A long-term perspective: What is #resilience within declining living systems?

Again and throughout the year, radical events have reshaped our business ecosystems. Overnight, we used ad hoc measures to maintain our prosperity. Teams have quickly executed, reinvented, solved. Daring initiatives and sustainability related innovations had to move into the attentional background. "Yes, this is important, yet for now it has to wait. Focus on head over water."

Let’s pause. Simply stopping for a moment. Right here. Right now. Creating some space to consider this:

We are currently facing an average decline of 69% in species population on our home base Earth since 1970 (see WWF's Living Planet Report 2022). This is important. We must not close our eyes to longterm survival as a species in a system of systems. This is what the essence of biodiversity is. Our home base is the sphere in which everything lies that we have: any business, any team, any leadership committee, any family, any home, any day, any meal, any breath.

So what to do? This is huge, complex, wicked. Off agenda. The business of business is business. The project needs focus. The strategy is set. Let's consolidate the current gains first. ... And even if we could, how would we?

Let's be authentic to start with: We simply don't know!

No one really knows. Yet, we know that we need new ways of approaching our challenges - and new skillsets. As individuals, as team, as businesses, as ecosystem, as humanity.

• We need tools and techniques that help us focus on what is most important right now - and we need skillsets that allow us to open our perspective, become aware of how we are embedded - so we can look beyond the "for now".
• We need to uncover how we interdepend. Find starting points for next step considerations towards maintaining prosperity tomorrow. Engaging in open ended engagement, and knowing why.
• We need the inner leadership strength of calm and focus for this urgent, short term action. And we need the inner resources for being radically creative, collaborative and open towards finding unexpected ways, alliances. We need to become curious about others perspectives. Experiment with people we have not much to do with. Because we have, if we think resilient futures.
• We need to own to nourish our self as individuals, as teams, as organisation, as nature, as life. Think cabin crew: sort yourself out first, help the neighbour, land the plane, redesign travel, ...

All this is what we consider part of Resilience & Spaces - what we call resilience skillsets, competencies, creating space. Because we want to better equip teams and leaders for way finding, for continuously evolving, in and with uncertainty. For a living planet, ecosystem, home in which we live - and in order to do business, innovate, navigate.

Please get into dialogue with us. Share where you stand right now,  so we can create space towards resilience. From building VUCA skills, to leveraging exchange at depth about direction, to co-creating future. We need to be in this together - because we are. 

Text and Foto: Ulrike Vött