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- [00:02]
New Books Network Host
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- [01:14]
Robert Hall
I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
- [01:45]
Interviewer (John)
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to another podcast from the New Books Network and the book we're going to discuss today is Building Resilient Futures by Robert Hall. This was, I think published in 2023, but there's subsequently other books by Robert. Robert is an expert on matters to do with resilience. After a career in the British army, he's now a consultant and an expert and a writer of many articles and also works with the Royal United Services Institute. He's also the founder or co founder of Resilience First Ltd. Well Robert, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:26]
Robert Hall
Thank you very much indeed and it's nice to speak to you and thank
- [02:29]
Interviewer (John)
you for joining us today. I was really surprised by this book, to be honest. It was a delight in many, many ways because I thought it was going to be a rather dry book that was looking at sort of management and consultancy and that sort of thing. I thought that is a particularly awfully dry subject. Could have been fascinating in its own right. But one of the ways, if I could describe this book to the reader, it's got many layers to covers, a broad and very interesting scope. And subsequently you've written, you were telling me you've written another book called the Resilience Mindset, A Philosophical Journey, which I feel I want to read now, that's
- [03:04]
Robert Hall
based on the first book because I thought when I wrote it that there was not enough understanding of the mental emotional issues that go behind people's approach to resilience. So that caused me to dig a little deeper into some of the psychological philosophical attributes. And then when I was doing that, one thing that occurred to me is that, you know, animals and plants are incredibly resilient and, you know, they've been at it for much longer than we have. So my third book was looking at nature's resilience and how animals and plants adapt.
- [03:37]
Interviewer (John)
Describe your journey from the British army, from your subsequent careers, career as a consultant and so on, expert in resilience, to deciding to write this book when you had in mind. Who did you have in mind when you set about writing it and how did you set about writing it?
- [03:50]
Robert Hall
Well, the text really contents really arose from my experiences throughout my working career. And as you say, I started in the military, but I've worked for big businesses, small businesses. And I felt that the was not a book that was not a management guide, as you say, but really looked at the different aspects of resilience of which there are many, and trying to give some impression as to what people need to look for or consider when they are delving into their own organizational or own personal resilience. So it starts with human resilience, it looks at social resilience, emotional resilience, urban resilience, national resilience. So these are all different aspects to the word and they all have different connotations and implications. And the book tries to delve into these and add further depth to what people might appreciate when they're thinking about resilience rather than just a blanket one word term.
- [04:53]
Interviewer (John)
How do you imagine the reader approaching this book as a textbook, as a guide or just as a jolly good read?
- [05:00]
Robert Hall
I think it's a mixture of all that. It is meant to be a guide to flesh out the various dimensions of resilience, but it's not meant to be a manual. It gives hints to what you can look for and do, but it's also a stair as when I wrote it, I was trying to understand more about how nations can be made more resilient and what particularly the British government is doing and. Or not doing so. It was a case of really trying to unpick, for my own purposes and I hope give some clarity to readers what a bigger concept of resilience in a national or international arena might look like.
- [05:42]
Interviewer (John)
That's fascinating. I was going to start with. Let's start in a moment with sort of personal resilience from a teacher and education point of view. But I was just listening to the news before we sat down to talk today. One of the stories on the news was, of course, the big stories, the Iran war and the Americans involvement in opening the Straits of Hormuz and so on. And they said, well, a couple of years ago, in fact, little less than a year ago, Britain had minesweepers and now we don't. And I thought, well, did they not foresee this? And they were, in fact, they were stationed next to the Straits of or somewhere for this sort of thing. So it's almost as if there was not just a lack of resilience, but a tremendous lack of foresight.
- [06:20]
Robert Hall
Yes.
- [06:20]
Interviewer (John)
Is that what you meant when you said the British aren't always prepared?
- [06:23]
Robert Hall
Well, foresight is a wonderful thing and it's always nice to be wise in hindsight. The thing is that resilience has to balance one's capabilities, and that may be personal or national, against the resources you've got to deploy. And as I'm sure you read in the article you read today, that you know, the British have not given enough resources for a whole host of reasons because there are always choices to be made, resources to some of the assets, military assets that they may need. And I think this is a case. Or the Middle East. Middle east situation is a case of where we have sadly neglected some of our resources, minesweepers, for example, so that when we do need them, they're not there. And this highlights an interesting paradox in resilience because there is a sort of paradox between preparation and response whereby you, if you are to be resilient, you need lots of reserves and redundancy in your capability, but they don't necessarily come. You have to spend money on doing that to prevent something. And the paradox is, well, if you prevent something, people will say, well, it never happened anyway, so why do we need to spend all those resources? Because it's never happened. Typical example, if you Remember, is the Y2K incident in the beginning of the millennium where we spent an awful lot of money on trying to make sure that our computers did not crash due to a time, unfortunately nothing did happen. But then people said, well, why do you spend all that money on building, you know, all these fixes for computers when it never happened? Well, you don't know it didn't happen because it may have happened if you didn't do it. So this is, this is the paradox of resilience. You've got to be prepared to put some money and some resource and time into thinking about these things. But if they don't happen, it's not necessarily wasted. You may have avoided it, but then the criticism all comes back, well, why did we spend all this money? And I think it's the same with the military, the minesweepers. And we're not only guilty of sending our minesweepers back if you also know that the Americans shipped back four of their minesweepers just before the start of the Gulf Current crisis as well. So, you know, there's a lot of hindsight and foresight to be applied here.
- [08:38]
Interviewer (John)
Fascinating. We could talk a lot, I guess, about what's going on in the news right now. We are in a world where black swan incidents things out of the blue, the unexpected should be expected, as it were, which is again, another sort of historical paradox really, is that our world is more interdependent, more complicated, more. We have never been so informed about things, and yet we seem to be more vulnerable as well.
- [09:02]
Robert Hall
Yes, no, you're absolutely right. And the complexity of societies and the world today make it very tenuous and easily disrupted. Cyber is a typical example. We're all so dependent on computers today that, you know, one little issue can magnify up, cascade out and cause massive mayhem over a wide area. So you're absolutely right. And I think it's forcing us, this complexity and susceptibility is forcing us really to look inwards rather than rely on, and I'll use another example of NATO many of us belong to. Well, perhaps it won't always be there or all the parties won't be there on the day. That means that we have to look to ourselves much more, how we are more resilient if we are going to meet some of these complexities and disruptions and it needs always a case of backups, redundancy. And this leads me to the principle that is very much popular at the moment of switching our thinking from just in time resilience, where we've got enough reserves, if you like, just to meet our tomorrow's requirements. Food or energy or whatever, to look at much more of just in case, what if something goes wrong to our energy and our food as is. And that, I think, is forcing governments and people and organizations to think how they can have this redundancy without necessarily incurring a lot of expense, but it will incur some degree of cost, because resilience is now a strategic necessity and not a nice to have.
- [10:48]
Interviewer (John)
One of the ways this book is structured, one of its delightful, makes it a delightful read in a way, is because you move from theoretical perspectives and analysis to case studies. There's a whole number of case studies which you could mention. One of those that jumps out from what you're saying is, of course, Covid and the experience we had in the lockdown and Covid and so on. And it struck me as, again, from what you were just saying is the National Health Service displayed both a tremendous resilience, particularly its personnel, people going off to work and not coming home for weeks, sleeping on the floor of hospitals because they couldn't endanger their families, displaying the most tremendous kind of commitment to public service. But at the same time, the NHS was in many ways unprepared. It's the kind of service that a bad winter causes a crisis, and this was a crisis with bad winter with extra, as it were. So at the same time, just frail and yet enormously resilient.
- [11:47]
Robert Hall
Yes. Well, there's a famous book by a guy called Taleb who talked about black swans and being antifragile, and he was talking about what he meant by antifragile being stronger when damaged. It's like the head of a hydra. When you cut off one of the arms, it grows another one and becomes perhaps stronger and the same when we exercise, we exercise our muscles and we become stronger through that. So I'm not saying that the NHS came out of COVID massively stronger, but I think it learned a lot of lessons. And while it was fragile by virtue of nearly collapsing, it didn't. And it's quite interesting to see in such a situation how solutions in that scenario, such as vaccines, adaption, dedication, volunteers, all came together in a crisis to allow the organization to survive and be resilient and, you know, thrive in a way. People are now finding. There are fewer waiting lists, slightly fewer waiting lists. So, you know, it's not all negative. But your criticism that it could have been better prepared is, I think, accepted by everybody. We could have better PPE stock bars were out of date, the vaccines weren't available. We prepared for a different sort of pandemic that actually occurred. Um, and this is why the inquiry is spending 200 million pounds, taking years to come to the conclusions of. So it's always easy to be critical and some of that criticism is well deserved. But I think it actually did survive.
- [13:24]
Interviewer (John)
Oh, yeah.
- [13:25]
Robert Hall
Now beginning to thrive. And that's another definition, if you like, of surviving. Not just surviving, but be able to bounce forward and back to thrive subsequently.
- [13:35]
Interviewer (John)
Yeah, I mean, I agree, absolutely. I mean, if you look back at the sort of pandemic of 1919, the world was. Millions died, hardly knowing why they were dying, but the world reacted and brought. Brought into existence a vaccine in no time at all. Saw the pandemic moving across the world and so on. So there was a lot to be looking at that and say, well, that's extraordinarily extraordinary example of tremendous human ingenuity and global resilience.
- [14:03]
Robert Hall
Yeah.
- [14:03]
Interviewer (John)
So we could, yeah, congratulate ourselves on that.
- [14:06]
Robert Hall
And I think it also showed what's involved in national resilience. And again, well, a lot of Christendoms, but I think the hope and reassurance and dedication and coming together of a lot of people, you know, 4 million people overall were involved in this does show that when there is a dramatic crisis, a national crisis, and we face many of them, but the COVID one was one, we can come together and meet the challenges, but we need to learn the lessons as well of how we could have done it better and some of the. As we made on the way and, you know, communicate better communication, broader threat, appreciation, better exercising. We've just done a large exercise in this country called Pegasus, which is going on to meet the next pandemic, of which we'll be one at some point. So it's not all doom and gloom. And I think there is a lot that we learned from the pandemic to make us better nationally in resilience terms.
- [15:05]
Interviewer (John)
Is it likely, though, that to be. To be less. One of the feelings I get from reading your book is optimism. It's a book about. It's a kind of can do book. Human beings can do this if they. And there's all sorts of ways in which you analyze the possibility of making things better. We can do things, but another way, looking at it pessimistically, we, you know, I think it was. I think the philosopher Kierkegaard said, we. We live lives forward, but we understand them in reverse. So we're always going to bump into something, aren't we?
- [15:34]
Robert Hall
Yes, that's human nature. And I'm writing a book at the moment about how 10 historical characters throughout the next, through the last 3,000 years have met challenges. And they've all come up with tremendous barriers, walls. And they come in in various ways. And the point I think, about resilience is there's no one solution. It's a journey and we never reach the destination. And we all have different times of traveling in that journey and different outcomes. And you can be extremely resilient, just like nations, extremely resilient to one particular threat. It might be flooding. Your house might be flooded or burned down or whatever. And you might be resilient, but you might not be resilient if one of your family members dies. And it's totally different concept of how you can become resilient to those challenges. So it's not a one plan, fix all. It's not a final journey. It's a way of traveling and learning how you can become more responsive and adaptable to the challenges that you face.
- [16:40]
Interviewer (John)
I guess that's our. Our special power as humans. Although you're going to look at the resilience in nature, if there's anything that separates us from the rest of nature, as it were, is the human capacity for adapting and learning.
- [16:52]
Robert Hall
You asked about how we define resilience, and there are lots of ways of doing that. We can go back and look at that. But adaptation is one word that is not often used in defining resilience because people just see it as picking the threads up and going back to where they were before, return to normality. That's being resilient. Well, it is more than that. And that's what I try to point out in the book, that if we are to move forward personally or nationally, we need to find a way of looking at the new situation that we face ourselves, we find ourselves in and adapting ourselves so that the next time a similar situation occurs, we are better capable of doing that. So it's more than a sort of business continuity approach. It's more a case of this is a learning journey and I need to find a better way coping with circumstances in the future. They won't be exactly the same. Life never is, but there will be some of the past. Well, that's how I handled that and I was able to come back from the disaster this time. I'll try this one. So adaptation and animals do it all the time. In fact, they've been doing it longer than we have in evolutionary terms, and they've been very successful at it. And I think we just need to be a little bit more successful in Adapting to climate, to energy, to whatever the problem appears.
- [18:13]
Interviewer (John)
Yes. Someone told me the other day that we are as far away from the Tyrannosaurus rex as the Tyrannosaurus is away from the Stegosaurus. In other words, they were on Earth an awful long time and enormously successful creatures. And we've been in here on the Earth impact comparison a fraction of a second compared to dinosaurs. And I remember when I was at school, dinosaurs were supposed to be evolved out in existence because they're tiny walnut brains. Far from it. They're enormously successful, but they couldn't foresee a comet hitting the Earth.
- [18:44]
Robert Hall
Yeah. No, it's a very interesting analogy. And how long this current Anthropocene generation, the human world continues is going to be quite a challenge.
- [18:55]
Interviewer (John)
Before we started talking, Robert, I said I'm a retired teacher and I came across the term resilience, maybe in the last 10 years of teaching when it became quite a buzzword. So we talked about teaching resilience. The word grit was used. It was often an inference that things were going on in the lives of young people today to undermine their resilience. There was a kind of sense, you heard among parents on the media sometimes, that this was a snowflake generation. They lacked the depth of resilience and strength that past generations had often compared with people from the Second World War period or the 1950s, or so they say. Well, today the youngins, the millennial generation, whoever, are somehow lacking the depth of resilience that we had. So what can we as teachers do about that? I thought, is that such a fair thing to say of this generation?
- [19:48]
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- [20:02]
New Books Network Host
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- [20:03]
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- [20:15]
Interviewer (John)
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- [20:19]
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- [20:47]
Robert Hall
Well, I have heard it. It is a popular approach. I'm unsure about answering you one way or other. I think if you looked at the young generation before the First World War, Second World War, I think many people would have a similar sort of concern that they weren't ready for what was about to unfold, but they stood up. I know it's a different generation, but when the cards are down, if you put it that way, I think people do have an amazing amount of capacity to respond as long as you don't tell them to keep calm and carry on. Which was a World War II banner, if you remember, but it was withdrawn before it could be released because there is no point in telling people to keep calm and carry on. It doesn't really work, but I think people do.
- [21:38]
Interviewer (John)
Is that because people do keep calm and carry on? Is it a natural tendency for you said, you know what strikes me when you look at Gaza or somewhere like that, people emerge from ruins and sort of the first thing they do is reach for a broom or something.
- [21:50]
Robert Hall
Yes. But they don't do that because you tell them to keep calm and carry on and grab a broom. They do it because they realize in the circumstances they find themselves in, they have to do something because no one is there to help them necessarily in the first few hours. So they have to pick up a broom or have to do their own thing. And I think if the chips were down, then the young people today would respond. But your point is, how do we help them get to that point is an interesting one. And I think there is an onus on schools and colleges to put into the curriculum somewhere. And I know it's a full curriculum, ideas of how to help oneself mentally, physically, to meet the challenges of life. And it doesn't have to be a flood, you know, it doesn't have to be a wall. But I think there are lots of challenges in life that people could have a little bit of help with. They need reassurance and they need hope. And I think if you, if you have the right syllabus, you can help people understand what the threat is. You know, in other words, risk, awareness. Am I going to fall down a hole tomorrow or is there going to be a war tomorrow? You can help them understand the circumstances, but you want to say, well, you know, we're all going to have to find ways of coping with this mentally and physically. And I think there's a lot more we can do with young people and bringing them on. It doesn't necessarily mean they have to join the scouts or the cadets. Some people don't like that, and that's fine. But I still think there's a universal need to understand how we can prepare ourselves more.
- [23:18]
Interviewer (John)
Would that be about acquiring certain skills and looking at those skills in terms of certain personal skills, like soft skills, like adaptability, ability to reflect on what you've done and reflect upon your circumstances you find yourself in?
- [23:35]
Robert Hall
Yes, absolutely, that. And I think a lot of other countries are doing this. France has been doing a lot recently, but all the Nordic, Nordic and Baltic countries have a very active program of engaging their young people. And many of them choose, having had an experience of it, to go on and join the military. I'm not saying that's a way of recruiting, but, you know, they're not adverse to doing something, perhaps even volunteering. Where there is recognition, there is a social responsibility behind this. We don't live in bubbles, and we need, therefore, to be more aware of social tensions and problems and be willing to commit ourselves through social responsibility. Volunteering is an example, and I don't think there's enough of that at the moment. People tend to retreat and say, well, it's nothing to do with me, and, you know, I'm happy on my iPad, but I think there's a lot more that we should be doing to help.
- [24:34]
Interviewer (John)
That's interesting. One of the countries that pop comes in, right. Arrives in your book in a number of ways is Finland.
- [24:40]
Robert Hall
Yes.
- [24:40]
Interviewer (John)
And not only in the historical sense of the Russian Finnish War, but also. Well, we'll talk about that in a minute. But one experience I had is a few years ago, I talked on another podcast to an academic who'd done a study of the Finnish education system. Always fascinating to teachers because the Finnish schools score enormously, highly. And yet in many ways, they would be quite an anathema to many people in this country. They don't. They often don't have school uniforms. The teachers can be referred to by their first names. They have fewer. They don't set much homework, and yet they score very highly in terms of numeracy and literacy up there with schools in Southeast Asia and so on. And so how do they do this? So lots of study of how the Finns do it. And I talked to this academic and I said, well, why don't we just simply do what you do? Why don't we simply adopt Finnish schools in the UK if they're so good? And she said, well, yes, but the trouble is, it works in Finland because we were a nation for two or 300 years, bullied by the Swedes, bullied by the Russians, and we devote to culture where education was enormously valued. It almost became part of being Finnish was to work hard at school. And you don't really have that. In other words, the Finnish education system works because it works in Finland. Just something to do with the culture.
- [25:57]
Robert Hall
I agree. You can't transplant one education system and just dump it in some other country because we all have our own contexts and historical backgrounds to accommodate. But I think there's a, there is a nugget of truth in looking at others and adapting, taking, adopting and adapting what others do to make it relevant for us. I do commend the Finns with a background you've rightly given, but they have this mentality called sizu, which is a sort of self reliance. Even the North Koreans have a concept of self reliance. But the idea that the Finns can muster a lot of people if the need arises from a physical problem or an invasion is well worth seeing how we could take a little bit of that and apply it to our own educational system. And if you look at the example of the Finns and the historic history of their winter war in 3941, there's a close similarity to what's going on in Ukraine at the moment. And there they're, you know, facing massive problems from again, a Soviet Russian threat. And they're showing remarkable resilience as a nation. And I think in both cases the reason is they have an inbuilt feeling of nationhood and sovereignty and independence. When you talk to Ukrainians, that's exactly what they come up. We will fight to the death, as it were, because we're defending our country. Now we don't seem to have quite half of that degree of sustenance because perhaps we don't have the same Russian bear on the border. But I think people are beginning to realize that we might from what's gone on in Ukraine and the Middle east that I think people begin to say, oh, perhaps we should be thinking about what sort of SISU mentality concept can we embed in people that would allow us to have this greater resilience in case of something. It doesn't have to be a Russian invasion, but if it was another Covid, then we would be better prepared for it.
- [28:02]
Interviewer (John)
Well, there were elements of that within Covid, weren't there? The celebration of the National Health Service, a sense of national purpose, but also a recognition that something also had gone Sort of wrong. I mean, in other words, not only with the National Health Service, its fragility and so on, but the shock that in number 10 Downing street there had been beer and wine parties wasn't because the beer and wine parties were particularly egregious, it was because a sense that, you know, we thought we were all doing this together equally. We thought we were. Somehow this was a natural struggle of some kind and yet some people seem to have thought themselves outside of that struggle and that that was why it was, in a sense, so shocking and symbolically shocking.
- [28:40]
Robert Hall
Yes, but I think you'll always find that, you know, if it wasn't Boris Johnson, it'd be someone else. You know, look at Trump. There was always a situation where people will challenge the rules, as it were, break the rules, do something different. And I think the maturity of a population is to see through that. Yes, they want punishment doled out, et cetera, but the maturity is to say, well, that's not really what's going on here, it's how do we protect our communities, our hospitals, our family, and what can we do to make sure that we are not putting ourselves in extra danger by taking unnecessary risks, even if we don't agree with all the communications that are coming out. So all I'm trying to say is that we will always find lawbreakers, rule breakers and, you know, the rule based order in the world is seemingly going down the tubes. So, you know, the things we can try and do to turn that around, but we mustn't let that diminish our search for resilience in the face of these challenges.
- [29:52]
Interviewer (John)
That was true, and I think that didn't really. I mean, although we were shocked by it overall, there was a sense of the celebration of our national, you know, national. National Health Service enterprise, the banging of pots and pans on your doorstep, this clapping for the nhs, it was, it was an unusual sense of coming together. I thought that it was. That was undermined. Not. Not at all really, but it was shocking, as it were, to see that we weren't necessarily all in it together.
- [30:18]
Robert Hall
And obviously you'll never get all in together, you know, all will never apply. It's. If the majority apply, then you're the winner.
- [30:27]
Interviewer (John)
But there can be societies where moments. Well, one of the things, when I was reading your section on the Winter War with Russia and Finland, the Finns do remarkably well, as you say. They lose in essence, but they didn't. They're astonishingly good against the Russians in an overwhelming force that came against them. And I Was thinking of another sort of case study that I come across was, was how in the Vietnam War, the South Vietnamese regiments and units would sometimes just melt when they faced a North Vietnamese group. And even. But the captured ones, the North Vietnamese captured, then incorporated their own army, fought to the death. And they were the same people culturally, the same people, spoke the same language, but one side believed in something and the other side were fighting for the paycheck. And in essence, if you could, if you can convince people of the, of a, of a commune, of a communal project, you believe in an ideology. Essence. In essence, they'll move heaven and earth.
- [31:26]
Robert Hall
Yes, well, I think that's, you know, very applicable to both the Finns and Ukrainians. They have a utter faith in what they're doing and, you know, they, technically, they will fight, fight to the death to achieve it. Sadly, the Finns have lost about 9% of their territory to the Soviet Union and the Ukrainians are looking, possibly losing 20% of their territory. But the Finns are that today, the happiest nation in the world. Classified as the happiest nation in the world. So they have overcome losing an awful lot to bouncing back. And I think the Ukrainians will do the same when ceasefire and end of this awful war happens, they will come back and they will show us that what can be sustained by a human population in the face of horrendous brutality and disaster. And I think it's admirable. I've only got respect for the Ukrainians and what they are showing as a
- [32:21]
Interviewer (John)
way to being resilient is part of the Finnish happiness. Is there a correlation between that and social equality? It's often been made that societies like Denmark and Finland and so on, where levels of happiness are high is also where the difference between the richest and the poorest, the shop floor and the boardroom, also really quite narrow.
- [32:42]
Robert Hall
Yes. I can't answer your question because I don't know what the disparity is in Finland, but I think a lot of the Nordic countries have high taxation because they do use the money to close this inequality gap. And therefore, you know, your argument is quite, quite valid that if you can close that inequality gap, you are more likely to succeed in being resilient. So, you know, I don't know those figures, but I'm sure you're right.
- [33:08]
Interviewer (John)
Yeah, I mean, I'm tempted to make an unfavorable. And I apologize to American listeners for this. This is purely a personal observation, that when the lights go out in New York, when there's a power outage, as we used to call power cuts, when there's a power outage in New York, the shops get looted. Whereas, you know, there's a sense in which during the Blitz, if that was a terrible, unfair comparison, it was a sense of cohesion and people stepped over. My mother telling me, in the Second World War, the jewelry shop would have been scattered across the street by a bomb and people stepped over the jewelry. Whether that was true or not, I'm not sure. But there was. There was a certain a sense of. Of society where we're again in this together in a society whether it was true or not. And a society where we did. We don't really feel we're in this together. We feel someone is really. Yeah, no, you know, if.
- [33:53]
Robert Hall
Right.
- [33:53]
Interviewer (John)
If the l devil take behind most.
- [33:56]
Robert Hall
Yeah, you're right. But it raises an interesting question. You're not going to have situations where you can claim we're all in this together. Wars, Covid pandemics. Probably true. But you might have, you know, a major flooding of, you know, a large part of the country. And it may be a case of we're not all in this together, but how can we help those people who are. So I just make a slight distinction between those that nature of the threat and the Nordics and the Baltics are. Countries are very good at creating that threat because they are living on the border of Russia. Because we don't. We don't have quite that compunction to encourage the nation all in it together. And it's therefore more difficult to do. But we still must do it because something will come where we will have to be all in it together. We don't want to start learning the lessons then.
- [34:49]
Interviewer (John)
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Robert Hall
our new protein lattes or matcha.
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Interviewer (John)
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- [36:04]
Interviewer (John)
We've been talking so far mostly about sort of societal, cultural kind of cohesion and resilience, but your book is more than that, quite a bit more than that. And one of the ways you talk, one of the things you talk about is personal resilience in the face of trauma. I think you talk at the. Was it the Moorgate train disaster?
- [36:24]
Robert Hall
Ladbroke Grove.
- [36:25]
Interviewer (John)
Ladbroke Grove. Thank you. Ladbroke Grove, which was in 2000 or
- [36:28]
Robert Hall
so, which was 1999.
- [36:31]
Interviewer (John)
Thank you. It's a terrible, awful. And there's a gripping account of one of the survivors. Someone. Yeah, it was a guy called Hugh and he sees the most appalling things. And you use him in a sense as a case study of how one might be resilient to the traumas that we're going to suffer in life and is a kind of pro. The chapter goes into a kind of proactive preparation for trauma. We're going to experience trauma. But, you know, you can put people back together, you can try and put Humpty back together and he's fallen off the wall. But how can you make him stronger for the inevitable? Falling off the wall.
- [37:06]
Robert Hall
Yeah. Yeah. Now Landbrook Go is, you know, a long time ago, 1999. And just for listeners, that was a train crash between two ongoing trains combined speed of 130 miles an hour. So you can imagine it was a pretty large disaster. 31 people lost their lives, 417 were injured. There was a major fire and 30 to 40% of those who survived suffered post traumatic stress disorder trauma. So what were the lessons? Well, in brief, firstly, trauma is not something that just happens the day after. A lot of people say that, you know, their experiences were coming back to them for 10 years or more after it and affecting them. So trauma can be a long, long term process. And those people who came out of it more easily, if that's a word, were people who said that they had greater bonds between their colleagues, their family, teams around them who could support them and not necessarily by talking. A lot of people in trauma don't want to talk about it, but they just need to feel that they are supported by people around them. Your family is therefore a great one. So that's interesting. Strong bonds which have developed before an incident, not just afterwards. Another point was that organizations with a strong culture which is suited to learning are better placed to deal with trauma. So it's interesting to look at business organizations, their culture, and whether they are encouraging and helpful and facilitate this team bonding with members of their staff, because it's not necessarily a disaster to the organization, but any one of those staff members may suffer trauma by being on a train coming into work. So it's what you can do ahead of it. And culture is often missed out in organizational literature. If you go into many big organizations and look for culture, it's. It won't be there. They find it hard to express and hard to write down and what values they have. But that's a shame, because I think it's embedded in a resilient organization, if you can say that. And then the next one is that it's not just an HR responsibility, which many organizations think it is. And I was in Barclays when 77 happened, and everyone was saying, oh, ring this number. It's our outside management help organization. If you're, you know, suffering trauma, that's not the way really to really help people. It needs to be those original teams, those people around an individual coming together to support that, organize that individual. And that's more than hr. And I think too many companies think of dealing with trauma or survivors or incidences in hr. So that was another lesson. So, you know, you're right. I think that Ladbroke is just an incident, an awful incident, but it brought out some really powerful lessons on personal resilience.
- [40:20]
Interviewer (John)
One thing I. One description that I'll take away from your book was you said you talk at one point about resilience being. People think of resilience as like having a store cupboard full of baked beans and lots of fresh water when the. When the. The balloon goes up, we're ready. But in fact, it's probably about knowing your neighbors.
- [40:37]
Robert Hall
It's being part of the community. Yes, it is. While we, the government, does sell this message of having a grab bag of matches and batteries and water, it isn't going to last you very long. They may well help you, and I'm not knocking it, but actually, the most important thing is how can you support the neighborhood and how can they support you when your water runs out or your batteries go die, eye on you? It is a much larger holistic entity, a community that will actually deploy resilience. And we haven't I haven't made the point that resilience is about people and it's delivered on the ground. It's not delivered by some government or organization in the cloud who might say, yeah, we're resilient, we've got a plan for, Got a strategy forward. But actually, when it comes down to it, what matters is who on the ground is willing to pick up the brush, the broom, shovel and do something. Often when emergency services are not there because they're so different elsewhere. But it's all about people. It's not about AI, it's not about climate, it's not about anything else. It's. It's about people.
- [41:44]
Interviewer (John)
It's for that anyone's going to notice when you're not around, if they're going to notice if the. If the newspapers are piling up in your front hall or something of that kind. You know, the old. The thing that comes out every now and again, some shocking things. Someone would be found dead in a flat in London. They'd been there for 10 months or a year or something, and they said, well, no one knocked, we didn't. No one liked to. There was a break. The breakdown of some sort of social cohesion with the support networks of neighbors and community and family and friends that would have made that decision.
- [42:14]
Robert Hall
Shop streets as well. How many businesses on a street come together to help one another if there was, say, a flood in the street or an incident? We did some work in resilience first on how networked shops are in High street in Fitzrovia. And amazingly, they weren't. They didn't know their neighbors, so it would be a case of survival of the fittest, as it were. And it was a shame that they didn't really know who they could call on because the guy next door might be a locksmith and able to help them if they were locked out on one day. It's that simple sort of knowledge of a community.
- [42:53]
Interviewer (John)
Yeah, I remember I could. I can still do this, actually. I lived in a town, in a new town called Crawley in Sussex, and when I was a kid, and I can still name all of the neighbors. There's Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Smith and the Mrs. Worley at the end and so on. All of the neighbors, because I knew their names. And my mum will say to me, look, if you've ever got a problem, just go, I'm not around. Just go across and see Mrs. Russell or whatever. And often we refer to the neighbours as Auntie, sort of London thing, and so on. And there was that. That was A street that had its own resilience, I guess.
- [43:26]
Robert Hall
Yes. And you could do that with school children of in their neighborhood do a sort of exercise in learning about the skills of their neighbors. You know, who is a plumber, who is an engineer, who is a medic, who is a locksmith. And if every community had a little map of where these experts lay, it would be an immense help if you had a problem, whatever that problem may be. Unfortunately we don't do that. You know, kids don't knock on doors these days for safety reasons. But with supervision, I think it's possible to build this sort of repository of knowledge within a community.
- [44:02]
Interviewer (John)
If it's one of the themes that comes out of your book is that again, resilience is about people, resilience is about culture. Are there things in our society that are mitigating against those two things? I'm thinking of the atomization of kind of communities. People are more mobile, people move around, people are supposed to be more self reliant. The kind of self reliant consumer who doesn't need neighbors, doesn't need. If they know anyone at all, they know them. On the Internet, across the other side of the world and in corporations, in organizations, there's a degree of competition and evaluation will depend on performance rather than community. I remember a teacher saying to me once we need a bit less collegiality and a bit more, what's the word he used for it? Bit more people being responsible for what they do. So I thought in a sense the collegiality and public service kind of cultures have been a little out of fashion into the, I'm going to say the word neoliberalist, market driven kind of world we live in.
- [45:02]
Robert Hall
Yeah, I agree with you. And the trends aren't particularly optimistic. We are atomized. Social media is a bit of a contradiction in terms really because it actually hasn't helped us build social bonds in the way we would like has in others. But you know, it's not a not being kind to the points you make. I think the geopolitical arena has not made us more confident and willing to engage because it is a very threatening. It's a very volatile and certain complex, ambiguous world and people are fearful and when they're fearful they tend to retreat into their homes, their boxes and organizations and say well you know, there's nothing I can do that will change this. And often there isn't towing we can't make a difference to the Middle east, but I think you can make a difference to the people around you. In your organization, in your communities, and try and counter this. But I don't dispute your trend, sadly, because I think it is a case of pressures which are driving us apart. And until something happens and, you know, I'm not begging in any way a disaster, but until something like Covid happens, where you do see people coming out of their boxes and held in one another, I see the trend sadly going in, continuing in that direction.
- [46:28]
Interviewer (John)
It's kind of the idea of people who get on the train every morning and never speak to this. They see people, familiar faces, they never speak to each other, travel the same journey commuting for years. One day the train has a slight pump or an accident, the lights go out and they start talking. And so people. People break down the bonds of privacy and shyness and so on in the face of some kind of crisis.
- [46:51]
Robert Hall
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's difficult to counter without having some impetus, some pressure that makes a difference. You know, likely lights going out, we'll do that. But, you know, I think we need to give people reassurance and hope that it's not gone, this feeling of togetherness. It's just sort of submerged within all the other pressures of life at the moment, including social media pressures where it's not coming to the fore and helping us tackle some of the major issues that we've got.
- [47:22]
Interviewer (John)
So if being a more resilient society starts at the bottom, starts with your neighborhood, your street, your community, your organization, is that sort of your mission, in a sense, is to find ways of helping people know that and act positively in some way that fosters that?
- [47:39]
Robert Hall
I wouldn't say it's my mission. I, you know, had 45 years of work, and I'm not out in the thick and fast of it at the moment to try and change the world. I think my writing is a way of expressing what I believe is the situation, how it can be improved. It doesn't mean to say I'm right. And I get satisfaction from articulating what I think is needed to make things better. And I do take great reassurance and hope from looking, for example, at the environment and the biological world, that animals and plants have overcome these challenges in a totally different way, admittedly and human. Examples 1 I give in the book is about Ernest Shackleton. Things can be different and people are remarkably exceptional when they face difficulties. So I don't lose hope from this. I just think the pressure is high. Pressures are against us and we need to fight back. Really.
- [48:38]
Interviewer (John)
I think, yes, I use the word mission in the sense that the book is quite didactic. There's an element of you can learn from this book, there's practical advice you can learn from the. And one of the ways you are asking us, as it were, the reader to learn is by example of people like Ernie Shackleton. What is the lesson of the remarkable career of Shackleton?
- [48:57]
Robert Hall
Well, Shackleton is a remarkable character and sadly died quite young. He was a polar explorer who tried to reach the South Pole and failed on two occasions. He was going to. He was going to try a third time. So, you know, there's resilience for you. But his ship, and he had 27 crew, sailed in 1914 just as the First World War started down to the South Pole. And sadly, he got trapped in ice or ship got trapped in ice for a long time and eventually crushed the ship and it sank. And there's some amazing pictures on the Internet, if you look, of HMS Endurance sitting on the bottom 10,000ft down, almost intact, all this time because cold water has just allowed it to be preserved. So what he did was lead his 27 men across the ice to where water was allowed rowing boats to be launched, and he reached Elephant Island, a very small island by the boats. And then he. He and four others set off in a rowing boat across the southern ocean for 800 miles in atrocious weather. And how they navigated, I had no idea. But they did, and they reached South Georgia, a whaling station, unfortunately arrived on the wrong side of the island, so they had to walk across the island and before they could reach the township. And he eventually mustered a reserve spare ship and got back and rescued his crew, left in elton island after 20 months. So why I find this man so amazing that he never gave up. And although he didn't achieve his objective of reaching the South Pole, he achieved something far greater, which was to save 27 of its crew from imminent death because they were miles, a thousand miles from the nearest habitation. And the lesson that I bring from it is what he describes as successful failure. In other words, you know, you can not necessarily achieve your main objective, but you can be tremendously successful in what you do afterwards. And he did achieve afterwards, you know, the saving of. Of his crew. So I think there's a nice paradox there that in resilience, you don't have to fail and say, I'm not resilient anymore. Give up, you've got to move on. And a quote I've got from him reads this. A man must shape himself to a new mark directly. The old one goes to ground in Other words, every time we face a circumstance which has changed, then we need to plant a new flag and march to that and not be concerned about the old one because the circumstances have changed. You know, that's adaptation, but it is successful failure as well, Ty. That's why I like his story so much. And that phrase successful failure, I think, is. What was he talking about?
- [52:04]
Interviewer (John)
Well, Robert, your account there of Shackleton's remarkable journey and adventure captures, I think, the spirit of your book. And nicely, I can see why he's there. Both the optimism of your book, your belief in humanity, which is not always easy these days, and also a sense in which you're reasserting that in your next book you have no doubt come across Aristotle. The kind of we are social animals at heart, and when we remember that, there's something about the indomitable spirit of human nature comes across in your book beautifully.
- [52:36]
Robert Hall
Well, thank you. Yes, and I think, you know, I've tried to carry that theme through all the books that I've written and writing because I'm always amazed myself at how resilient people are. It's a great privilege to delve into some of their lives, like Shackleton or Alexander the Great.
- [52:52]
Interviewer (John)
Well, thank you very much, and we have come to the end of our time and thank you so much for that discussion. And we have been talking about Building Resilient Futures by Robert hall, and it's published by Austin McCauley and found in all good bookshops. So thank you so much for discussing your book with me today.
- [53:11]
Robert Hall
Thank you, John. Been privileged. Thank you.
- [53:25]
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