The Field Guide › Paper
A short, definitional paper (co-authored by Holling, whose adaptive-cycle work is in this corpus) that sorts out the conceptual confusion around 'resilience' by distinguishing three related attributes that together determine how a social-ecological system moves through time. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks: not a single quantity but a property with four components, most easily pictured through the metaphor of a stability landscape of basins and ridges. Latitude is how much the system can be deformed before it crosses a threshold into a different basin of attraction; resistance is how much disturbance it takes to produce that deformation; precariousness is how close the system currently sits to a threshold; and panarchy is the way dynamics at one scale are shaped by states and processes at the scales above and below. Adaptability is the capacity of the actors in the system to manage that resilience, to steer the system within or between basins deliberately. Transformability is the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when the existing one has become untenable, changing the state variables and the very shape of the landscape rather than staying within it. The value for psychological safety is a precise vocabulary for something the ecological framing in this corpus reaches for but often has to gesture at: the safety substrate of a team is not simply present or absent but sits somewhere in a stability landscape, with a latitude before a shock tips it into a different regime, a resistance to being pushed, and a precariousness that varies with circumstance. The three-way distinction is analytically useful in its own right: bouncing back from a rupture (resilience), deliberately adjusting how the group holds safety under changing conditions (adaptability), and recognising when a team's whole way of relating has to be remade rather than restored (transformability) are different tasks demanding different responses, and conflating them is a common error. The panarchy component also formalises the cross-scale point that a team's safety is constrained by the organisational and institutional levels around it, which the leader-centric account tends to miss. Published in the open-access journal Ecology and Society, it complements Holling's panarchy and adaptive-cycle work and connects to the resilience-engineering and Safety-II strands elsewhere in the corpus.