The Resilience Shield

There is no doubt that our current environment demands resilience. But what exactly is it, and how can we improve it - at both an individual and collective level? Our proprietary Resilience Shield was developed by Dr Dan Pronk, Ben Pronk and Tim Curtis, all of whom are SAS veterans with combat experience in theatres including Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste and counter terrorist operations. The model was developed after the authors witnessed first-hand the markedly different reactions that ostensibly similar individuals had to stressful events, including the gruelling SAS selection course as well as the incredible demands of leading high-performance teams in military operations – life and death situations with national strategic implications. This experience drove a deep desire to understand exactly what resilience was and – crucially – how it could be developed and improved in individuals and organisations. Through research conducted over a period in excess of fifteen years, we have sought to identify the constituent elements of stress and resilience and develop a model that was dynamic, multi-factorial and modifiable. The result was the Resilience Shield – a highly applied model of resilience that identifies the key constituent characteristics of this mercurial quality and provides a framework for the development of a Resilience Action Plan. Since its development, we have delivered programs based on the Resilience Shield to organisations as diverse as elite policing units, academic organisations and tax professionals. While the concept might have originated within a military context, we are firmly of the belief that resilience requirements vary only by degree and our successful implementation of the Resilience Shield across a wide range of sectors has reinforced this.