience, what it’s made of, where it applies, where it does not, and more about what it is that many are so desperately attempting to resolve by pushing the limits of its meaning. We’ll start with a structure known as “Prince Rupert’s Drop.” Is it resilient? We’ll see.
SociologicalSafety® is a registered trademark of Rob Jones.
