This week’s 12 links:
- Dead link for an old blog post on the Workflowy website (a sort of digital notebook to organise information in). Just looked at what it does and annoyingly, it looks excellent. I do NOT need to adopt a new system. I do not. NO!
- Ditto dead link.
- A silly video about drinking only water for 30 days. I have no idea why I saved this, I am very notinterested.
- Gretchen Rubin‘s website – she’s an American writer who talks about her pursuit of happiness and building habits. I think I used to follow her posts on Facebook an eternity ago (in the days when I had a Facebook account, so that’s going back a fair bit!) but not sure why I saved the website homepage. I think this was of its time for me, and is no longer of high interest.
- A video Facebook post by Gretchen Rubin (from 2015!!!!!!) about her Better Than Before Day-by-Day Journal (“change your habits, change your life”). At least this explains the previous link!
- More Gretchen Rubin writing.
- Landed on the Behance blog, redirected from an old blog post from when it was called 99u.com. Something about “Purpose Is the New Bottom Line”? Ah well, gone now anyway.
- Betterhelp website (online therapy). Don’t remember why I saved this, looks like I got there from a Facebook link.
- Dead link, it seems to have been for a course on resilience coaching.
- Dead link, an info page on resilience coaching.
- Dead link, a different info page on resilience coaching.
- Dead link, article on how to cultivate resilience. I obviously went down a little rabbit hole at that time, but interestingly EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT IS GONE. Resilience has become a bit of a dirty word (mainly because capitalism made it a personal responsibility-slash-failing, when resilience is a property of systems not individuals*.)
Tags: complexity, systems change
My time to read:15 minutes! An easy one this week because this lot was so out of date.
* Resilienceis a core concept in ecology. It is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, undergo change, and still retain its essential functions and structure. It is key to sustainability. A system’s ability to recover from shocks or changes is not solely dependent on the resilience of its individual components, but rather on the complex interactions and feedback loops within the entire system. Individual adaptability is important, but a system’s overall capacity to cope with stress is influenced by factors like networks of relationships**, connective structures, and available resources. Even individually resilient individuals will be overwhelmed if the system they are part of is not resilient.
** I was reading this case study of work in Barking and Dagenham Children’s Social Services today, and what stood out was that they asked their social workers to think differently (like activists), take more risks (‘hopeful disruption’), etc – and to do that effectively they have to attend to the relationships with the families and children they are supporting. “But is it realistic to expect social workers to bring an activist approach to a role with such high pressure and high risks?” The article argues for the value and quality of service achieved through relational work, and the risk and consequences of *not* doing so. I also think that in order to work this way, the teams need to cultivate great relationships internally, with colleagues and managers, and be part of a dynamic, learning, supportive system.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash