#96 - Second Anniversary - The Journey Continues

Learning Curve

Two years have passed since the first post on Resilience Institute, published on September 24th, 2023. This is post number 96, and the blog is fast approaching one hundred.

The first year felt like a honeymoon, full of excitement, energy, and, I must admit, a growing sense of confidence.The second year was very different. Once I started discovering the depth and complexity of the resilience field, I began to realise just how much I didn't know.

This is a typical learning journey, nicely captured by Dunning and Kruger.

The most confident people often know something, but not too much. When you don’t know what you don’t know, your confidence soars. This peak is sometimes called Mount Stupid.

Many sports fans are self-proclaimed football experts, even if they've never kicked a ball. Voters have strong political views; parents are certain about teaching techniques. Daniel Kahneman calls this the illusion of skills and validity. A little knowledge can inflate self-confidence far beyond actual competence.

his can be a dangerous stage. A friend of mine, who was a paragliding accident inspector, told me that most accidents occur among pilots with 200–300 flights. They’ve gained enough experience to feel confident and start taking risks, but not enough to recognise or manage truly dangerous conditions.

Valley of Despair and Beyond

Once you dive deeper into a subject, you inevitably reach the Valley of Despair. This is where you begin to notice the subtleties, complexities, and contradictions within your field. Your confidence drops sharply. Many people give up at this stage and never return.

Yet this is the most critical phase of the learning curve, because now, you know what you don’t know.

If you can accept this reality and persist, you start climbing the Slope of Enlightenment. Your confidence rises again, this time tempered by humility and a more accurate understanding of complexity.

According to Dunning and Kruger, it never returns to the levels of Mount Stupid. Why? Because now you recognise that reality is shaped by countless interacting agents, systems, and, often, sheer luck.

Kahneman compares these people to foxes, thinkers who are flexible, cautious, and hard to categorise. You rarely see foxes on television. Strong, simplistic opinions make for better ratings, but rarely good decisions. Wisdom very rarely provides black and white answers.

The Ten Thousand Hour Reminder

In the chart above, I included the ten thousand hours concept as a humble reminder: mastering a field takes time, effort, and deliberate practice.

It’s not a flat road, it’s a winding trail of ups and downs.You cannot shortcut a complex learning process. It takes roughly ten years of consistent practice to reach genuine expertise.

Shortcuts may only leave you stranded on Mount Stupid.

Organisational Resilience

Resilience can be described as a characteristic of individual, organisation and complex ecological systems up to the entire planet. It can refer to a short-term response to shocks or a long-term capacity to evolve and adapt. It can be static or dynamic; it can emphasise either stability or transformation.

Over time, I’ve chosen to focus most of my work on the long-term resilience of organisations. That focus now shapes much of the content on this website. Still, I regularly return to the individual and planetary levels—they are deeply interconnected, and resilience at one level depends on resilience at the others.

I’ve started climbing the Slope of Enlightenment, and I intend to keep climbing in the years to come. Stay with me—and let’s climb together.

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References and Notes

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.​

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77(6), 1121.