The modern meaning of resilience is that of endurance under strain – the capability of regaining an original shape after bending, stretching or compression.

The word resilient is sometimes used in context of a patient recovering from surgery or simply someone able to recover quickly from shock.

And, in modern telecoms usage, resilience is used more generally to imply the unlikelihood of network failure – with or without codified Service Level Guarantees or Assurances – or, with well-designed fibre access, self-healing networks.

Economic resilience, the capacity for an entire national economy to recover from a major depression, is often used in speculative discussion of the relative merits of different fiscal environments – but is surely not meant to deny change or imply that things will fall back exactly into their original shape.

On the other hand, and from the same root, the verb resile is most definitely used in legal circles to express shrinking back – maybe with a hint of compromise, resignation, loss of confidence or just giving up the struggle – but generally not in the more positive sense of renewal or bouncing back.

The semantics are important, particularly in the context of ‘cuts’ – a government’s programme for lowering public sector expenditure and balancing the books. Hamish McRae, writing this week in The Independent, points out that the 2015 predictions for national debt as a proportion of GDP vary considerably – UK 67%, Germany 80%, US 100% and Japan 250%.

Our UK debt projections may seem high relative to the 40% level in 2008 before the global recession but others have it worse and the scope for enhancing our (relative) competitiveness and flexibility is considerable.

Change is not only unavoidable but long overdue.   But, in trying to manage those changes, or as Ellen MacArthur says ‘re-think the future’, there is little point in trying to persuade people to get by ‘using less and less and being gloomy’. Repeated calls to use less are, literally, useless.

In tackling major issues like future energy provision or climate change, reduction of waste, or finding new sources of employment and economic growth, the resilience we need is the gritty determination and aspiration to ‘rethink and redesign the future’ rather than a return to our earlier but, in so many ways, flawed state.

To many the Autumn gloom of impending cuts, of massive employment disruption, of readjustments to family economies and all-round organisational upheaval, will not seem to be the time for positive aspirations.   But if we are not to resile – to shrink back – we need resilience-plus, not just for recovery but for finding new and better ways forward.

Hamish McRae will, as an economist, see this as a natural evolutionary step – necessity being the mother of innovation – but even he, one suspects, will see the value of increased public expenditure to encourage local infrastructure projects that make it far easier for many more of us to change our own and others’ futures.

In Spanish, the cólera of ‘Love in the time of cholera’ can also denote rage, anger, or social strife.  Resilience in the context of cuts, for many organisations, individuals or families, is deeply desirable and must mean more than a return to the normality of the last generation.

__________________________

Readers of this editorial also read 'Sustainability?' and 'Communicating Communications'