A Road Map for Cross Operationalization of Resilience

Resilience is "a natural, malleable, and system-level property that during stressful conditions facilitates optimal performance of complex adaptive systems in the space between stimuli and response." Over the past three decades resilience has been increasingly recognized as a property that enables systems to become better at responding to change. Resilient systems may operate along a hormetic basis. However, most published work focuses on linking the concept to the previously existing concepts in rather an isolated way. No one has yet offered a systemic perspective that spans across multiple domains. In this chapter, I attempt to fill this gap by providing a timeline for resilience. The timeline highlights an underlying evolutionary trend in the growing literature of resilience and demonstrates that decades of work converge on a common ground of creating a cognitive shift in individual and societal perception of change. With the increasing pace of urbanization and concerns over ensuring the sustainability of planetary boundaries and well-being of social systems, the implications are important. By becoming focused on the role of stress in shaping societal cognitive capacities, the timeline of resilience can shape a road map for global cross-scale dialogs on the future operationalization of resilience. This provides useful insights in marrying the two concepts: hormesis leads to resilience. This understanding unifies many themes and approaches presented in this book in a more cross-disciplinary way, with the ultimate aim to improve human health.