Tomorrowmind: Building Intra- and Interpersonal Resilience at Work and Beyond

Today’s world of work threatens our personal and organizational health in a thousand ways. The level of uncertainty, volatility, and constant change is unprecedented in human history. And yet it’s the same 70,000-year-old forager’s brain we will need to use to navigate it. How can we not only survive but thrive in this whitewater environment?

Our course begins with the key principles of Tomorrowmind (Atria, January 2023), including the five psychological meta-skills–PRISM– most essential for flourishing as individuals, leaders, and organizations in the whitewater:

• Prospection (P): the ability to imagine and plan for the future

• Resilience (R): the ability to respond to change without harm, and even to grow stronger through challenge

• Innovation (I): the creativity to find solutions to rapid, novel problems

• Social Connection (S): building trust efficiently with strangers by way of Rapid Rapport

• Mattering (M): the drive that fuels our efforts as we pivot again and again.

The organization of the future will thrive not through a single transition but through change after change, reinvention after reinvention, by prioritizing the development of these capabilities in its employees.

Resilience, the bedrock of all five of the PRISM meta-skills, is the focus of this course. We’ll start with understanding individual-level resilience. Five drivers predict resilient outcomes for individuals. Each of us - as practitioners, leaders, therapists, patients - has unique strengths and opportunities across these five. We’ll explore our individual resilience profiles while learning how to identify the resilience strengths and opportunities for our patients, colleagues, and organizations.

Next, we will examine resilient relationships, starting from trust. Without trust, relationships cannot accommodate challenge. We’ll explore how trust differs in personal versus professional contexts, and define dimensions of trust. We will also explore how the science of individual resilience overlaps the science of relational resilience, asking questions like, “How can we build durable connection with people with low resilience?”

On our fourth day, we will explicitly explore resilient leadership and the determinants of trust of a leader, including prospection and foresight. We’ll review data suggesting that vertical trust - trust in leadership - is declining.

We’ll end by exploring organizational resilience: its definition, components, and common obstacles. How do we define organizational resilience? Are resilient organizations simply organizations composed of resilient individuals, with high-trust relationships? Is anything else required? How do organizations get in their own way when they seek resilient outcomes?

Throughout the course, we’ll utilize small group work, practice vignettes, and case studies to deepen our learning. Come ready to challenge your own assumptions about what resilience looks like at every level of society.