In May 2025, we launched the Navigating Uncertainty Webinar Series in response to sudden USAID funding cuts that disrupted thousands of livelihoods across Kenya. What began as an urgent support platform soon evolved into something deeper: a shared journey of reinvention.
Out of this experience emerged a concept that reframed our entire understanding of change—transilience.
🌍 From Resilience to Transilience
Coined by Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr in their transformative book The Upside of Uncertainty, transilience offers a powerful upgrade to the familiar concept of resilience. If resilience is about bouncing back after adversity, transilience is about leaping forward into something entirely new.
“Transilience is the moment when hardened steel turns to molten metal, or terrifying uncertainty becomes insight, wisdom, and opportunity.” — Furr & Furr
Transilience recognizes that uncertainty is not just something to be managed or survived. It is the very condition from which growth, reinvention, and transformation emerge. In our webinar sessions, we saw this in real time: participants pivoted from confusion to creativity, from despair to direction.
📖 Insights from The Upside of Uncertainty
The Furrs offer a practical model for navigating uncertainty, known as the Four-Part First Aid Cross. We built our webinar design around this:
- Reframe — Shift Your Mindset
See uncertainty not as a threat, but as an opening. Participants began to see job loss not as an ending, but as a re-beginning. One participant said, “I paused, reflected, reset, and restarted.”
- Prime — Prepare Proactively
Build buffers before crisis peaks. Attendees reported new budgeting practices, exploring digital tools, and reskilling—not in panic, but as investment in future resilience. This is the video
- Do — Take Imperfect Action
Many stopped waiting for the perfect opportunity. From launching poultry ventures to exploring content creation with AI tools, action created clarity.
- Sustain — Maintain Purpose and Perspective
Through journaling, prayer, peer groups, and coaching, participants remained connected to deeper meaning. They began to view this disruption as a pivot point, not a detour.
🌎 Why Transilience Matters More Than Ever
We are living in a VUCA world—one marked by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. This isn’t a passing storm. According to the World Uncertainty Index, global uncertainty has been climbing steadily for decades, with no signs of reversal.
In this context, resilience alone is no longer enough. Resilience is about bouncing back. Transilience is about building forward.
As Marcella Bremer insightfully notes:
“The upside of uncertainty is just as real as the downsides, but like an underdog, it just needs a fair chance to show what it can do.”
When we embrace transilience, we stop asking “How do I survive this?” and start asking “What can this make possible?”
🤝 What Transilience Looked Like in Practice
From the Navigating Webinars post-series feedback survey:
- One participant said, “Better to do something imperfectly than not at all.”
- Another launched a poultry venture after years in traditional employment.
- Several began using AI tools like ChatGPT to explore job leads, create content, or build personal brands.
- Others learned to budget and save deliberately for the first time.
These aren’t cosmetic changes. They represent transilience in motion: people using disruption as raw material for reinvention.
🔍 Anchoring Quotes
“We are all wired to fear the downsides of uncertainty, but we forget that change, creation, transformation, and innovation rarely show up without some measure of it.” – Nathan & Susannah Furr
“Most of us are taught to minimize risks, but that’s different from minimizing regrets.” – Marcella Bremer
“People with a growth mindset see mistakes not as failures, but as part of learning.” –Carol Dweck
“We don’t control the world. We are successful if we are in the right place at the right time with the right skills.” – Systems Thinking Lens
These quotes became guideposts for our participants, helping them reframe fear into fuel.
💪 Moving from Fragility to Future-Fitness
The future belongs not to those who return to the past, but to those who transform through the present.
Transilience means:
- Letting go of fixed identities
- Choosing curiosity over control
- Seeing detours as design
- Using uncertainty as innovation fuel
This shift isn’t easy. But it is learnable. With the right tools, support, and mindset, anyone can build transilience.
🕯️ A Final Word
If you’re navigating career shifts, funding cuts, or personal transitions, remember: This season might feel uncertain, but it might also be the portal to your most courageous and creative work yet.
Don’t just bounce back. Leap forward.
Don’t just be resilient. Be transilient.
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One response
Transilince sounds live, Thriving in Turbulence.
Making peace with Uncertainty as the only certain thing to navigate such a life that we are to thrive in with tent mentality-not permance!
Thank you Sir for the insights!