Session Description

Every resilience talk tells you to bounce back. Ecology says you won't - but that's not the failure you think it is.

Forests, economies, and organizations move through the same four phases - growth, hardening stability, release, reorganization. Each rewards completely different behavior. The discipline that made you successful in one is what makes you brittle in the next. Organizations don't fail because leaders lack grit; they fail running conservation-phase playbooks in a release-phase world, then calling the resulting exhaustion a personal failing.

That includes you. Leaders sit inside these cycles, not above them, and depleted reserves transmit downward faster than any memo. Your capacity is load-bearing infrastructure.

Drawing on complexity science, behavioral research, and considerably more collapse than anyone plans for, this session offers a diagnostic rather than a pep talk: identify your phase, spot the brittleness that accumulates during good times, and read your own depletion as system data rather than character weakness.

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:

• Diagnose which phase of the adaptive cycle - growth, conservation, release, or reorganization - their team or organization is actually in, and identify the specific management behaviors that succeed in one phase and sabotage the next View accountability as a shared commitment and not a top-down command. Understand performative resilience and how it shows up for you today.
• Recognize the brittleness that accumulates during stability, distinguishing between efficiency and resilience, and audit where their organization has optimized itself into fragility (single points of failure, eliminated redundancy, no slack)
• Account for their own position in the system, using the principle that faster, smaller cycles propagate upward and slower ones constrain downward - so that a leader's own phase state becomes information to manage rather than a variable to ignore.

About the Speaker

Karla Starr is the coauthor of Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers with Chip Heath. Her first book, Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others, was a Fast Company best book of the year.