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This week we launched the TRS-42, the latest iteration of our Resilience Survey.  We’re very proud to have developed and fielded this screen – not only is it a slimmer, quicker and more user-friendly experience, but it also incorporates the learnings from all the resilience research we have conducted to date into what we believe is the most comprehensive .  Given this, we thought it would be a good opportunity to provide a little bit more background on the Resilience Survey.

The Resilience Shield model was developed as a result of our own personal experiences, our observations of people we knew and an extensive literature review.  From the outset, however, it was also incredibly important to us that it was scientifically validated.  To achieve this, we applied for – and won – an Australian Federal Government grant which allowed us to embark on a research project in conjunction with Dr Lies Notebaert from the University of Western Australia.  Our main tool for the conduct of this research was the Resilience Survey.

Because we had never seen a multifactorial resilience model before, we created the survey by identifying a range of existing, academically-proven and peer-reviewed screens that could act as proxies for the various layers of the Resilience Shield (you can find a full list of the amazing academics who have given us permission to use their work in the development of our survey here).  Our intent was to see how each of the layers interacted with each other, and how they compared against exiting metrics for overall resilience.  It was comprehensive – but long, clunky and untested!

Thanks to your overwhelming support, we’ve been able to collate data from over 3,000 respondents and then throw it all at the amazing Dr Lies Noetebart from the University of Western Australia to make sense of.  In doing so, we asked her three things:

  1. Does our Resilience Shield Model suck?

  2. Do we have the right metrics?

  3. How do we streamline the survey so it can still provide a benchmark of resilience in a shorter format?

Fortunately, her answer to the first question was no!  It turns out that each of the layers of our model contribute significantly and independently to overall resilience, proving our hypothesis that resilience is, indeed, multifactorial.  You need all of the layers in your Shield!

Lies’s statistical analysis and further research also highlighted that a few of our original metrics were not contributing as much to overall resilience as much as we’d originally thought, and that there were other components – such as Locus of Control, Job Autonomy and Cognitive Flexibility – which do.  Moreover, Lies and her research assistant Hannah Abdul Razak, were able to identify which questions within each survey were contributing the most to the model, which allowed us to significantly reduce the number of questions contained in the survey.

The result is the TRS-42 – a 42-question screen which provides a proven benchmark of your Resilience Shield and forms the first step in understanding where you currently sit – and which shield layers might benefit you most to develop. More importantly, as Douglas Adams informed us, 42 is also the ‘Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything’ – further proof that a strong Resilience Shield might just be the secret of life!

Ben Pronk