The Resilience Institute
The Resilience Institute began in the sports medicine practice of its founder, Dr Sven Hansen (MBChB, MBA). This was established in 1987 based in Christchurch; its prime focus was performance optimisation for elite athletes. With the help of Dr Merv Dickinson, Sven discovered that what could help New Zealand athletes was relevant to people in business. Mastering stress, securing physical vitality and resilience could help business achieve sustainable performance. So the process began of formally introducing organisations – their executives, managers and staff – to the disciplines of sports science under the headings of corporate health, executive medicine, stress mastery and team development. The objective was to integrate these disciplines into leadership, strategy and team-building. Systematic collaboration and extensive research resulted in the establishment of some of the first integrated long term New Zealand leadership development courses. It seemed that the business world was at last ready to accept and take the concept of Human Capital Resilience seriously. This work ran for a number of years and proved to be the foundation for today’s Resilient Leadership.
The Institute itself was founded in 2002. Its mission was (and remains) to deliver high impact, practical, evidence-based and integrated Resilience training by bringing together modern preventative medicine, positive psychology, emotional intelligence, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and neuroscience.
During the years preceding The Institute’s formation and subsequently, thousands of executives and professionals have shared their stories of success and failure. They built stronger bodies, achieved greater levels of emotional control and understanding and have developed ever sharper minds. These participants have variously completed the HealthCheck, the Practical Resilience programme, the RESILIENT!360© Assessment, and the Resilient Leadership programme.
In addition to the core training (and often in support of it), The Institute has developed and offers a range of Keynotes and Training Workshops and Sven has published Five Books on Resilience which are regularly used in support of the training and can be purchased separately.
In 2003, Stuart Taylor, who gained exposure to The Institute’s approach and materials as one of its clients, joined the Institute and proceeded to establish the business in Australia. In 2005 Stuart and Sven proceeded to pioneer the business in New South Wales – work which has continued through to the present time. In 2008 they were joined by Tim Ellis, an ex-PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting partner and more recently an executive in IBM’s New Zealand Global Business Services team.
Since then we have expanded the Australian and New Zealand business. In 2010 Benoit Greindl, Alexia Michiels, Laurent Levisalles, Thomas Tang and Thierry Moschetti have helped establish practices in Switzerland, France, China and Singapore. This has provided us with an international team to provide global support to clients such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Shell, NAB, General Electric and Microsoft.