Resilience entered public debate through psychology in the late 1990s, antifragility through a statistician in 2012, robustness through a biologist in 2023, and everyday usage now blurs them together. I retrace the history of these three notions and the controversies they raise, because choosing a word means dividing up responsibilities between the individual, the group and the institution, and deciding how we prepare for crises.
A controversy between an ecologist, psychiatrists, a statistician and a biologist
The people who put these three words into circulation do not look at crises from the same place:
- resilience comes from materials science, where it describes a body’s capacity to absorb a shock and return to its shape; the Canadian ecologist Crawford S. Holling transposed it to ecosystems in 1973, the developmental psychologist Emmy Werner observed it among children in Hawaii, the neuropsychiatrist and ethologist Boris Cyrulnik brought it into everyday language in France in 1999, and the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron has been criticising and reworking it since 2003;
- antifragility is the invention of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a statistician and former trader who learned to think on the financial markets, in contact with their crashes;
- robustness is an old engineering word, but it was the biologist Olivier Hamant, research director at INRAE within the École normale supérieure de Lyon, who turned it into a project for society on the basis of his observation of plants;
- two authors, finally, reject or sidestep this vocabulary: Thierry Ribault, a social scientist at the CNRS who investigated Fukushima and sees resilience as a technology of consent, and Bruno Latour, a sociologist of science who says very little about resilience and prefers to ask how our territories can be made habitable.
These people do not agree with one another. In August 2003, in Le Monde diplomatique, under the title “’Resilience’, or the struggle for life”, Serge Tisseron published a critique of the French enthusiasm for a word he links to the American ideology of the autonomous self and the self-made man; Boris Cyrulnik, for his part, never presented resilience as an individual strength, he describes it as a process knitted together with those around us, and so the disagreement is less about psychology than about the social use of the word. Nassim Nicholas Taleb finds robustness insufficient, a mere resistance that learns nothing from disorder, and it is something quite different from inert resistance that Olivier Hamant would describe ten years later under the same word. Thierry Ribault, for his part, does not ask for a better word, he asks why populations are being trained to adapt to disasters instead of tackling their causes. I do not settle these disagreements here, I set them out, because depending on the word we choose, we do not look at the same thing: we will see psyches to be strengthened, systems to be given margins, organisms to be toughened, or a consent to be questioned.
Providence, Social Security, then resilience
A question keeps working on me, and I have no complete answer to it: why do we now see ourselves as people who must resist and rebuild, when previous generations did not see themselves that way? Hardship did not wait for our era, but people were not asked to be resilient. In religious vocabulary, hardship was sent by Providence and opened a path to salvation; in moral vocabulary, it was a matter of courage and endurance; and twentieth-century France had built a political vocabulary, that of solidarity and insurance, with the mutual aid societies, the 1898 law on workplace accidents, then Social Security in 1945. The sociologist Robert Castel described this construction (L’Insécurité sociale. Qu’est-ce qu’être protégé ?, Seuil, 2003): the welfare state took collective charge of shocks, illness, accident, unemployment, old age, by turning them into covered risks, so that people did not have to be heroic, since institutions absorbed the shocks in their place.
My hypothesis is that the vocabulary of resilience thrives at the meeting point of three developments:
- the risk society described by the sociologist Ulrich Beck (Risikogesellschaft, 1986, English translation Risk Society, Sage, 1992): dangers are no longer external blows of fate, they are products of our own industrial and technical activities, and a society that manufactures its own dangers starts speaking the language of risk management;
- the retreat of collective protections that Robert Castel documents: as institutions absorb fewer shocks, the burden falls back on individuals, and they need a word to name the virtue expected of them;
- the shift, with climate disruption, from the exceptional shock to chronic stress, which Serge Tisseron emphasises and which Bruno Latour called the new climatic regime: when disturbance becomes the ordinary state of the world, preparing, holding on and getting back up become permanent activities, and words are needed for them.
Serge Tisseron adds an almost ethnological observation: resilience developed in the United States, in a self-made-man culture where everyone is expected to succeed by their own strength, in spite of adversity, and it arrived in France in the 1980s, in psychological circles, accompanied by the individualism that had seen it born. Asking where our words come from is already giving ourselves the possibility of not inheriting, along with them, a worldview we did not choose.
Resilience, from the metal test piece to the children of Kauai
In materials science, resilience is the amount of energy a body absorbs under impact before it breaks, its capacity to take the blow and return to its shape, and it is measured by striking a metal test piece. The ecologist Crawford S. Holling transposed the word to living systems in an article that became foundational (“Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems”, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 1973), showing that a resilient ecosystem is not the one that quickly returns to its previous state, but the one that absorbs major disturbances while keeping its functions and identity, even if it changes form. Holling later named this difference: engineering resilience is measured by the speed of return to equilibrium, ecological resilience by the amount of disturbance a system can absorb without tipping over.
Psychologists then took up the word, on the basis of field studies. Emmy Werner followed for decades the six hundred and ninety-eight children born in 1955 on the island of Kauai, in Hawaii (Vulnerable but Invincible, with Ruth Smith, 1982); among the children who combined poverty, violence and family pathologies, some nevertheless became well-adjusted adults, and the most constant protective factor was not an inner strength, it was the presence of at least one adult who mattered to the child and to whom the child mattered. Boris Cyrulnik, whose parents were deported and who himself escaped, as a child, from a round-up in Bordeaux, brought this work to the French public (Un merveilleux malheur, Odile Jacob, 1999, published in English as Resilience, Penguin, 2009). Resilience as he describes it is not a quality one possesses, it is a process knitted together with what he calls resilience tutors, those people, places or works that make it possible to resume one’s development after the crash. The success of the word nevertheless produced what Boris Cyrulnik never asked for: a resilience turned into an individual virtue, demanded of everyone, in whose name the good survivors are separated from the rest. It is this drift that Serge Tisseron has been attacking since 2003, then in La Résilience (PUF, “Que sais-je?”, 2007), where he argues for a collective, preventive conception, attentive to chronic stress, the very one he now extends into co-resilience: each system’s capacity to recover depends on that of all the others. I presented this proposal, and the way in which, in my own practice, I can give it training grounds, in the article Building Co-Resilience. Thierry Ribault, finally, documents on the basis of his Fukushima investigation (Contre la résilience. À Fukushima et ailleurs, L’Échappée, 2021) the moment when resilience becomes an instrument: there, the authorities teach residents, through dedicated programmes, to live in a contaminated area, and the political question of causes turns into an individual question of behaviour. I discussed this critique, and the answer I try to give it, in the article The three ecologies of co-resilience. A single word therefore covers at least four ideas, the return to the previous state, the maintenance of functions despite change, psychological reconstruction and the adaptation demanded of populations, and these ideas do not call for the same actions.
Antifragility, the gains and costs of disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the second word on the basis of his experience of the financial markets (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Random House, 2012). Between what breaks under a shock and what withstands it, he identifies a category that languages had not named: what comes out of the shock stronger. Muscle, the immune system, biological evolution all benefit from disorder, in moderate doses. In his triad, robustness occupies the middle position, and Taleb files it among the mediocre qualities, a mere indifference to shocks that draws nothing from them. I proposed applying antifragility to the cultural sector in the article Build antifragility for cultural projects, before preferring an approach based on robustness in the article Pour une robustesse coopérative des projets culturels (in French). I changed approach because of a limit that Taleb himself acknowledges: the antifragility of a whole often rests on the fragility of its units. The restaurant business improves because restaurants go bankrupt. Transposed to societies, this logic means sacrificing parts to strengthen the whole, and the parts are people.
Robustness, or in praise of margins and slowness
Olivier Hamant is a biologist, a specialist in plant development, and he heads the Institut Michel-Serres in Lyon. Observing how organisms function, he finds that living things are not efficient: they are heterogeneous, redundant, slow, full of errors and apparent waste, and this sub-optimality is their strength (La troisième voie du vivant, Odile Jacob, 2022). A system optimised for a stable environment collapses as soon as the environment fluctuates, whereas a robust system maintains its functions despite fluctuations, and even uses them as resources. In Antidote au culte de la performance. La robustesse du vivant (Gallimard, “Tracts”, 2023), Hamant draws from this a critique of our organisations: performance, which he defines as the sum of effectiveness (reaching one’s goals) and efficiency (reaching them with the fewest possible means), can only be obtained by trimming the margins that would allow us to hold on in a world that has become structurally fluctuating. Optimising is then a losing strategy, and robustness, with its margins, its redundancies and its slowness, becomes the way forward. This robustness has nothing left of the inert resistance that Taleb dismissed, since it draws on fluctuations instead of ignoring them. And it does not promise a return to the way things were: it consists in maintaining vital functions in a world that will not return to the way things were, which also distinguishes it from resilience understood as a return.
Words that place the effort on different people
When an organisation asks its members to be resilient while itself remaining driven by performance, it reverses the roles: it makes each person bear, in their life and their health, the cost of the fluctuations that its own optimisation makes worse. I see this regularly in the cultural field, where teams are called upon to be resilient at the very moment the resources that keep them going are being cut. It is to institutions that Olivier Hamant addresses himself: it is up to them to be robust, to give themselves margins, redundancies and slowness, so that people do not have to be heroic. Resilience then keeps its full meaning for what is irreversible, bereavement, the catastrophe that has already happened, where rebuilding is really what is at stake, and Serge Tisseron reminds us, with co-resilience, that even this rebuilding depends on others, just as the children of Kauai rebuilt themselves thanks to an adult who mattered. As for antifragility, it seems legitimate to me for activities that really do benefit from disorder, learning, creation, experimentation, and illegitimate as soon as it is applied to lives. Thierry Ribault’s warning, finally, applies to all three words at once: robustness or co-resilience can also become a refined form of crisis management that leaves the causes of crises untouched, if no one makes room for those who refuse to adapt.
Using the three words, before the crises
These distinctions become useful when we apply them to a concrete situation: a team, a cultural organisation, a family, a territory. I suggest we ask ourselves three questions:
- in this system, what must be able to return to its previous state, what must hold on despite fluctuations, and what can benefit from disorder? The answer is almost never the same for every part of the system, and that is the first benefit of the exercise: we stop demanding a single virtue from everyone;
- who bears the effort today, and who should bear it? Whenever a person is required to show the resilience the institution spares itself, we notice it by answering this question;
- what are we preparing before the crisis, and with whom? None of the three qualities can be improvised during the event.
These questions translate into actions:
- we build robustness into budgets, teams and schedules, through margins, redundant roles and deliberate slowness; I detailed these avenues for the cultural field in the article Pour une robustesse coopérative des projets culturels (in French);
- antifragility finds its legitimate place in spaces of learning and creation, where the unexpected is a material rather than a threat, a principle of facilitation I developed in the article Leading Collective Intelligence in the Face of Crises;
- we prepare co-resilience in calm times, by describing our dependencies together, as I propose in the article Landing together, and by building together our representations of crises, as I developed in the article The imaginary as survival equipment.
Telling these three words apart is within the reach of any team meeting, and each time they are confused, an institution finds in that confusion the alibi for asking of people what it spares itself.
