The adaptive cycle as a dynamic map for resilience thinking

Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties. Making progress requires going beyond any authoritative expertise to mobilize discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses, and generating the new capacity to thrive anew.

Systems need to be managed not only for productivity or stability, they also need to be managed for resilience—the ability to recover from perturbation, the ability to restore or repair themselves.

Adaptive work involves orchestrating multiple and passionately held points of view. In an ideal world, people would not be threatened by the existence of contrasting viewpoints. Instead, they would view them simply as different pieces of the larger picture that everyone needs to see.