Resilience is collective

Thoughtful and actionable paper from Johan Allspaw about engineering resilience—with principles and tactics applicable to other kinds of work, I think. Importantly, resilience as defined here depends on a number of different behaviors, including open and honest communication, reciprocity, and a lack of judgment. What I find notable about this framing is the sense that resilience is a collective, rather than individual, attribute. That is, it depends on sharing information, inquiring into team member’s experiences, and drawing from the knowledge and capacity across a team or teams. That’s a lesson for how we think about resilience generally: not as something each of us has independently, but something that we build and maintain together.