Do you know the meaning of the word “resilience”?
In what context have you heard it before?
Resilience is a word that can apply to people, to businesses, to systems, to the economy and even to the planet.
It refers to the ability to recover from or adjust to difficult circumstances or change. So if you’re a resilient person, you are able to return quickly to a stable place or a better situation, after something bad or challenging has happened.
A resilient business is able to overcome challenges and survive (or even grow) in challenging times.
Resilience is also something that can be characteristic of people. So you can be a resilient person – someone who bounces back faster after a setback. To bounce back means to recover from a difficult situation. And a setback refers to something difficult that’s stopping your progress.
One thing to remember is that resilience is not just something that happens. It’s a result of planning how to deal with imminent threats, and ensuring that the right technologies are in place before we need them.
Resilient is the adjective. Resilience is the noun. And you’ll hear me use both in this episode.
According to the Consumer Technology Association, resilient technologies are those that keep the world healthy, safe, powered, fed and secure, even in the face of adversity. Adversity refers to a difficult or unlucky situation or event.
Entrepreneurs in this niche want to tackle global challenges and threats such as climate change, forest fires, rapid population growth and urbanization, or coastal erosion. In this context, if you tackle a problem, that means you deal with it or you try to solve it. So resilience tech will innovate solutions in the field of communication, cybersecurity, water supply, public health and disaster recovery.
In episode 28, we’ll also teach you 8 English terms you can use to talk about overcoming challenges and building resilience.
Here are a few of the expressions we talk about in this lesson:
- to bounce back
- a setback
- obsolete
Here’s the episode audio.
If you want to learn more about the business model of the resilience tech startups we talk about in this episode, here’s where you can find them:
Field Ready – rapid manufacturing for humanitarian purposes and remote areas.
Development Seed – mapping the planet with the help of machine learning
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Satellite image of Manhattan in New York City provided by NASA via Unsplash
