In our relentless pursuit of productivity, we’ve lost sight of what truly drives organizational success: human resilience. In our recent conversation with Jenny Campbell on the Awakening Conscious Leadership podcast, Chief Executive of the Resilience Dynamic, revealed a transformative approach to understanding and building resilience in the workplace.
Resilience is more than just bouncing back from challenges. It’s about adaptive capability – our capacity to navigate change, uncertainty, and complexity with purpose and energy. Campbell’s research suggests that most organizations are fundamentally misunderstanding how resilience works.
The 65/35 Rule: Rethinking Productivity
One of Jenny’s most compelling insights is the 65/35 rule. This approach suggests spending 65% of time in focused work and 35% in intentionally unfocused activities. It might sound counterintuitive, but this “positive constructive daydreaming” is crucial for cognitive processing, creativity, and innovation.
Most organizations demand constant productivity, filling every moment with tasks and meetings. But our brains need space to connect ideas, process information, and generate breakthrough thinking. By intentionally creating unfocused time, teams can actually become more effective, not less.
Psychological Safety: The Hidden Key to Resilience
Jenny emphasizes that true resilience emerges from psychological safety. Leaders must create environments where teams can explore, question, and dream together. This means moving beyond traditional hierarchical structures and embracing collective attention and vulnerability.
“The state you are in as a leader is everything,” Jenny notes. Leaders set the ‘mood music’ for their entire organization. By modelling resilience, vulnerability, and purposeful thinking, they can transform organizational culture.
The Human-Centered Approach
At the heart of Campbell’s research is a profound understanding of human potential. Resilience isn’t about working harder or longer; it’s about understanding individual and collective energy, purpose, and capacity for change.
This approach recognizes that employees are whole people. Personal challenges, mental health, and life circumstances directly impact workplace performance. Organizations that acknowledge this can create more supportive, adaptive environments.
A Call to Action
For leaders and coaches, the message is clear: challenge the traditional productivity paradigm. Stop measuring success purely through output metrics and start investing in human potential. Create space for reflection, support mental health, and understand resilience as a systemic capability.
The Future of Resilience
Jenny’s ongoing research explores generational differences in resilience, particularly focusing on Gen Z and Gen Alpha. These generations bring new perspectives on work, connection, and purpose that will reshape organizational dynamics.
As we navigate increasingly complex workplace landscapes, her insights offer a roadmap for building more human-centered, resilient organizations.
The Bottom Line
Resilience isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity. By embracing a more holistic, intentional approach to organizational performance, we can create workplaces that are not just productive, but truly thriving.
Emily & Johnny own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of the Awakening Conscious Leadership podcasts, with all rights reserved, as well as their right of publicity.
All opinions expressed by the Podcast Guests & Participants are solely their current opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Emily & Johnny. The Podcast Guest and Participant opinions are based upon information they consider reliable, but neither Emily, Johnny nor the companies with which such guests & participants are affiliated, warrant its completeness or accuracy, and it should not be relied upon as such.
No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Emily’s or Johnny’s name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services.