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Solicited Response to Harvard Business Review Article on Resiliency
Harvard Business Review
60 Harvard Way
Boston, MA 02163
April 11, 2002
Dr. Al Siebert
P.O. Box 505
Portland, OR 97207
Dear Dr. Siebert:
For more than 45 years, the Letters section of the Harvard Business Review has been an important forum for business leaders worldwide. We hope that you will help us continue this tradition by submitting a response to the enclosed article, "How Resilience Works" by Diane Coutu. Your knowledge and expertise in this area would be of great value to our readers.
Your letter need not be lengthy. Be is praise or criticism--we welcome both--please feel free to draw on your research, personal experience, or simply informed opinion when responding.
Thank you for your time and consideration. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to call me. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
Andrew Gray
Editorial Assistant*************
Andy: Here is my critical review:
How to Resile
by Al Siebert, Ph.D.
Author of The Survivor Personality, Director of The Resiliency CenterDiane Coutu described some aspects of "How Resilience Works" with great skill. (Harvard Business Review, May, 2002) Her discussion of optimism and reality is impressively insightful. "Bricolage" is a fresh perspective on how to use creative problem solving to achieve good outcomes.
I disagree, however, with her repeated assertions that resiliency "is one of the great puzzles of human nature" that "none of us will ever understand fully." Resiliency in adults is not that puzzling. It is so well understood that individuals and organizations can learn how to be highly resilient if they choose to.
Like Coutu, I have been fascinated with highly resilient people for many years. For me it started when I joined the paratroopers at the end of the Korean War. I realized from my daily contact with the training cadre in the 11th Airborne Division, all survivors of deadly combat, that it wasn't luck or chance that determined which soldiers came back alive. Something about them as individuals had tipped the scales in their favor.
Later, in 1958, when I was senior in college, Viktor Frankl came to our campus on his book tour. I was struck with what a happy man he was. When he spoke about how he survived in the Nazi death camps during the holocaust, he told us he was inspired by Nietschze's statement "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Frankl said his determination to emerge stronger led him to search for meaning in experiences.
I wondered, "Why do some people emerge stronger and better from adversities that crush so many others?" When I finished graduate school in clinical psychology in 1965, I began to focus on finding answers to my question.
Here is a brief overview of what it takes to resile. ("Resile" is the verb for resilience. Its use helps make the point that resilience is something you do, not something you have.) I will describe an important resiliency principle and follow it with suggestions for executive action.
Rapid Reality Reading: When a person or an organization is hit with an unexpected, disruptive event, resiliency starts with rapid reality reading. This sort of situation is where the habit of being curious, open-minded, and non-judgmental has a survival benefit.
Resiliency starts with surviving. Survival chances are increased the more quickly you accurately comprehend the new reality. Survival is less likely for people and organizations who do not accurately comprehend their new reality.
Suggested Executive Action: Urge people to conduct an intense search for information, then bring groups of people together from every level of the organization and ask them to talk about their assessment of what is happening.
Resiliency comes from problem-focused coping. The pioneering resiliency research conducted by Richard Lazarus in the 1960's with adults (Garmezy focused on children), established that people typically respond to unexpected difficulties in one of two ways. One is emotion-focused coping, the other is problem-focused coping. Resiliency research conducted more recently by psychologist Mary Steinhardt for a division of Motorola confirms the Lazarus findings. People who become emotionally upset about difficulties, blame others for their feelings of distress, dwell on their unhappy feelings, and experience their jobs as full of stress are the least resilient and have more illnesses. People who use problem-focused coping and handle their feelings well are the most resilient and healthy.
Executive Action: You increase workforce resiliency with workshops on effective problem solving. Coverage should include logical "left brain" methods, creative "right brain" methods, and group "brainstorming." Steinhardt found that resiliency training at work helped people handle problems in their personal lives as well.
People are more resilient when they express their feelings in healthy ways. The ability to express feelings at the right time in an appropriate way is what psychologist Daniel Goleman emphasizes in his teaching about emotional intelligence. Highly resilient people bounce back faster than others because they focus first on problems that must be dealt with, talk or write about their feelings about what has happened when the time is right, then focus outward again on what is happening.
Talking with a friend or a counselor can be very useful. Psychologist James Pennebaker and his associates have created an emotions writing technique used successfully to increase the resiliency in thousands of people. Pennebaker reports that the people in groups that write about their feelings often say they wished they would have written about their feelings sooner.
Executive Action:Have your Human Resources personnel and the counselors with the Employee Assistance Program explain to you what guidelines and coaching they are providing to employees on how express their feelings in healthy and appropriate ways.
Screen "stress management" workshops very carefully for proven results. Dr. Hans Selye, the source of concerns about human "stress" apologized when he retired for making a serious conceptual mistake. He said his research was about subjective strain, not external stressors. His mistake helps explain why stress disability claims often increase after stress workshops instead of decreasing.
People are more hardy and resilient when they experience some control over what they do. Research by Susan Kobasa determined why some people remain healthy in high pressure situations that lead others to have heart attacks and other illnesses. People who work under high levels of pressure and strain without becoming ill, have three mental qualities that make them more hardy than people who become sick under pressure.
Kobasa found that hardy people: 1) know they can control or influence what they do, 2) are committed to something they feel is important and are deeply involved in activities related to their commitment, and 3) look forward to change as an exciting challenge that may further their personal development. Similar studies by other researchers have shown that the first quality, feeling in control, is the most important. Feeling helpless and hopeless leads to feeling like a helpless victim. People who repeatedly feel like victims have more illnesses and don't cope well with new difficulties.
Executive Action: Give people choices about what they do. Create and support transition teams using guidelines developed by William Bridges. Remove autocratic managers from positions of control over work groups.
People with an internal locus of control survive dangerous circumstances and are more resilient than people with an external locus of control. Research by Julius Rotter, Herbert Lefcourt, Bonnie Strickland and others shows that people with feelings of internal control are self-reliant and self-motivated. They resist being told by an authority what to do—especially if not given an explanation why.
Executive Action: Manage self-motivated people with questions, not with instructions.
Resiliency is increased by positive emotions, decreased by negative emotions. Psychologist Barbara Frederickson, winner of a MacArthur award for her research on resilience, has solid evidence that the experience of many positive emotions during a day, increases cognitive skills and action choices. Feelings such as enjoyment, playfulness, contentment, laughing, satisfaction, warm friendship, love, and affection—all increase resiliency. Negative emotions, in contrast, decrease resiliency because feelings such as anxiety, anger, fear, vulnerability, and helplessness narrow a person's range of thoughts and limit action choices.
Frederickson also been found that the strengths gained during positive states are durable. They last a long time in the face of adversity and on-going difficulties.
Executive Action: Ask for proof that your managers and supervisors arrange for each employee to have the positive emotional experiences described years ago by Frederick Herzberg ("One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?" Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb, 1968) and more recently by the Gallup organization (First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, 1999).
Efforts to bounce back from setbacks are increased by balancing positivity and negativity. Optimism is essential to resiliency. People who lack optimism don't even try. People with self-confident optimism have a better than average chance of bouncing back and can make things even better than before. It is essential to understand, however, that executives with optimistic attitudes handicap themselves when they have negative attitudes about negative attitudes. Harvard professor David McClelland established years ago that success is most likely when a person has optimistic expectations about what can be done and tries to anticipate everything that could go wrong. Psychologist Irving Janis showed that managers who suppress disagreement and negative thinking during group discussions create a condition called "groupthink," in which groups make bad decisions.
Executive Action: Follow Peter Drucker's advice to effective executives. If you don't have a case against your proposed course of action, you don't know what you are getting into. Best Practice: Intel corporation requires every new hire to take a class on "Constructive Confrontation" taught by a senior manager.
The flexibility and adaptability that is the hallmark of resiliency is derived from counter-balanced personality traits.
In a survival conflict between two living systems, the more complex system will prevail. Highly resilient survivors have many counter-balanced or paradoxical personality qualities. Paradoxical qualities allow you to respond in both one way and another. The most resilient people function with pessimistic optimism, extroverted introversion, selfish unselfishness, playful seriousness, and more.
Executive Action: Psychologist Paul Weand, a former banking executive, founded the Center for Advanced Emotional Intelligence to show executives how to develop paradoxical inner qualities. Power is derived from being at the choice point between counter-balanced forces. The more that you are comfortable with internal counter-balanced qualities, the more you can manage the complex, counter-balanced forces essential for resiliency in your organization.
********
5/3/02
Dear Dr. Siebert:
Attached please find a file for your review that contains an edited version of the letter that you sent to the Harvard Business Review for inclusion in the July 2002 issue. You will see that I greatly shortened your letter to three major ones, ones that respond directly to points in Diane Coutu's article and that we think will engage our readers.
Yours truly,
Carolann Barrett
Manuscript Editor***********
5/4/02
Dear Al,
Thank you for your email and quick review of your letter. I added this sentence at the end of the second paragraph: "Two organizations providing such guidance are Adaptiv Learning (mentioned by Coutu) and the Resilience Group." Coupled with the name of your own organization at the end of your letter, readers will have three places to get concrete information about evaluating organizations' resilience and pursuing training if they choose. (I had looked at the various components of your web site and looked again today.)
Regarding the last paragraph, I wasn't clear in my query, and so I asked the wrong thing. Can you say something more about your statements, "My research also does not support Coutu's assertion that resilient people all find meaning in what they've been through. Some do, but many do not"? How do these people conceptualize their extreme experiences? Fate? Bad luck? ...? If they don't find them meaningful, do they tend to downplay them? deny or diminish their severity (especially in contrast to people who do find them meaningful)? I'm not sure I even know questions to ask you to explain a bit more, and I'm not unconvinced by your research; it's just that I'd like backup to counter the claim in the article. Thank you.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Carolann*******
5/5/02
Carolann:
I've interviewed many hundreds of resilient survivors over the past 35 years. My original "frustration" when I started was finding that perhaps 1 in 20 can conceptualize and verbalize why they did what they did to cope, recover, and bounce back. Even fewer can observe themselves and then put into words how the experience transformed them in some positive way. It is easy for Coutu or other readers of books or articles about resilient survivors to conclude that resilient people find meaning in their experience, but I can assure you that the ones whose stories get told are a small percentage of all who are resilient. The larger percentage are folks who read a description of resiliency qualities, such as those listed in my book or my self-assessment, and recognize that much of what I say is true for them...that they never had words to express it. It is the difference between recognizing a correct answer on a True/False test and being able to recall what you know to write a short essay about the same subject. You and I and Coutu are skilled at observing and describing our feelings and inner processes, but the majority of people can't do it very well.
There is a subtle issue here that Coutu missed. It is to make the distinction between resiliency and the meaning finding that occurs with Post Traumatic Growth.
Resiliency means to bounce back, to get your life or business or health back to the way they were. Many people do that and then explain their success as "I knew everything would work out OK" or "I decided to not let it ruin my life" or "just too stubborn to give in" or a similar short statement. Keep in mind also that many people who "resile" just do it without being impressed with what they accomplished.
If you have access to my book The Survivor Personality look at the story of Paul and Kathy Plunk (pages 181-186) They were taken captive by two men who rented a room in their newly purchased motel on the Oregon coast. Paul was tied up and forced to watch them rape Kathy over and over with their little girl nearby. Their story was so dramatic it was filmed as a TV movie of the week (Captive). Today they are still running their motel, living out their dream, raising their two children. I have interviewed and talked with them many times over the past ten years (once was a five hour interview on videotape for a proposed TV show) and have never had either one talk about finding meaning in the experience. For them it is just something that happened and they moved past it...without help from therapists or "coaching."
Post Traumatic Growth (PTG) is more rare than bouncing back. That is why I call it the fifth level of resiliency. Finding meaning, being transformed, and serendipity skills are a distinct, higher level of recovery. Coutu didn't make that distinction. She incorrectly presented the very few who are transformed and can verbalize the meaning they found as representing the larger group of people who are "merely" resilient. This is why I say her assertion as not supported by my findings.
It bothers me that HBR readers will not learn in Coutu's article or in my shortened response about the qualities and responses consistently found in almost all instances of resiliency in adults. The pioneering resiliency research started by Richard Lazarus in the 1960s established that people who become very emotional when hit by an unexpected setback are the least resilient. People who react with problem-focused coping and handle their feelings well are the most resilient. This is a far more universal aspect of resiliency than finding meaning later in what they went through.
My research also shows that people who resile well consistently show the qualities I listed...a need to have things work well, strong self-confidence, a playful spirit, curiosity, flexibility, adapt quickly, keep learning lessons in the school of life...These qualities are found much more often in resilient folks than in the few who can verbalize how they found meaning or a better philosophy of life.
Good questions! Ask more if you wish...
Al
*********
5/7/02
Dear Al,
Thank you for your email and all the explanatory information in it. I'm attaching a copy of the letter we'd like to print under your name. I drew liberally from your e-mail and hope this is a small part of what you feel is important. I do understand your wanting to include a discussion of the qualities and responses found in most resilient people and organizations, but we do not feel able to do justice to the breadth and subtlety of this material in our letters section. Please know that at least one person (me) has been enriched by it in what you sent us and what I examined on your web site.
Do let me know if you have any concerns about this version of the letter being printed, as I will send all letters on to our production department tomorrow. And please don't hesitate to email if you have questions about this or other things. We look forward to your letter appearing in our July issue.
Best regards,
CarolannDocument attached: [ Revised Response to be printed in July 2002 Harvard Business Review ]
"How Resilience Works" article
Diane Coutu described some aspects of "How Resilience Works" (May 2002) with great skill, and her discussion of optimism and reality is impressively insightful. Bricolage is a fresh perspective on how a talent for ingenious problem solving can lead to good outcomes.
I disagree, however, with her repeated assertions that resiliency is "one of the great puzzles of human nature" and that "none of us will ever understand [it] fully." Perhaps that is true in children, but resiliency in adults is not that puzzling. It is so well understood that people can be evaluated for their resiliency skills, and clear guidelines are available for individuals and companies that want to learn how to be highly resilient. Two organizations providing such guidance are Adaptiv Learning (mentioned in the article) and the Resilience Group.
"Resile" is the verb for resilience. Its use helps us to understand that resilience is something you do, not something you have. I believe that almost everyone can increase his or her resiliency skills and that one can emerge even stronger and better than before. For most individuals, the challenge is to overcome having been raised to be a "good child", training by adults that thwarts and suppresses the development of resiliency skills. Breaking free from inner prohibitions is different from trying to learn new habits or skills for effectiveness, and so resiliency is often a heroic journey of self-discovery, individuation, and transformation.
I also do not agree with Coutu's assertion that resilient people all find meaning in what they've been through. Some do, but many do not. Finding meaning and being transformed by what is called "posttraumatic growth" is a distinct, high level of recovery that only a few resilient individuals ever attain. Coutu didn't make that distinction but instead presented as representative of resilient people the very few who can verbalize the meaning they found. My research has shown that the people whose stories we hear are a small percentage, perhaps 5%, of all who are resilient. Most people do not or cannot conceptualize and verbalize why they did what they did to cope and recover. Even fewer can observe themselves and then say how the experience positively transformed them. Resiliency means to bounce back, to get your life or business or health back to the way it once was. Many people do that and then explain their success with short statements like "I knew everything would work out okay," "I decided to not let it ruin my life," or "I was just too stubborn to give in." Many people who resile just do it without being impressed with what they accomplished.
Finally, the pioneering resiliency research started by Richard Lazarus in the 1960s established that people who become very emotional when hit by unexpected setbacks are the least resilient; those who cope by employing problem-solving skills and by handling their feelings well are the most resilient. This is a far more universal aspect of resiliency than finding meaning at a later time.
Al Siebert, Director
The Resiliency Center
Portland, Oregon
The Resiliency Center was founded by the late Al Siebert who studied highly resilient survivors for over fifty years. He authored the award-winning book The Resiliency Advantage: Master Change, Thrive Under Pressure and Bounce Back From Setbacks (2006 Independent Publisher's Best Self-Help book), and best seller The Survivor Personality: Why Some People Are Stronger, Smarter, and More Skillful at Handling Life's Difficulties...and How You Can Be, Too.
The Resiliency Center is affiliated with several Certified Resiliency Trainers ("Resilitators"). Soon we plan to list and promote our qualified resiliency speakers and experts available for workshops, interviews and consultations. Contact Us for more information.
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