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Hello, everyone; welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast. Today I like to talk about resilience. And of course, probably the first thought that comes to your mind when we are talking about resilience is about big disasters like earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes, mostly related to the reconstruction of civil works, roads, buildings. So a resilient building is a building that does not collapse during an earthquake. But here, I want to talk in a more broadway. I want to talk about our ability as an organization, as individuals and as teams to withstand adversity and bounce back quickly from difficult events. This is what resilience is about. It's not just the concept of the engineering surrounding the engineering aspects.
So we want to understand how I can become more prepared to resist. And if something happens, I can build back and bounce back quickly. And I don't want to say that resilience means zero stress, zero suffering, or zero problem environment. No, resilience comes with a lot of stress, a lot of suffering, a lot of pain. But resilience brings you back to your pre-crisis condition quickly. And this is exactly what we want to talk about here today. One example I want to share with you is that for me, it's a perfect example; it's when you think about the strength of a diamond.
Diamond is hard. Diamond is so hard that we use diamond to cut, for example, materials or to cut glass and to do all sorts of work-related cutting related works. However, if you take a diamond, a stone, and take a big hammer, and hit the diamond, it will become powder; it will be completely destroyed. Why? Because it's so hard, it's so hard that when you receive a wave of shock that the diamond cannot withstand, it just collapses. Now let's think about rubber, a rubber mat; a rubber mat is a perfect example of a resilient material. Why? Because if you take the same hammer that destroyed the diamond and heats it with the hammer in the mat, the mat will deform. And very quickly bounce back to normal conditions. This is exactly the concept of resilience that goes into paths here.
And I want to give you three tips for each of them.
The first one is psychological resilience is the resilience that is related to your behaviour, your fears, your own safety; the other one is organizational resilience. How do you improve your psychological resilience? The first it's I said this, I think 100 times, but it's self-awareness; you need to know where you are strong and where you were not strong. And you need to know your behaviour, your attitude, your response to the crisis, because if you don't know, when the crisis comes, you don't know how to do things, but you will do things, but I'm not sure he will do the right things. So you need to know yourself to know for example, when you may face some trigger that will, for example, potentially become an emotional hijack, or a needle hijacks, that you will lose complete control of yourself and get angry or issues or you know, depression or panic syndromes and these kinds of effects.
The second one is experiencing; you need to face a crisis you need to handle, and the crisis, of course, is a tragedy many times, but it's a fantastic opportunity for you to learn. Of course, I'm not saying you should generate crisis to learn, but at least in all tragedies, there is the learning opportunity. For me, for example, during my whole career, I try to do that I try to do and visit different jobs, different kinds of work as self-made working at the UN Working in a startup environment, so from big to small, from humanitarian projects to capital projects. Why? Because this gives me the perspective and the experience that maybe I learned at the UN, and I can apply now in a different context. But the crisis is, in some ways, similar. So experience, so you need to open yourself to experience, so you need to open yourself to challenging projects, challenging environments because this is what will allow you to grow psychologically in becoming more resilient and more strong psychologically.
And the third one is open to different thinking. You need to open, and this is a big challenge. Lunch today because we are becoming less and less open to different thinking we think this way. And we struggle to accept that not everybody thinks like us. And these become a massive challenge. And if you want to become resilient, you need to be open to talk to people that disagree with you talk to people that may have a completely different approach from you when they face a problem.
On the organizational side, I want to give you three tips quickly; the first one is prototyping, doing now scale tests, test it because it's cheap. And if things do not work, just throw them away and build again.
So this prototyping will allow you, for example, to evaluate, and this is my second trip, the different scenarios. And for example, the prototyping associated with scenario planning will allow you to make a what-if analysis in understanding if this happens, what do I do? If this happens next time in is like different way, how would I react to bounce back quickly. For example, when the COVID pandemia started, pretty much all of us were a little bit lost on what to do and how to behave. Because for us, it was something very new. However, if for any reason, and I hope it never happens again, there is not a pandemic or an event that is similar to this one. We hope that we have learned from that experience, so we can use the benefit in the future.
Last but not least, is diversity in diversity is exactly what allows you on a psychological level to be open to different thinking. Organizations must stimulate diversity and diversity in thinking diversity culturally because these will create an absolutely fertile environment for creativity, innovation, and these will allow you to find creative ways to revisit your business and bounce back quickly and become more and more resilient. And this is an ultra-relevant topic.
If you want to deliver successful projects in the times, we are living in. Think always about that and take this as a principle in your professional life.
I hope you enjoy this podcast until next week with another Five Minutes Podcast.
