resiliency

Resiliency, often used interchangeably with resilience, refers to the capacity of a system, organization, community, or individual to withstand disturbances, recover from adversity, and adapt to changing conditions.

The term has specific meanings in different disciplines. In psychology, resilience describes adaptive coping and functional recovery after stress or trauma, influenced by individual traits and environmental resources. In ecology, resilience characterizes a system's ability to absorb disturbance, reorganize, and continue to function, or to shift to a different but still functional state. In engineering and materials science, resilience denotes the ability of a structure or material to absorb energy and return to its original form after deformation, distinguishing it from fragility. In social and urban planning contexts, resiliency refers to the capacity of communities and infrastructures to anticipate hazards, absorb impacts, and rapidly recover through networks, governance, and resources.

Assessment and enhancement: Organizations pursue resilience through risk management, redundancy, diversification, modularity, flexible processes, and adaptive planning. Metrics vary by domain but often include recovery time, continuity of critical functions, and the speed of adaptation.

Challenges include definitional variation, measurement difficulties, and trade-offs between efficiency and robustness. Critics argue that resilience can be used as a broad, vague goal if not paired with concrete strategies and accountability.

Origin and scope: The concept draws on ideas from physics about rebound after deformation and has broadened to describe systemic responses to stress in living, social, and technological contexts.