The Origins of Resilience Training

Resilience training is embedded in the aviation industry

In today’s workplaces “resilience” is everywhere.

It appears in job specs, strategy slides and culture conversations.

It’s become a term used loosely, describing everything from toughness to optimism, without much clarity around what it actually means or how to build it.

The result?

Resilience has become a concept, admired, but rarely taught. Talked about, but hard to apply and largely, misunderstood.

But in one high stakes industry, resilience training isn’t vague at all. It’s embedded, repeatable, evidence based and quietly transformative.

That industry is aviation and the training is called Crew Resource Management (CRM).

The Accident That Changed an Industry

In 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on the runway in Tenerife, 583 people lost their lives.

It remains the deadliest accident in aviation history.

Both aircraft were serviceable, the weather was poor, but within limits and manageable for the vastly experienced crew.

The main failures, however, were human and tragically in hindsight, which so often reveals what’s invisible at the time, were preventable.

Misunderstandings, external influences, assumptions, delayed decisions, hierarchical pressure and a lack of intervention.

A sequence of normal behaviour but under abnormal strain, which led to catastrophe.

In the aftermath, the investigation confirmed all this.

And rather than falling back on the usual catch all “human error” NASA and the wider aviation community asked a different kind of question:

Not who is to blame, but truly: why did this happen?

And then, unusually they asked something more:

“How can we better understand and support the human side of performance, especially when under pressure?”

That question gave rise to Crew Resource Management.

Not just a new training course, but as a seismic shift in how aircrew think, decide, lead, and recover.. together.

What Exactly is "CRM"!?

CRM focuses on what are sometimes called “non technical” skills. But that term undersells their impact. These aren’t soft extras. They’re foundational capabilities:

Clear, closed loop communication
Situational awareness, the ability to notice, interpret, and anticipate
Decision making in uncertainty
Leadership and followership that adapts in real time
Workload and emotional regulation
Recovery from error, with accountability and grace

These aren’t left to chance. They’re taught, practised, embedded.

Through shared language, open feedback, structured debriefs, and daily habits, CRM creates a culture where performance and reflection go hand in hand.

It doesn’t remove stress. But it gives people something to stand on when pressure rises.

It's Not Rocket Science

NASA's BHP program draws directly from aviation's CRM and Human Factor's training

In space, mistakes don’t just create risk. They jeopardise lives, missions, and years of work.

That’s why NASA expanded on CRM with its Behavioural Health and Performance (BHP) program, designed to help astronauts navigate prolonged isolation, emotional strain, and complex team dynamics during long missions.

The focus?

Sustainable performance in extreme conditions.

Astronauts are trained in:

Team cohesion and group living
Conflict management and emotional support
Psychological self-monitoring and reflection
Working effectively across specialisms and roles
Maintaining motivation and focus in uncertainty

This isn’t corporate wellbeing. It’s behavioural resilience, tested in some of the harshest environments known to us.

And much of it draws directly from CRM and Human Factors training.

How is This Relevant to Other Industries?

The challenges CRM and BHP address aren’t unique to flight or space. They’re familiar to anyone navigating complexity, responsibility, and human dynamics under pressure:

Leaders juggling decisions with limited clarity
Teams managing friction, fatigue, and shifting priorities
People performing in emotionally demanding roles
Organisations stretched thin by change or crisis
Staff expected to “cope” without the tools to recover

CRM offers something these settings desperately need:

Structured, humane ways of staying adaptive, before, during, and after disruption.

And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t frame resilience as personal heroism.

It sees it as shared, teachable practice.

Evidence-Based Training

Since CRM’s introduction:

Aviation’s accident rate has dropped by over 80% despite higher traffic and complexity
Airlines using embedded CRM report faster incident recovery and stronger team cohesion
Healthcare and nuclear industries have adopted CRM-based training to reduce human error
NASA continues to invest heavily in BHP and non-technical crew training, recognising it as a mission-critical asset

Beyond aviation, research continues to support the broader value:

Gallup links psychological safety and engagement to a 21% rise in profitability and a 41% reduction in absenteeism
Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety, not intelligence or skill, was the strongest predictor of team success
The WHO reports over $1 trillion in annual global productivity loss due to workplace stress
Organisations that invest in human factors informed training see improved retention, communication, and adaptability across teams

In short: investing in people works, when that investment is meaningful, consistent, and rooted in real world pressure.

Give Your Employees Professional Resilience

Professional skills that double as life skills don’t just help individuals

Since the pandemic, many businesses have pushed hard to survive. People stepped up. They gave more than they had. Quiet sacrifices. Long hours. Emotional load. And now, as the world slowly pivots back toward growth, some organisations are looking to reward that effort, with pay rises, retention bonuses, or improved flexibility.

All welcome. All important.

But what if you offered something more lasting?

What if, alongside the recognition, you gave people something that stayed with them, something they could use every day, not just during disruption?

What if you trained them to think clearly under pressure, to communicate without friction, to reflect and recover, at work and at home?

What if you gave them not just appreciation, but adaptability?

Not just feedback, but tools?

Not just relief, but meaning?

Because professional skills that double as life skills don’t just help individuals, they ripple through teams and strengthen organisations. They build shared capability, shared language, and shared trust.

And in that quiet shift, resilience stops being a vague ideal.

It becomes something you can see.

This is sustainable performance.

Sustainable Performance

Not through perfection, but through preparation. Through small behaviours repeated, through habits shared across teams, and through an understanding that humans need more than instructions to perform well, they need clarity, autonomy and support.

That’s what sustainable performance looks like.

It’s not always fast. It’s not always visible. But it lasts.

And it costs less than a replacement hire, less than extended sickness from burnout, less than the slow erosion of team capacity when people quietly withdraw.

It helps people stay, not just in post, but present.

Why Resilience Matters now, More Than Ever

Resilience shouldn’t be something we scramble for after a crisis. It should be part of how we work, every day.

CRM, Human Factors, and behavioural training give us that option. They offer structure without rigidity, clarity without jargon, and reflection without self indulgence.

They help people lead, follow, recover, and adapt. Together.

And the best part? These are skills. They can be taught, learned and shared.

That’s the shift we’re making. From resilience as a buzzword, to resilience as a shared professional language, professional skill and.. a life skill.

Transform the way you Work

CRM/HF has helped transform one of the world’s most safety critical industries. But the behaviours it teaches, awareness, communication, decision making, reflection, belong far beyond aviation.

They belong in classrooms, clinics, boardrooms, workshops, team meetings.. your home.

Because when people are trained in how to think together, speak up early, make steady decisions, and recover with care their performance changes. So does culture. So does the day to day experience of work.

This isn’t corporate virtue signalling.

This is clarity.

This is calm.

This is recoverability.

This is what resilience looks like, when it works.

Teachable, Transferable, Transformational

Our courses are built from lived experience, developed over decades of flying, instructing, and navigating critical operations using the gold standard of non-technical training: Crew Resource Management/Human Factors training.

But we didn’t stop there, we’ve combined what CRM does best, clear communication, safe challenge, structured decision-making and recoverability under pressure with ideas and principles learnt from Agile methodologies and an interactive learning approach inspired by Training From the Back of the Room.

The result is something new.

A practical, evidence based approach to resilience.

One that isn’t locked in a cockpit or a boardroom, but designed for any environment where people work under pressure, navigate uncertainty, or lead through complexity.

What we offer is the development of a professional toolkit, rooted in behavioural science, tested in one of the world’s most exacting industries, and now translated for universal application.

And it’s built to develop resilience at all three critical levels:

Individual Resilience

We don’t treat this as a personality trait.

We treat it as a skill, one that can be taught, practised, and grown.

This part of the course helps people understand themselves better, respond to pressure with clarity, and stay adaptable on good days and bad.

It builds a quiet, confident ability to perform, not through toughness, but through self awareness and recovery.

Operational Resilience

Here, we focus on how teams work together, how they communicate, make decisions, respond to risk, and recover from strain.

This isn’t about heroic effort.

It’s about systems that are designed to flex, where people understand their roles, speak up early, and know how to operate under both normal and non-normal conditions.

We equip teams with language, habits, and shared mental models that make high-functioning collaboration possible under pressure.

Organisational Resilience

At this level, resilience becomes strategic.

It’s about how businesses prepare for the unknown, not just through contingency plans, but by addressing hidden vulnerabilities and fostering cultures that support adaptability.

This part of the course helps leaders and organisations see resilience not as a crisis response, but as a daily behaviour, because when a skill is practised regularly, it’s already there when you need it most.

Each level builds on the last.

We explore complexity, emergence, system drift, and how a just culture invites truth, reflection, and improvement. We’ll also discover how vulnerabilities grow unnoticed, how to spot them and resolve issues before they begin.

Resilient individuals strengthen their teams.

Resilient teams protect and uplift the organisation.

And resilient organisations create the conditions where all three can thrive.

This is a cohesive, teachable system.

It bridges industries.

It speaks a shared language.

And it enables sustainable performance, at every level.

The best time to learn resilience was before you needed it, the next best time is now.

Learn. Resilience. Now