The Theatre of Resilience

How We Rehearse a More Human Future

TLDR: What is the Theatre of Resilience? It’s What Does Not’s theory of change: human beings build collective resilience by rehearsing empathy, cooperation and belonging through shared cultural experiences.

“To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future,” wrote author, Rebecca Solnit. Uncertainty leaves open the possibility that things could still change. But hope is not passive optimism. It is the decision to participate in what happens next.

Here’s the defining challenge of our time that we must decide to participate in: Technology has evolved faster than our relationships. Can human beings cooperate across difference at the scale that our shared problems demand? We can speak to almost anyone on Earth, yet loneliness, distrust and division continue to shape public life. Making participation especially challenging.

The Theatre of Resilience is our response: a framework for using culture, storytelling and shared experience to help people practise the human capabilities the future requires.

My work as a creative director, consultant and professional fixer repeatedly brought me back to the same question: what happens when organisations solve for systems, outputs and technology, but forget the human beings inside them?

Looking across behavioural science, social learning and the science of resilience, I found a more hopeful proposition. Human behaviour is not fixed. We learn from one another. Emotions move through groups. Stories shift perception. Relationships change what people believe is possible. Empathy, trust and cooperation can all be strengthened through experience.

This thinking culminated in What Does Not: a culture studio, creative incubator and community built to change the world through human connection – and explore just what it can do.

Our recipe is simple, but the impact is far reaching: we use storytelling, music, conversation, play and participatory experiences to create spaces where strangers become collaborators, audiences become communities and difference becomes a source of learning rather than division. The public programme is our living laboratory. Our work with organisations applies what we learn to workplace culture, leadership, employee engagement, brand experiences and social impact.

Why call it the Theatre of Resilience?

We do not mean theatre as spectacle. We mean theatre as rehearsal.

Culture allows people to try out different ways of seeing, relating and behaving before those behaviours become ordinary. A story can rehearse empathy. A discussion can rehearse disagreement without dehumanisation. A jam session can rehearse active listening and adaptation. A gathering can rehearse belonging.

Every What Does Not experience is therefore a behavioural prototype: a small-scale version of the more connected and collaborative world we want to live in.

In our spaces we go beyond imagining the future. Instead, we practise it.

Here’s why: in unstable times like we’re living through, people seek certainty, purpose and belonging. If healthy communities do not provide those things, more divisive movements will be more than happy to. The rise of the far right, the manosphere and other alarming phenomena are proof of this. Rebuilding social trust therefore cannot be treated as a soft cultural extra. It is part of the infrastructure of a resilient society.

Brands, institutions and cultural organisations already shape how people see themselves and one another. The question is whether they will use that influence merely to capture attention, or to strengthen connection and participation.

Legendary director, David Lynch’s forecast: “What a great time to be alive if you love the theatre of the absurd.”

From individual resilience to collective resilience

What Does Not takes its name from the idea that adversity can become a source of strength and the aphorism ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger’. These days, loneliness taking on epidemic proportions seems to prove that alienation is a core feature of capitalism – and a sentiment echoed by Britney Spears when she sang ‘my loneliness is killing me’. Jokes aside, resilience is often misunderstood as an individual’s ability to endure more, work harder or bounce back unchanged.

We see it differently. No one becomes resilient alone. Resilience is relational: it grows through trust, shared identity, mutual support and the knowledge that we do not have to face uncertainty by ourselves.

All of which creates the paradox of our era. We are technologically connected at extraordinary scale, while many people feel increasingly separated from their neighbours, communities and even themselves. The challenge is not simply to make individuals tougher. It is to repair the relationships that allow people and systems to adapt together.

To repair a damaged social fabric, we have to strengthen its warp and weft: the relationships between people. That requires more than encouraging everyone to be kinder. It means designing environments in which people can encounter difference safely, listen without immediately defending themselves and discover common ground.

We talk about designing human connection, but the reality is you cannot programme people for empathy. But we can create the conditions in which empathy, curiosity and cooperation are more likely to emerge. As much as we’d like empathy to be innate to all humans, it just doesn’t come as naturally to some. Even for those whose heart naturally bleeds, the strain of the daily grind can numb feelings of empathy. And if the antidote to this age of division, extraction and aggressive competition is cohesion and mutually-beneficial collaboration, the question is, how can we cultivate kindness and build strong, collaborative, empathic social relationships on a larger scale? Cue What Does Not.

How humans learn from one another

Humans learn socially. We observe one another, imitate behaviour, absorb emotional cues and update our understanding through interaction. Mirror-neuron systems are one part of that much larger process, alongside social learning, emotional contagion, memory, language and cultural transmission.

The important point is not that a single type of brain cell “creates” empathy. It is that our brains and bodies continually respond to the people around us. What we witness, practise and experience together can shape how we feel and behave.

That gives culture extraordinary power. When people encounter a perspective through a story, a conversation or a shared experience, the unfamiliar can become recognisable. The person previously understood as “other” becomes fully human. We see this time and again in the spaces we create: that we have more in common with people we thought we had nothing in common with.

From ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ to ‘If it inspires, it transpires’

For us, immersive does not mean surrounding people with bigger screens. It means involving the whole human.

We create multisensory, participatory experiences that bring different perspectives into contact. Music, food, stories, play and conversation create common ground. People do not simply receive a message; they encounter one another. We examine issues from many angles, facilitate genuine human connection, provoke thought and build resilience in the process.

The reactions that get stimulated make these mirror neurons come alive. We activate them through creating safe spaces of common ground — where the universal language of music, food, and stories facilitate an understanding of our shared humanity.

There’s a reason What Does Not is a self styled culture agency and creative incubator. We want to change the norms of co-working, co-living, and co-existing — so that we no longer do things from a place of obligation, but from a place of inspiration. Our gamble is that healthy, happy humans will create a healthy, happy culture.

This is key to the creative incubator side of WDN… Connection and inspiration leads to hopeful dreaming and collaboration. In a way, we are creating a new ethos, and virtuous cycle, for content creation and content consumption: “if it inspires, it transpires.” Scaled up, this is change-making, culture-shifting, zeitgeist-defining stuff.

Inspiration changes what people imagine to be possible. When that feeling becomes shared, it can travel through communities, shape behaviour and eventually alter culture. That is what we mean by: if it inspires, it transpires.

Across workplaces and communities, the same signals keep appearing: exhaustion, loneliness, distrust and a hunger for more meaningful ways to live and work. These are not isolated wellbeing problems. They are evidence that many of our institutions are failing to meet basic human needs for agency, connection and belonging.

Resilience does not mean returning everything to the way it was. It means adapting without losing the qualities that make a community worth sustaining.

“Resilience is the ability of a system (like a community) to absorb disturbance and still retain basic function and structure. Building resilience means intentionally guiding the system’s process of adaptation in an attempt to preserve some qualities and allow others to fade away, all while retaining the essence — or “identity” — of the system. In a human community, identity is essentially determined by what people value about where they live.”

Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Institute

That distinction matters. The goal is not to protect every existing norm or institution. Some should be allowed to disappear. Collective resilience means consciously deciding what we carry forward, what we leave behind and who gets to participate in that decision.

How we rehearse resilience

You’ve read what it says on the tin, but what’s in it? Quite simply, finding different ways to discover our shared identity and unite around shared interests. This looks like What Does Not’s uncensored storytelling nights, the RAW, which helps people discover their shared humanity. Each one is centred around a theme, and we curate it in a way that helps people discover different lenses on that topic.

Then there’s the NOISE, our emerging music showcase meets open jam, unites people through a love of shared interests — in this case music and dance.

And finally, there’s the POV, What Does Not’s panels with a difference. This takes themes arising from the RAWs and helps people contextualise the age we live in, so they can process how their personal experience — from dating, to sex, and relationships — is connected to the whole. In short, we are not an atomised society. We are an organism called humanity, and we’re having a bit of a moment. But we will overcome.

What collective resilience means for organisations

The same human capabilities that allow communities to adapt also determine whether organisations can respond to change.

Resilient organisations are not merely those with contingency plans. They are organisations in which people can speak honestly, share information, challenge authority, collaborate across boundaries and adapt without losing trust.

That makes human connection commercially consequential. It influences retention, creativity, decision-making, innovation, customer experience and the ability to navigate disruption.

And this applies to humans that work for brands, and those that buy into their mission.

As artificial intelligence takes on more analytical, administrative and creative tasks, the capabilities once dismissed as “soft” become more strategically important.

Empathy. Trust. Judgement. Curiosity. Improvisation. The ability to listen, challenge, repair relationships and work across difference.

These are not decorative additions to an efficient organisation. They are civilisation skills. They determine whether increasingly powerful technologies are introduced into cultures capable of using them wisely.

With some brands commanding allegiances bigger than some nations (e.g. Apple and Nike), the fastest way to create a global culture of kindness and collaboration is for organisations everywhere to align their goals with this vision: culture programming as the machete that cuts through the noise of division and fear.

This argument is grounded in years spent diagnosing organisational problems from the inside: restructuring teams, developing digital products, recruiting people, repairing communication and trying to make hierarchical systems more responsive to the humans working within them.

Again and again, the visible problem was performance, process or technology. Underneath it sat a relational problem: people did not trust one another, information could not move freely, authority could not be challenged or teams had lost a shared sense of purpose.

Structure matters. But no organisational model can compensate for a culture in which people are disconnected.

Employee satisfaction in almost all the places I consulted was pretty low. In the process of diagnosing the problem, rolling up my sleeves, restructuring the company, fixing, recruiting, motivating, inspiring, developing and building, you could say I got to know each business pretty well. Hierarchical structures meant authority cannot be held to account. Implementing flat structures almost never worked, because this is applied as a business model and not as an imperative stemming from the desire to fulfil basic human needs. And so the same problems persisted.

This not only impacts performance, morale and productivity. It affects the ability to innovate, adapt, be resilient to market shocks — and ultimately, the bottom line.

Now playing in the theatre of resilience: journeys not destinations

If I had a penny for the amount of times clients wanted to make an app to solve a real, human problem – I’d be bigger than Elon. The truth is, when you rehumanise internal processes and solve for the human, your products and services naturally come together in a CX-focused (customer experience) way – both internally and externally.

Governments and organisations often reach for technology because it appears concrete, scalable and measurable. But a digital interface cannot, by itself, repair distrust, align competing institutions or persuade people to cooperate.

When the underlying challenge is behavioural, relational or cultural, technology should support the response rather than define it. A service can be technically functional and still fail because people do not trust it, understand it or recognise themselves within it.

The more useful question is therefore not, “What should we build?” but, “What needs to change in how people understand, relate and behave – and what role, if any, should technology play?”

If I could, I’d change the channel to play a narrative of togetherness and collaboration, as society and government work together to navigate through a time of crisis. In this show, everyone’s concerns are heard, everyone is represented, no one has the answer – but together we’re working to find it. That’s a show I’d watch.

When you remove the rush to design tech for a human problem, you may actually solve the real issues. In society these are: distrust of authority, fear of the unknown, scrutiny by the media.

Inside large institutions, the obstacles are often equally human: territorial departments, conflicting incentives, fear of accountability and pressure to keep delivery machinery moving even when the problem has not been properly understood.

These are not primarily technology failures. They are failures of trust, collaboration and collective sense-making.

In short, it’s more cost-efficient and socially effective to change the ‘tech-first’ mental model. And approach challenges as behaviour change projects that contain a technology element as part of overcoming crisis.

From survival to participation

Resilience is not something experts deliver to passive populations. It grows when people experience themselves as participants in a shared future.

The role of culture is to make that participation imaginable, emotional and social – not merely intellectual.

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other. [Our job now] is to help people uncover and experience their innate connections with each other and with the systemic, self-healing powers of the web of life, so that they may be enlivened and motivated to play their part in creating a sustainable civilization.”

Joanna Macy, Environmentalist

McKinsey’s digital arm recently wrote about ‘Inclusive design as a path to resiliency and growth.’ While they’re bang on the money about the fact inclusivity puts resilience into products and services, inclusive design is frequently presented as a route to untapped markets and organisational growth. That may persuade businesses to act, but it is not enough.

Inclusion should not begin with the commercial value of previously overlooked people. It should begin with the recognition that systems designed without them are incomplete.

Nor can resilience simply be “built into” products while the culture producing those products remains hierarchical, disconnected or extractive. Inclusive outcomes require inclusive relationships, decisions and institutions.

I’ll tell you something else for free that big consultancies won’t. ‘Inclusive design’ is about to be the next buzzword in a string of methodologies that didn’t quite hit the mark. As enterprise resilience (defined as an organisation’s capacity to anticipate and react to change not only to survive, but to evolve) takes on increasing strategic importance for navigating these rollercoaster times, there is no use trying to build resiliency into the design of products and services, without considering one very obvious roadblock to this noble intention: we live in the age of the attention economy.

So the question becomes, how can we reach, and positively influence the distracted, the disconnected (from self and other), and the dispossessed? Isn’t the answer ‘you gotta make them FEEL something’? To make the invisible, palpable? The IRL, visceral? The impossible, seem possible? To change behaviour, people need opportunities to encounter a different social reality – not as a presentation or policy, but as something lived in the body and shared with others.

You see, when you solve for the human, you solve for every ‘X’. And the people feel it. Happy employees make better teams – they collaborate seamlessly. They have the mental space to see the way forward. They build better products. And deliver better services.

This is why I designed every event series to work as a B2B product, so businesses can easily be on the right side of history. The principles behind our public formats can be applied inside organisations without reducing them to corporate entertainment.

RAW uses personal storytelling and active listening to build empathy, psychological safety and understanding across hierarchy.

POV creates facilitated dialogue in which authority is not the only source of knowledge, helping organisations surface lived experience and challenge assumptions.

NOISE and AFTERNOISE use experimentation, improvisation and collaboration to help people practise creative risk, responsiveness and collective authorship.

The format may change according to the context. The purpose remains the same: to create the conditions in which people can see differently, relate differently and therefore behave differently.

Resilience requires relationships across difference

Belonging cannot be built by gathering only people who already look, think and live alike.

Our rooms are intentionally intergenerational and multicultural. We bring together people with different professions, experiences, identities and levels of access—not as a diversity exercise, but because relationships across difference expand what individuals and communities can imagine.

Connection does not require sameness. It requires environments in which difference can be encountered without immediately becoming threat.

If we make something inaccessible, more accessible, people will clamour for it.

But, maybe because we’re an all-female team, there’s a heightened level of sensitivity that comes with everything we do — so we throw open the doors to people who would ordinarily not have access to the Soho Houses of this world. And we make a lot of these events free too. It’s the only way to truly activate the power of mirror neurons — to create a new type of social mixology that is very hard to come by.

We will not repair social division by retreating further into groups of people who already agree with us. Collective resilience depends on our ability to cross boundaries, remain curious and cooperate without erasing difference.

That is the work of the Theatre of Resilience: creating places where people can practise the relationships, behaviours and shared identities that a more humane future will require.

The future will not be made resilient by technology alone, or by asking isolated individuals to withstand ever more pressure.

It will be made resilient between us.

In stories that turn strangers into recognisable human beings.
In conversations that transform disagreement into curiosity.
In music that teaches people to listen and adapt.
In gatherings that make belonging tangible.
In organisations where people can speak, challenge and create together.

We do not build audiences and hope that change follows.

We rehearse the future.

One room.
One relationship.
One shift in perception at a time.

Welcome to the Theatre of Resilience.