What I Learned While Tracing Resilience Across Time—and How Leaders Can Put It Into Practice

I’d been hearing the word “resilience” everywhere these past few months: on panels, in mission statements, in board retreats, staff meetings, and strategy decks. And I started to feel uneasy. Because while the word was being used constantly, it was often deployed like a mantra—vague, moralizing, strangely empty. Something you’re supposed to have. Something you’re supposed to be. Or, worse, I hear people equating endurance with resilience. Holding on. Pushing through. Grinding. That never sat right with me. Endurance may get you through the week, but it doesn’t teach you how to recover, adapt, or evolve. I wanted more to offer leaders and teams than “hold tight.” How do we actually build it, in ourselves, in our teams, in our organizations?

That hunger to be useful sent me searching. Strangely enough, it carried me into archaeology.

The Study

My curiosity led me to a recent study published in Nature that spanned thirty thousand years of human history. A team of researchers from across the globe analyzed 40,000 archaeological radiocarbon dates from sixteen regions. They identified 154 collapses—moments when populations shrank, fields failed, or settlements emptied out.

But the study wasn’t just about collapse. The researchers asked: How did societies recover? How quickly? How fully? The findings startled me. Societies that faced frequent disruptions recovered more fully. Collapse wasn’t only devastation. It was rehearsal. Rehearsal built reflexes. Reflexes became culture.

Four Lessons from the Long Arc of Collapse

The more I sat with the study, the more I recognized patterns that spoke to the organizations I work with today.

Lesson 01: Disturbance Builds Capacity

In the Cape of southern Africa, drought was not an occasional catastrophe but a recurring reality. Foragers learned to move with the seasons, sustaining wide networks of exchange so that when one valley failed, another could provide. What looked fragile from the outside was in fact a culture trained by repetition. Each disruption rehearsed the next.

Lesson 02: Agriculture Brought Both Risk and Resilience

In the Andean highlands, farming exposed people to famine, pests, and crop failure. But fragility also forced invention. Terraced fields carved into steep slopes, irrigation canals that stretched further each season, storage pits that carried food through lean years—risk drove adaptation, and adaptation became resilience.

Lesson 03: Collapse as Cultural Transmission

In India’s Middle Ganga Valley, collapse did not erase knowledge; it repurposed it. Rituals, political institutions, and new settlement patterns emerged from disruption. Memory became instruction. Collapse became story, and story carried survival forward.

Lesson 04: Not All Collapses Are Equal

Rigid systems broke. Flexible ones bent. In northern China, monocultures left communities brittle. When the climate shifted, their systems cracked and recovery lagged. By contrast, in Eastern North America, migration and coalition were already part of the cultural fabric. Flexibility allowed people to bend and recover more quickly.

Framing the Diagnostic

As enlightening as these learning were, the great and my big takeaway surprise was this: Resilient societies weren’t the biggest or the most resource-abundant. They weren’t the ones that managed to avoid collapse altogether. They were the ones that learned how to recover.

I used that knowledge to design a diagnostic that would allow my clients to evaluate organizational resilience. What I am offering is a mirror. A way of asking: What are we practicing, collectively? What systems help us bounce forward?

The resilience diagnostic features three key pillars. They are rooted in the archaeological lessons and combined with core principles of Adaptive Leadership, developed by Ronald Heifetz and colleagues at Harvard, which focuses on leading through change, especially in times of uncertainty, complexity, and disruption.

Organizational Resilience Diagnostic

Pillar 1: Learning, Adapting, Evolving

• Our organization reflects on past challenges to inform current decisions.
  
• We treat mistakes as learning moments, not blame moments.
  
• We have mechanisms (e.g., after-action reviews) to extract and circulate lessons.
  
• We evolve our strategy or operations based on what we’ve learned—not just what we planned.
  

Pillar 2: Innovating and Collaborating Under Pressure

• During pressure periods, we pivot rather than double down on failing plans.
  
• Psychological safety allows for experimentation and dissent.
  
• Cross-functional collaboration increases under stress.
  
• We have individuals or teams who model adaptive thinking and bring others with them.
  

Pillar 3: Shared Learning and Cultural Transmission

• When one team learns something, others can easily access it.
  
• We codify and carry knowledge (templates, mentorship, storytelling).
  
• New practices are reinforced—not just introduced and forgotten.
  
• Senior leaders model openness to learning and adaptation.
  

What Leaders Discovered

When I introduced the diagnostic to a group of thirty senior leaders from a national organization I had been supporting at their summer retreat, the shift in the room was immediate. These were people who had lived through wave after wave of disruption—political attacks, funding uncertainties, leadership changes, reductions in force—and they were hungry for a way to name and measure what resilience actually looked like in practice.

As we worked through the framework together, patterns started to emerge. Collaboration under pressure came easily to them. They knew how to rally in a crisis, how to close ranks and deliver when it mattered most. But as the discussion deepened, another reality surfaced: their learning didn’t always travel. Insights remained trapped within teams. Institutional memory leaked away with every staff departure. What they carried in strength at the level of grit and urgency, they lacked in the systems that would allow resilience to compound over time.

It was a sobering realization, but not a paralyzing one. In fact, the candor seemed to free them. People began voicing practical next steps: codifying postmortems, building rituals for storytelling, mentoring newer colleagues so that knowledge didn’t just vanish with turnover. I watched resilience move from abstraction to something tangible, something they could actually embed, measure, and improve. In that moment, it no longer felt like a buzzword. It felt like a practice they could own.

The CORE Framework

In the midst of developing the organizational diagnostic, I found myself remembering the CORE framework. It was something I had first encountered during the pandemic, when so many of us were trying to name and strengthen our own reserves. Sitting with the archaeology study, the connections came back to me with new urgency

Developed by the Center for Creative Leadership amid the COVID-19 outbreak and building on psychological research, the CORE model defines resilience as a dynamic capability that lives at the intersection of four domains:

• Mental resilience
• Emotional resilience
• Physical resilience
• Social resilience

Resilience is not a fixed trait. It is a system of habits, mindsets, and behaviors that can be practiced and strengthened. Each of these domains maps to one or two specific behaviors. I flipped those behaviors into questions—are they drivers of change, or are they reinforcing the status quo? That translation became the foundation for the Leader Resilience Diagnostic.

When It Gets Personal

After working through the organizational diagnostic, the group took the CORE diagnostic at the individual leader level. That’s when the conversation shifted from systems to selves. Sitting with thirty leaders who had already been candid about their teams, I watched them turn inward.

The honesty that followed was striking. Some admitted they had never modeled rest for their staff, confessing that they still carried the belief that grinding without pause was proof of their commitment. Others reflected on how little time they gave to gratitude or connection, acknowledging that their drive to execute often came at the expense of presence.

Because the framework was presented not as judgment but as a mirror, the responses were unguarded. No one postured or pretended to have resilience figured out. Instead, the group recognized that resilience wasn’t a trait that some people had and others didn’t. It was a system they could choose to strengthen, one they had a responsibility to practice, and one they could see clearly laddered up into the culture and performance of the organization itself. In that space of vulnerability, I saw leaders beginning to imagine what it would look like to lead differently.

The Resilience System

After introducing both tools, I zoomed back out with the group to show how they fit together. The organizational diagnostic gave them a way to see resilience at the systems level: how their culture, structures, and practices helped or hindered their ability to bounce forward. The CORE diagnostic, by contrast, brought the lens down to the individual leader: how habits, mindsets, and daily behaviors shaped the very culture they were trying to build. Taken together, the two tools reveal resilience as a system that moves between levels. The ancient lessons provide the blueprint. The CORE framework offers the architecture. The behaviors become the rituals that bring resilience to life.

Resilience, in this light, is not a cliché. It is not sloganeering. It is a practice leaders can design, measure, and embed over time. Collapse is rehearsal for what comes next. The question isn’t whether disruption will come—it already has. The real question is: What are you rehearsing right now, and what will you pass forward?

Resilience in Practice: Ancient Blueprints, Human Architecture, Modern Rituals

An Invitation

I designed these tools to be used. If you are curious, take the leader diagnostic for yourself. Try the organizational diagnostic with your team. See what surfaces. Notice where you’re strong, and where resilience slips through the cracks.

Shortly after introducing the framework to the leaders this past summer, the chief people officer wrote to me: “Thank you for giving our team a concrete way to talk about resilience. It moved us beyond abstraction into actions we could measure and embed.” That is exactly the point. Resilience becomes real when it is practiced, not simply admired.

And if you want support—if you’d like a partner to help you introduce this framework, or to build something similar for your organization—feel free to reach out. My hope is that these tools give you a mirror and a starting point. Resilience is not just something to invoke in crisis. It’s something you can strengthen, beginning now.

Cold War Lessons for Philanthropy and the Future of Coalitions

 

On a sweltering June day in 1950, NAACP convention delegates gathered inside a Boston ballroom to vote on a controversial resolution. Speeches were made. Shouting ensued. The headlines afterward told the story: delegates had voted, by overwhelming majority, to bar communists and banish infected chapters from holding membership or leadership positions. This was not just a procedural matter—NAACP leaders Walter White and Roy Wilkins championed the purge, believing it was the only way to preserve the organization’s legitimacy in an era of heightened suspicion. The Baltimore Sun reported the decision matter-of-factly, a measure aimed at safeguarding the organization’s reputation amid intensifying Cold War scrutiny.

But Black press accounts, like The New York Age, carried a more somber tone, noting the symbolic and strategic cost of cutting loose comrades who had marched, organized, and fought alongside the NAACP through the Depression and World War II.

This wasn’t an abstract beef. The heat of war and paranoia was no abstraction—it was everywhere, pressing down on every decision. In January of that same year, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in New York and sentenced to five years in prison. Days later, the former Los Alamos physicist Klaus Fuchs was arrested and charged with passing atomic secrets to the Soviets—an act that, once traced, exposed an entire spy network that included Harry Gold and David Greenglass and eventually led to the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. One week after Fuchs’s arrest, Senator Joe McCarthy delivered his infamous Wheeling speech, waving a list of supposed Communists in the State Department. Though unsubstantiated, the charge ignited a four-year inquisition that fundamentally altered American politics. In no uncertain terms, the Cold War’s fuse had caught. And in the middle of all of this, President Truman announced to Americans the United States’ intention to develop the Hydrogen Bomb--a weapon orders of magnitude more destructive than the bombs dropped on Japan five years earlier.. And then, two days after the NAACP vote, North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel, officially turning the cold war hot.

Within this charged climate, the NAACP’s decision to expel communists was both understandable and devastating. Understandable, because the price of association had become unbearable. Devastating, because what was lost was not just individuals but also an agenda that stretched beyond access to integrated schools and lunch counters, beyond the ballot box, toward wealth, housing, labor, and global solidarity.

The loss was made visible in the isolation of two towering figures. W.E.B. Du Bois, founder, scholar, and internationalist had already been expelled by the NAACP board the previous year because of his vocal support for Henry Wallace against President Truman. The expulsion left the now 82 year-old exposed, and the government took advantage, indicting and ultimately trying him for "failing to register as an agent of a foreign principal" under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Paul Robeson—once celebrated as America’s foremost symbol of racial progress—became a pariah for insisting that Black freedom was inseparable from labor rights and anti-colonial struggle. In March, citing a flurry of angry phone calls, NBC “indefinitely postponed” his scheduled appearance on Today With Mrs. Roosevelt. A network executive told the New York Times that “no good purpose would be served in having him speak on the issue of Negroes in politics.” Neither the NAACP nor any other mainstream civil rights organization came to his defense. Soon, NBC’s ban spread across other networks, effectively erasing the most recognizable Black man in the world from public consciousness just as television was becoming the nation’s new public square.

Other radicals were either driven underground or hauled off to prison. Their exile marked the shrinking of a coalition that, from World War II through the early days of the Cold War, had found an uneasy but steady footing. It had united labor, artists, clergy, students, and internationalists around a broad vision of democracy. By 1950, that coalition fractured under the weight of state pressure and internal mistrust. And it bears remembering: the vote skewed heavily by generation. Younger members of the NAACP opposed the measure overwhelmingly, calling it “[u]ndemocratic and playing into the hands of the enemies.” They weren’t listened to.

Meanwhile, a new moderate liberal ground was being laid. In 1946, the Harvard historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., alleged that the Communist Party was “sinking its tentacles into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” A year later co-found Americans for Democratic Action alongside NAACP board member Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1949, Schlesinger Jr. published The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, where he argued that liberal democracy was besieged by two totalitarian extremes—fascism and communism—and could only survive by defending a vigorous, anti-communist “center.” The book became a beacon in 1950, making Schlesinger the father of a new liberal movement. Schlesinger had addressed the convention the night before the NAACP vote, stating “If totalitarianism can only succeed as it whips and enslaves minorities, democracy can only succeed as it protects and liberates them.”

At the same time, Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, contributed an essay to the international bestseller The God That Failed, describing his disillusionment with the Communist Party.

These texts provided a kind of cultural permission structure for moderates—legitimizing suspicion of the left, and giving intellectual muscle to the NAACP’s narrowing.

Sound familiar? This is the posture that intellectuals like Ezra Klein and Bari Weiss have taken and in so doing ridden to new media fame—and, I presume, riches. A centering maneuver in times of heat, offering a narrative of balance and reasonableness by disavowing radicals.

Pulling back to the present

This history surfaced during a conversation I had with a foundation board member while preparing for a session on what it means to support racial justice now. We were wrestling with the same questions the NAACP faced in 1950: what risks are tolerable, what lines are worth holding, and how do you sustain a coalition when outside forces are working overtime to splinter it?

I remember saying to the board member: history doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it does echo. The NAACP leaders thought they were protecting the organization by narrowing their tent. In the short term, they may have been right. But in the long run, the broader movement lost something it never fully regained. Looking back at 1950 helps us hear those echoes today. It reminds us what’s at stake when we choose survival by exclusion over solidarity by repair.

And that, ultimately, was the conclusion the board member and I reached: coalition support isn’t optional, it’s the shield. Funders will always feel the instinct to guard their reputation and resources, but the real reputational risk is being remembered as those who walked away when movements needed them most. Memory is long. What seems like the logical choice in the moment—protecting money and tax status, staying out of court—can become the very thing history won’t forgive.

The civil rights movement pressed on, and the victories were real. Jim Crow fell. Access to integrated schools, public accommodations, and the ballot box expanded. A generation of Black Americans seized new opportunities in public life, education, and employment. Yet the demand for wealth redistribution, housing justice, and worker power never recovered from the split. Organized labor, weakened by its own anti-communist purges, retreated just as deindustrialization and urban disinvestment began to reshape Black life.

By the late 1960s, Dr. King returned to the unfinished business: calling for a Poor People’s Campaign, opposing Vietnam, and standing with striking sanitation workers in Memphis. He tried to rebuild the bridge that had been dismantled in 1950, insisting that racial justice and economic justice were one struggle. His assassination froze that agenda in its tracks.

Looking back with the benefit of 75 years of hindsight, both sides got things right and wrong

Moderate institutions

• Got right: They secured durability, kept a national foothold, and carried forward disciplined legal and policy wins. They made it possible for the movement to withstand scrutiny and to score incremental gains at the federal level.
  

• Got wrong: They attacked their former allies with vociferous condemnations, branding them as Reds and traitors. By narrowing the coalition and cutting ties to radicals, they sacrificed the broader economic and internationalist vision of justice.
  

Radical currents

• Got right: They insisted on labor rights, redistribution, and international solidarity. They kept alive a horizon beyond access—an insistence that freedom had to mean more than formal equality.
  

• Got wrong: In their justified rage at the U.S. government’s failure to protect Black life, they clouded their judgment in terms of long-term strategy. Many aligned themselves vocally with Soviet Russia and later Maoist China—alliances that proved shortsighted and vulnerable to attack. This stance left them open to the moderates’ condemnations and cost them broader public legitimacy.
  

The most consequential error was shared: allowing the wedge to become a canyon. Once factions defined themselves against each other, there was no bridge long enough to reach the other side. What had once been a coalition of difference became isolated camps lobbing grenades across the divide. This is the cautionary tale for us today.

Four Lessons Worth Considering

1. Name division as a tactic early. In 1950, anti-communism was a deliberate wedge. “Anti-woke” attacks, selective invitations, and reputational smears today work the same way. Recognizing division as a strategy of repression is the first step to resisting it.
   

2. Protect the radical flank. Robeson and Du Bois weren’t liabilities; they were assets who broadened the horizon of what freedom could mean. Every movement needs pragmatists and horizon-setters. The challenge is not to choose between them but to make space for both.
   

3. Invest in conflict infrastructure. Disagreement is inevitable. In 1950, conflict calcified into rupture. What was missing was the muscle of repair—the ability to fight and still stay in community. Philanthropy can help fund that capacity today.
   

4. Refuse respectability bargains. The NAACP secured institutional respectability at the price of a larger agenda. Coalitions today must resist trading unity and vision for access or short-term wins.

When I step back from that conversation, what strikes me is the possibility. If the NAACP’s choice in 1950 closed doors, funders today can choose to keep them open. A recent example is the “Statement on the Fundamental Freedom of Speech,” where more than 100 foundations joined together to affirm the importance of dialogue and dissent in a pluralistic democracy. It shows philanthropy can act as a coalition itself. The real question and test is whether that same spirit and principle will extend to the movements they support — especially when those movements say things that are unpopular or uncomfortable.

How Philanthropy Can Help

1. Resource Solidarity Maintenance. Fund coalition infrastructure: convenings, relationship-building, shared communications and legal support. Treat solidarity work as a core budget line, not a side project.
   

2. Create a Radical Flank Insurance Fund. When a coalition partner is attacked, help cover the costs—legal, security, communications, and bridge funding—so the whole movement doesn’t fracture.
   

3. Underwrite conflict and repair. Pay for trusted facilitators, restorative processes, and retreats where differences can be aired without threatening the coalition’s survival.
   

4. Operate as if your reputation is on the line. The temptation will always be to protect reputation and resources. But memory is long, and silence will be remembered as complicity. What is being given up without even a fight? Funders must recognize that their credibility is a form of cover, and when they withdraw it, coalitions are left exposed.
   

5. Coalition support as cover. Coalition work is not a luxury—it is the shield. Funders have the opportunity to help movements withstand wedge tactics by resourcing coalitions not just to win campaigns, but to survive assaults on their legitimacy.
   

The delegates in Boston thought they were saving the NAACP from destruction. In one sense, they were right; the organization endured and scored victories. But in another sense, they were wrong. By choosing survival through exclusion, they sacrificed breadth and possibility. The consequence was a civil rights movement that toppled Jim Crow but left its economic vision unfinished.

We cannot know what might have happened had those coalitions held together. But we can refuse to repeat the mistake. Today, when philanthropy is tempted to reward moderation and distance itself from radicals, it can instead choose to fund breadth, solidarity, and repair. The lesson from 1950 is clear: it is easier to split apart than to stitch back together. Philanthropy’s role is to make it safer, braver, and more sustainable to stay whole.