Always to the fore in these matters, the Wellington City Council has already installed the post of Resilience Executive.Resilience will this year start to seriously overwhelm its predecessor word– sustainable, predicts MSCNewswire’s Peter Isaac.He is author of two text books on the topic: The New Gobbledygook , and also The Definitive Bureaucrats’ Survival Guide to Workplace Jargon.Sustainable is becoming unsustainable he claims. This is because in the increasingly hardscrabble profit-and-loss era the word sustainable has become tainted by being welded to the politically-correct and thus to the abstract.For example, would the Wellington City Council install a Sustainability Executive?Probably not. Because of the inference of public money spent on well-intentioned ephemera that some might regard as even frivolous. In contrast the word resilience carries an altogether tougher, business-like, no-nonsense, let’s roll up our sleeves message.The word is multi-purpose too. For example at some stage this year banks will cease to be subjected to stress tests. They will instead undergo resilience tests.By the end of this year people and organisations will no longer be said to be, or to have been, under stress. They will instead be said to have been, or are currently in the process of being, in a state of having their resilience tested. Put to the test.Resilience has a fine pedigree. We can trace it back to the 1960s when things were said to be viable. This term sometimes re-surfaces in the form of this or that being do-able.It was now that something being viable began to slide out of fashion being replaced by something being described as being feasible. Torrents followed of feasibility studies, reports, surveys.Feasibility though had the problem of giving an impression, sounding like, something being feeble and/or easy.For a while it therefore shared the usage limelight with the altogether tougher-sounding word impact and for years we were deluged with impact surveys, statements, studies, “audits” especially those known as environmental impact reports.As the 1990s developed all these fell before anything that could be described as being sustainable. It was now that sustainability reports/surveys/studies swept everything before them.Everything wears out though. Even words. They wear out through over-use which dilutes their value and indeed impact, and this leads to them becoming unsustainable.Enter the new era of resilience reports, studies, surveys, audits, tests, “interventions” .......
From the MSCNewsWire reporter's desk
