Not Just Bouncing Back: Connecting Systemic and Individual Resilience in a Changing World

This spring, I had the opportunity to speak at the Smart Zero City 2025 conference in Taiwan, organised by Yuan Ze University and chaired by Professor Miko Yu — a gathering of experts, innovators, and city leaders exploring how to future-proof urban life. We heard about digital infrastructure, green energy, and smart transport systems. The conference opened with remarks from Professor Ching-Jong Liao, President of Yuan Ze University, who highlighted the role of smart technologies in achieving net-zero cities. Professor Miko Yu underscored the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in driving sustainable innovation. Her own research explores the dynamics of international higher education and its role in shaping resilient knowledge systems — a crucial dimension of how we understand both systemic and institutional adaptability (Yu, 2018). I spoke about the people inside those systems — and what struck me was how often they were missing from the broader conversation.

We often treat resilience as either a personal mindset or a technical feature of systems. But real resilience lives in the space between — in how people and structures adapt together. I explored this in a previous article for Business Impact, where I focused on how resilience — particularly grit — can be taught, rather than being seen as an inherent trait. This new piece builds directly on that argument, extending it to include the systemic dimension of resilience and the importance of designing learning environments that connect the individual with the institutional.

At NEWTON University, this is exactly where we’ve been focusing our research and teaching — exploring how to train for resilience not just as a mindset, but as a capacity that emerges between people, systems, and the institutions that connect them.

Seeing the Intersections Clearly

If we want to take resilience seriously — in cities, organisations, or education — we need to stop talking about it in isolation. The individual and the systemic aren’t separate layers. They’re co-constructed.

When we frame resilience as purely personal — a matter of grit, mindset, or coping skills — we risk ignoring the structural conditions that shape whether people can actually adapt. And when we frame it purely in terms of systems — energy grids, institutional dashboards, disaster response plans — we forget that those systems are run by people whose own capacity to reflect, adapt, and collaborate matters enormously.

What becomes clear when taking an interdisciplinary look into theories and empirical realities of resilience in different contexts is that the same design principles support both levels: controlled exposure to challenge (Meichenbaum, 1985; Westley et al., 2013; Tabibnia & Radecki, 2018), diversified strategies and response pathways (Hayes, 2019; Folke et al., 2010; Denckla et al., 2020), and a supportive environment built on trust and feedback loops (Masten, 2001; Williams et al., 2017; Njaramba & Olukuru, 2025; Masten & Monn, 2015).

These are the same elements that drive effective team learning, adaptive leadership, and organisational transformation. And that same principle applies at the organisational level. In fact, many of the most robust organisational practices mirror the same principles we've observed in individual training. For instance, decentralised leadership structures that empower local decision-making reflect the same logic as diversified individual coping strategies. Ecosystems that rely on redundant pathways and adaptive cycles function much like resilient learners who use multiple strategies to respond to stress. Similarly, psychological safety — critical in classrooms and outdoor training — is also foundational to inclusive workplace cultures that support innovation and adaptability.

We also see how system-level resilience can break down when it ignores the principles we rely on at the individual level. The failure of the levee system during Hurricane Katrina is a well-documented case: highly engineered infrastructure was meant to prevent disaster, but it did so through rigid, centralised design with little redundancy or adaptability. When failure came, it came catastrophically — and it disproportionately harmed those who were already most vulnerable (Folke et al., 2010; Meerow et al., 2016).

These analogies aren't just metaphors — they point to real overlaps in how resilience works across levels. Berkes and Ross (2016) argue that effective resilience planning requires attending to these nested systems, recognising that local resilience depends on both micro (individual/household) and macro (policy/society) dynamics. This insight is echoed by Ungar (2021), who brings together multidisciplinary perspectives to show that resilience is always multisystemic — shaped by biology, psychology, institutions, and environment alike.. The more clearly we see these intersections, the better equipped we are to design institutions that foster resilience by design, not just by accident.

Insights from SmartZeroCity 2025

What the SmartZeroCity conference made clear is that the conversation around urban resilience is expanding. Yes, we need smart infrastructure — but we also need smart food systems, inclusive governance, and integrated education strategies. One session on resilient food systems, led by Dr. Perez Ochieng — CEO of SACOMA Global Foods Innovation and a pioneer in health-oriented food system design — highlighted how interconnected our health, climate, and supply chains really are — and how food security, nutrition, and sustainable agriculture are central to both planetary and bodily resilience. Her work underscored the idea that smart food strategies are not just about sustainability, but about enabling people to thrive cognitively, physically, and socially in the face of disruption.

These discussions reinforced the idea that resilience doesn’t belong to one domain. Whether we’re looking at the microbiome or the power grid, the ability to adapt, transform, and sustain depends on diversity, feedback, and decentralisation. The takeaways weren’t just technical — they were human. They underscored how smart policies must reflect complex realities, and how no system is resilient if the people within it aren’t.

These insights also affirmed what we’ve been working toward in higher education: that we need to train people to think across systems, disciplines, and levels. Our forthcoming chapter on the EU resilience dashboards (Cagáňová, Krausova & Stehlikova, forthcoming) draws from this approach, highlighting the distinction between sustainability and resilience — and the risk of conflating the two. While sustainability often focuses on maintaining equilibrium over time, resilience emphasises a system’s ability to adapt, reorganise, and transform in response to disruption. We argue that what we truly need is sustainable resilience — in people, institutions, and policies — a capacity to remain committed to long-term goals while being flexible and adaptive in the face of change. Based on European innovation policy case studies, we show how resilience dashboards can help make these dynamics visible, providing integrated tools for aligning strategic learning, environmental monitoring, and leadership development. And that brings me back to how we teach it at NEWTON.

Teaching Resilience by Design

At NEWTON, we’ve taken these theoretical principles and turned them into practice through our X-tream training programme — a core part of how we develop adaptive leadership capacity in our students.

The programme is grounded in Meichenbaum’s (1985) theory of stress inoculation, which proposes that individuals can build psychological resilience by being safely and gradually exposed to manageable stressors. This idea has since been extended by researchers such as Driskell, Salas, and Johnston (1999), who found that stress exposure training can generalise across contexts, improving individual responses to unfamiliar or high-pressure environments.

Our model integrates these insights with behavioural diagnostics and team learning theories. Students first complete a series of diagnostic tools assessing their decision-making tendencies and emotional regulation strategies. Then they engage in outdoor simulations and team-based challenges that replicate uncertainty, competition, and strategic pressure. Throughout, students are monitored by wearable biometric sensors and provided with individualised feedback.

Just as in ecological resilience theory, it is not exposure alone that matters, but the system’s ability to absorb, reorganise, and learn from disturbance (Folke et al., 2010). And crucially, it must be the right kind of exposure — calibrated to the learner’s context, goals, and capacity. Too little stress produces no growth; too much, and the system may collapse or disengage. This idea of optimal stress calibration is central to our approach, allowing for personalised challenge levels that stretch but don’t overwhelm. We’ve observed that students with a broader portfolio of self-regulation strategies tend to gain the most from the programme. But critically, we also see that the quality of the learning environment — trust in facilitators, clarity of goals, and peer connection — plays an equally central role.

Angela Duckworth’s work on grit (2016) also informs our approach — showing that passion and perseverance can be nurtured over time, particularly when students are supported by environments that value effort, progress, and purpose. This aligns with recent neuroscience-backed studies by Tabibnia and Radecki (2018), who show that structured resilience training can rewire stress responses and enhance performance across settings. Margolis and Stoltz (2010) remind us that resilience is not a crash diet but a long-term training plan. At NEWTON, we don’t train students to be tough — we train them to be adaptive, reflective, and engaged in the systems around them. And in doing so, we hope to model a kind of learning institution that is itself resilient: responsive to change, shaped by evidence, and grounded in human development.

We teach resilience not as toughness, but as adaptability in context — supported by design. And in doing so, we help students see that resilient systems, like resilient people, don’t just bounce back. They learn, evolve, and connect.

Video

References

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Cagáňová, D., Krausova, A., & Velinov, E. (forthcoming). The Green Dimension of Resilience Dashboards: Bridging Systems Thinking and Leadership in European Innovation. In Smart City, Smart Life, Smart Education: Innovations in Business, Mobility, and IoT Technologies (EAI/Springer).

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