Most of us were born into a 20th century which aspired to solve every problem.

That never succeeded, in part because it's just not the way life works, for individuals or societies, even at the best of times.

You solve one problem and new ones emerge.

Even sustainability implies a confidence that balance can finally be achieved.

Andrew Zali is a thought leader and curator of a new idea, resilience thinking,

which is galvanizing scientists, governments, and social innovators.

Resilience asks how to support people and create systems that know how to recover, persist, and even to thrive in the face of change.

In our age, disruption is around every corner by way of globally connected economies, inevitable superstorms, and technologies endless reinvention.

And a new generation is seeking wisdom and health amidst this reality.

Failure is intrinsic, healthy, normal, and necessary to most complex systems.

We need systems that are better at sensing, emerging disruption, that encourage cooperation rather than division.

We need systems where a failure in one component of the system doesn't bring down every other component of the system.

Those are really sort of a design brief for the 21st century.

I'm Christa Tippett. This is on being from APM American Public Media.

Andrew Zali studied cognitive science and has been a strategic marketer and a fellow of the National Geographic Society.

He's the author of Resilience, Why Things Bounce Back, and he's curator and executive director of Pop Tech, an annual conference in Camden, Maine, at the center of a global web of social innovators.

You may know this. I start all my interviews, whoever I'm talking with, by asking if there was a religious or spiritual background to your childhood.

Yes, very much so. I grew up in a Catholic family in New England. I actually, at one point, sort of flirted in my childhood with the idea that there might be a calling for me there.

That's a priest. Well, I wasn't sure actually. It's kind of, so let me sort of back up for a moment.

When I was a boy, my mom got cancer and people were shielding me.

As a child, what you pick up on is not the specifics of what's going on, but the kind of ambient anxiety that children attenuate to just perfectly, even if they don't understand the specifics of what's going on.

And people weren't sure she was going to live in when she went through all of that. She had a religious conversion.

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