- Resilience, as a business and health concept, went from a peripheral, almost fringe idea in the early 1990s to a mainstream field now attracting billions in investment.
- The field’s biggest ongoing challenge isn’t a lack of evidence, it’s fragmentation: dozens of overlapping terms, disciplines, and providers competing to define what “resilience” actually means and how to measure it well.
- Organisations invest in resilience for three distinct reasons, genuine care, economic return, or fear of risk, and the strongest solutions address all three at once rather than picking one.
This is a personal history, told from the perspective of Resilience Institute’s founder, reflecting on decades spent building a field that didn’t really exist as a business category when it started. It’s a reflection written from a particular point in time, its predictions about the future of resilience are exactly that, predictions, worth reading as one experienced practitioner’s view rather than settled fact.
With a professor-of-paediatrics father, a psychiatric-social-worker mother, two competitive brothers, a background in special forces, triathlon, ocean swimming, surfski racing, medicine, and an MBA, building a resilience business seemed like it should have been straightforward. It hasn’t been. It’s been long, complex, and genuinely difficult, even while helping tens of thousands of people and many organisations along the way. Scaling what should, on paper, be a very good business has been maddeningly slow.
In the early days, family and medical colleagues were openly sceptical. Executives found the whole idea strange. Why build resilience deliberately, the thinking went, when it’s genetic? Why would an organisation involve itself in the personal territory of an employee’s health, suffering, emotions, and thoughts? Why prevent disease at all when treating it is so much more lucrative?
Today, “resilience,” alongside a long list of overlapping synonyms, sits at the centre of parenting, education, business, NGOs, government, infrastructure, ecosystems, and sport. Billions are being invested in new ventures. It’s become something of a celebrity feeding frenzy, genuine experts working alongside gurus, placebos, and outright scams. This reflection covers the big challenges, the foundations that actually matter, the science and evidence, real mistakes made along the way, and where the field might be heading.
Discovering Resilience
“Resilience” first entered my consciousness in 1994, through Daryl Conner’s Managing at the Speed of Change, which introduced the concept’s role in leading organisational change. The underlying idea wasn’t new. My parents had spent their careers using medicine to shape better lives. Sport taught me the discipline required for genuine expertise. Special forces training revealed the real depth of human will. Sports medicine gave the whole thing a modern scientific frame. My own angle on it was simple: could business and organisations be used to build the capacities of excellence across more communities, not just individuals who could already afford it?
At the time, health insurers had already studied the impact of simple physical wellbeing programmes. A good programme combined leadership engagement, health risk assessment, and relevant lifestyle education, and the early studies were consistent: health risk factors dropped, sickness events and costs fell, absenteeism and turnover declined, and morale and productivity improved. Health status improved, sickness-care costs fell, and organisations saw a genuine positive return, studies of the era suggested a net present value of $2 to $3 for every $1 invested, in a US market carrying roughly double the health costs of most developed economies. In publicly funded health systems, the financial incentive for organisations to manage health risk directly was far weaker.
In 1989, we were building simple health risk assessments and basic workshops on exercise, nutrition, and health risk management. By 1992, I’d built the first version of a health check designed to be completed electronically. Early adopters existed, but they were almost entirely senior executives and professionals.
A client asking for “stress management” to be added to an executive health programme led me to Merv Dickinson, who held a PhD in leadership psychology. Together we designed interventions to build self-awareness and self-mastery, and that partnership became the foundation of our work in executive leadership development. Merv mentored me directly into the territory of emotion, mind, and spirit, and how to actually facilitate leadership teams through it. Our first resilience programmes launched from there, and genuinely progressive businesses started paying attention.
After an MBA and five years running an executive health clinic, Resilience Institute finally launched. The intent was clear: engage leaders directly, run genuinely rigorous health assessments, and deliver evidence-based, motivational workshops that actually changed behaviour. It worked. Physical, emotional, and mental measures moved in the right direction, and the engagements themselves carried real, visible energy.
Through most of the 2000s, competition was minimal, the market was tiny, and the whole concept sat at the periphery of business thinking. Building a viable business in that environment was genuinely tough, but it was a productive stretch. We ran health checks on thousands of people, delivered hundreds of workshops, and brought the concept into Australia, learning along the way how to collect and present health and resilience data properly, while respecting privacy and security.
As emotional intelligence, neurobiology, and the resilience concept itself matured, training with Daniel Goleman and later Andrew Shatte sharpened how we assessed and coached the emotional and cognitive dimensions of resilience directly. Small teams formed across Australia, Europe, Singapore, and the UK, and our reputation grew steadily through organisations like PwC, GE, AXA, and several major banks, each pushing our thinking further.
By 2014, digitising further was clearly necessary. Training was moving online, and the app economy was expanding fast. We ran psychometrics and analytics across our assessments, experimented with new platforms, converted our workshop content into short micro-training videos, and began exploring how tracking and artificial intelligence could be built directly into the platform. The Resilience app was born out of that period.
At the same time, the wider world woke up to resilience. It went mainstream. Organisations actively sought it out. Entrepreneurs, scientists, and celebrities rushed in to build businesses doing good while making money, with enormous variability in quality, from overnight charlatans to genuinely credible, deep specialists. Hundreds of start-ups now invest billions building solutions, and the self-improvement app market has expanded into the tens of thousands of individual products. Established consulting firms have rebranded themselves as experts overnight. It’s a genuinely chaotic market, whether you’re a provider, an organisational buyer, or an individual trying to make sense of it all.
Defining Resilience
Resilience today sits roughly where logistics sat during World War II: the challenge is integrating a vast number of interacting, moving parts, each guarded by specialists defending their own domain and hoping to dominate the solution. Will it be sports scientists, psychologists, neurobiologists, doctors, coaches, technology companies, or the major consultancies who define the field? The honest answer is probably some combination of all of them, which is exactly the problem.
The first real challenge is language. “Wellness” means different things to different people, and depression alone can legitimately be addressed through multiple, genuinely different approaches. Are you buying wellness, mental health, wellbeing, emotional intelligence, mental skills, stress mastery, peak performance, or medical services? Making sense of both the need and the right solution requires two axes: level of function, from diagnosed disease through to genuine excellence, and the specific territory being addressed. Testing your own understanding against both axes tends to expose real confusion fast, and providers, purchasers, and researchers would all benefit from more of that clarity up front.
The second challenge is integrating these concepts into a realistic, evidence-based, practical framework, one that respects each contributing field without letting any single one claim the whole territory. A psychologist might initially believe CBT is the only real answer to depression, and with genuine wisdom and flexibility, come to acknowledge that sleep, fitness, connection, breath training, or medication may work better for a given client. A good diagnostic and development model defines level of function and the realistic options available, since even genuine experts experience mental illness themselves, and people who are genuinely unwell can still benefit meaningfully from non-medical interventions alongside clinical care. Some people naturally understand the world through a physical lens; others through emotion, mind, or a more spiritual frame. There are many legitimate paths to resilience, and a good coach, trainer, or consultant recognises which lens a given client is actually using and adjusts accordingly, rather than insisting on one universal framework.
Measuring Resilience
Any assessment can increase self-awareness to some degree, but a genuinely good one has to be evidence-based, integrated across domains, and practical. Most existing tools rest on a single framework, say CBT, address a single level of function, typically depression, and cover only one dimension of resilience, usually mental or emotional. Many psychological assessments were originally built and validated on university student populations, and don’t always translate cleanly to other communities.
A genuinely good assessment needs to be clear, simple, appropriately short, reliable, and valid, which takes years of psychometric work across different populations, real experimentation with reporting formats, and careful evaluation of whether interventions actually move the needle. The web and mobile apps have transformed the practical ability to run assessments at scale, but people only complete them consistently if the experience itself is genuinely compelling.
Wearable technology now adds objective measures directly, steps, heart rate, sleep, heart rate variability, even blood pressure, which combined with subjective self-report is pushing assessment tools toward real power: potentially a coherent panel spanning physical measures (heart rate, blood pressure, heart rate variability), emotional measures (heart rate variability, the ratio of positive to negative emotion), and mental measures (focus duration, task-switching, idea generation, situational agility).
Evidence for Resilience
Investment decisions tend to come from three distinct places. Some organisations invest because it’s genuinely the right thing to do, they value their people, want to reduce suffering, and want to be recognised as a good employer; their people tend to engage wholeheartedly as a result. Others invest purely on economics, asking specifically what financial return the investment produces; if the numbers don’t clearly show it, they simply aren’t in the market, regardless of what their people might actually need. Others invest out of fear, which is exactly why safety and mental health services can be so lucrative: these organisations are genuinely afraid of risk and being held publicly accountable, so they gravitate toward mitigating risk concentrated in a small number of people while the broader workforce quietly disengages.
A genuinely good resilience solution addresses all three motivations at once: helping organisations understand and mitigate real risk, improving the function and productivity of their people, and supporting a genuine claim to being a good employer. Demonstrating that value convincingly is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, requiring an evidence-based, integrated framework, an effective assessment, a comprehensive reporting dashboard, both face-to-face and digital engagement, meaningful goal-setting, and follow-up reassessment over time.
There is genuinely good evidence that resilience initiatives deliver real results. Many providers still focus narrowly on single-factor gains, health improvement, positivity, optimism, in isolation. Resilience Institute’s own data shows something broader: resilience as a whole improves following training, and every one of the underlying categories and factors measured shows improvement in post-training assessment, not just the single metric a narrower programme might target. A genuinely good assessment can also pinpoint exactly where an individual or organisation’s risks and strengths sit, so training investment can be targeted precisely rather than applied uniformly, which remains one of the biggest open opportunities for organisations that take this seriously.
The Future of Resilience
Many of the classic survival-era risks and fitness tests have been engineered out of daily life for most people. Natural selective pressure is, for now, largely held at bay. Much of the physical, emotional, and mental suffering that remains traces back to self-neglect: the pressures of modern life produce a slow-burn distress that human physiology genuinely isn’t well prepared for. The costs, lifestyle disease, loneliness, distress, anxiety, depression, are enormous and continuing to grow. With nature’s usual pressures largely removed, communities, families, and individuals increasingly have to take ownership of resilience directly. Neglecting body, emotion, and mind carries a real personal and community cost; deliberately building these resources produces real, outsized benefit, especially when nature does eventually deliver a shock, fire, flood, earthquake, or otherwise.
The evidence for taking this seriously is clear, and the cost of continued inaction is increasingly obvious. Enlightened communities and organisations are already acting on it. Assessments will likely continue combining with data analytics and artificial intelligence, offering increasingly precise insight into where risks and opportunities actually sit and how to engage them. Implementation, training, and coaching will likely shift progressively from external consultants toward in-house resources, the same way an elite sports team builds its own extensive support and coaching infrastructure rather than outsourcing it entirely.
Some people are already fully on board, taking complete ownership of tracking and building their own resilience, actively seeking out genuine experts, building daily disciplines, and experimenting with new tools and devices, and genuinely thriving as a result. The Netflix series Grace and Frankie offers a good, watchable example of this kind of deliberate, later-life reinvention in action. Many more sit right on the threshold; with the right communication and engagement, they could take advantage of resilience just as quickly. Others remain resistant, or simply so overwhelmed by other pressures that self-neglect has become a default way of life. That group will need real kindness paired with wisdom and courage, sometimes a firmer hand and more intensive support to help them genuinely bounce, grow, connect, and find flow. That remains, honestly, the grittiest part of this whole challenge.
Resilience went from a fringe idea questioned by colleagues and executives alike to a field attracting billions in investment. The next chapter is less about proving it matters and more about building it well.
