I have just come back from a large summit up in Ho Chi Minh city where the word “resilience” was used a lot.

It reminded me that this is a word I hear about a lot in organisations, and amongst trainers.

When I hear the word “resilient”  I immediately think of a toy I had when I was a kid.  It was one of those blow up  clowns, weighted on the bottom, so that when you knocked it over, it would bounce straight back to it’s original position.  To me, that’s what resilience is, bouncing back.

When it comes to being a trainer, you need a certain level of resilience, sure.  However I think the real trick is agility.

For me, agility is about bouncing back to a different position, to avoid being knocked down again.  It would be the blow up clown with a bit of AI artificial intelligence that when it bounces back, it is to a different position every time.  It learns where the “blows” are coming from and responds accordingly.

To do this, trainers need to have lots of tools and techniques so that they can move and work and find the mark with their participants.

The Law of Requisite Variety is sometimes known as Ashby's Law after William Ashby is:

"the variety in the control system must be equal to or larger than the variety of the perturbations in order to achieve control"

This simply means that a flexible system with many options is better able to cope with change.

Being an “agile trainer” requires consideration of the following:

1. If you are stuck, try something…ANYTHING! … and pay attention to the feedback you are getting.
2. If that doesn’t work, try something else….and pay attention to the feedback you are getting.
3. There’s no such thing as failure, only feedback