I was sitting on a park bench in Bowral, phone outstretched in my right arm, filming something I'd never quite done before: a two-person selfie video.
Beside me was Sarah Mangelsdorf, psychologist, and project lead of the Highlands Youth Co-Lab in regional New South Wales. We'd just spent time together running events for families and educators across the Southern Highlands, and I wanted to capture, in her own words, why what she'd built mattered.
Sarah told me something I hear in almost every regional and rural community I visit.
Parents are worried their kids feel isolated and disconnected, and increasingly uncertain about the future.
Ask the kids, and you hear much the same thing back: they're bored, they're worried about their future, and they don't feel especially connected either.
Regional Australia, Sarah said, simply doesn't get the same wellbeing resources our cities do. So instead of waiting for those resources to arrive, she set about getting them to her town, bringing in psychologists to run workshops on youth mental health first aid training, Visible Wellbeing, neurodiversity, youth rights if passage and strength-based parenting.
The Highlands Youth Co-Lab bought a whole community together to create collective thriving.
Halfway through the selfie filming, a bird swooped low enough to interrupt us making us laugh and argued over whether it was a magpie or a crow. It seemed like nothing at the time. But afterwards I got to thinking about the way birds flock together to support each other, much like Sarah bought everyone together to support her regional community.
You've probably seen footage of a bird murmuration: thousands of birds moving together as one; folding and rippling across the sky in a single shape, with no leader and no plan, yet somehow never colliding.
I’ve always been fascinated by this and after my time in Bowral I decided to learn a little more about murmuration. Unlike what it looks like, each bird isn't tracking the whole flock. Researchers who've studied this closely have found that a bird adjusts its position relative to only its six or seven nearest neighbours. The birds fly by making small, local adjustments and as each of them do this something bigger emerges, an entire flock that can fold in half an instant to dodge a hawk and weather a storm.
Psychologists like myself have started researching whether human groups do something similar.
We've even given it a name collective resilience.
Collective resilience isn't just a lot of hardy individuals standing near each other. It's defined as “the bonds and networks that hold communities together, provides protection, and foster recovery in times of extreme stress,” (Fielding & Anderson, 2008). In this way resilience is a property that belongs to the group, not simply the sum of its members.
When researchers study human behaviour in the aftermath of crisis (e.g., London bombings, Hurricane Katrina, they find that people who have shared this same fate go on to develop a shared identity. Australian bushfires and floods produce a massive wave of spontaneous volunteering. Communities routinely organize informal, grassroots distribution hubs, animal evacuations, and emotional support networks long before formal emergency agencies arrive on the scene.
Crisis activate a collective response that boosts resilience in a way no individual acting alone could have.
My own research backs this up.
My colleagues Dr Jessica Bullock, Dr Daniel Loton and I tracked wellbeing across Chinese International School, a K–12 school in Hong Kong, through one of the hardest stretches of the pandemic - three data points over twelve months of lockdowns and repeated closures.
Every teacher was given the Visible Wellbeing strategies and trained on how to embed these strategies into their classrooms which were sometimes virtual and sometimes on campus (180 teachers and 780 students) (Waters, Bullock & Loton, 2023).
At a time when comparable international studies were recording clear drops in student and teacher mental health, the collective wellbeing - how much wellbeing teachers and students at Chinese International School saw in their colleagues and peers around them - grew significantly.
As a community they were able to lift each other up and rise above. Moreover, statistical analysis showed a significant correlation between collective wellbeing and individual wellbeing. The more they saw wellbeing rising in others, the more their own wellbeing was boosted.
We saw the murmuration effect playing out in staffrooms and classrooms at this school. Nobody had to hold the whole flock together. Instead each person at this school was bolstered by turning to those nearest to them. As each classroom, staffroom, year level or faculty area used the Visible Wellbeing strategies something bigger emerged, the entire ‘flock’ was able pivot and adapt in healthy ways to the ever changing quarantine conditions.
How to use the murmuration effect for your students
A student doesn't need the whole class to like them to be protected by it. What predicts their wellbeing is smaller and closer, they need only a handful of people - in the seating plan, the friend group, the sports team.
When you're worried about one student, in addition to asking how they're doing, look at who their nearest neighbours are and check on that small cluster too. A well-timed word to 2-3 people around a struggling student often lifts the whole group, not just the one student you were worried about.
Teachers supporting teachers through murmuration
You don't have to manage the wellbeing of every around you. Before a hard lesson or meeting, take thirty seconds to reset: through deep breathing, naming how you're feeling out loud, noticing something positive in the environment, thinking on one ‘win’ for the day.
This isn't self-indulgent and it isn’t trivial. In a collective, your nearest neighbours feel and benefit from your stress re-set.
How the murmuration effect helps school leaders
School leaders already do so many good things to lift wellbeing of their students, staff and families. Lifting the flock from above through a whole-staff email, morning briefings, students assemblies, parent evening, wellbeing days and so on. Murmurations are powerful because they don't work top-down.
There's no lead bird having to take the full responsibility.
The shape of the whole flock comes from thousands of small, local, neighbour-to-neighbour adjustments happening at once. As a leader, think about how you can strengthen and empower the smaller ‘local’ groupings in your school (e.g., middle management, school clubs) and let the ripple effect carry some of the weight for you.
Proof it works, mapped across a whole region
Collective resilience isn't only something a community discovers after disaster strikes. It’s also a “positive capability” that you build ahead of time Mukherjee and Mandal's (2022) research.
That's exactly what's happening across the Upper Hunter in NSW. This map shows our Visible Wellbeing project, run in collaboration with the amazing charity organisation Where There's a Will, running from Murrurundi down to Denman, Cassilis across to Ellerston - a whole region deliberately building the same close, local strength the research points to.
Stars = Kindergartens trained in Visible Wellbeing: Strength Stars
Badge = Schools trained in Visible Wellbeing
Book = Communities that ran The Strength Switch, my parenting course - delivered not by outside experts flown in for the day, but by local teachers within their own community
Every star, badge and book on that map shows where we did local training of kindergartens, schools, and groups of local parents.
Small Visible Wellbeing ‘hubs’ that went on to have impact across an entire region.
Wellbeing in the Upper Hunter is not left to a small few but is understood to be everyone’s right and responsibility. It's cultivated by hundreds of local adjustments, in enough nearby places, at once.
Exactly how a resilient flock of birds flies together….and how a resilient region holds its shape under pressure.
Ready to build collective wellbeing in your school?
Whether it's one classroom, a staffroom, or an entire region like the Upper Hunter — we'd love to help you build it.
Book a Discovery Call with my team to see what a whole-community Visible Wellbeing approach, using all six SEARCH pathways, could look like where you are.
P.S. Looking for more wellbeing resources? Check out Lea's shop...
References
Waters, L., Cameron, K., Nelson-Coffey, S. K., Crone, D. L., Kern, M. L., Lomas, T., Oades, L., Owens, R. L., Pawelski, J. O., Rashid, T., Warren, M. A., White, M. A., & Williams, P. (2021). Collective wellbeing and posttraumatic growth during COVID-19: How positive psychology can help families, schools, workplaces, and marginalized communities. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 17(6), 761–789. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.1940251
Fielding, A., & Anderson, J. (2008). Working with refugee communities to build collective resilience (ASeTTS Occasional Paper 2). Association for Services to Torture and Trauma Survivors
Mukherjee, T., & Mandal, E. (2022). Collective resilience: Macro influencing micro. In S. K. Upadhyay (Ed.), Handbook of resilience in the Global South (pp. 71–85). Springer.