APS distinguishes stability from resilience.
Stability concerns the preservation of particular states or organisational patterns under familiar conditions.
Resilience concerns the preservation of continuity when conditions change.
For this reason, a system can be stable yet fragile if it depends upon conditions remaining unchanged. Conversely, a system can remain resilient while undergoing substantial reorganisation, provided continuity is preserved.
Living systems rarely persist through stasis. They encounter perturbation, environmental variation, ecological disruption, and changing persistence conditions. Continuity is therefore often maintained through compensation, redistribution, behavioural adjustment, ecological reorganisation, and adaptive transformation.
APS consequently treats resilience not as resistance to change, but as the capacity to preserve viable continuity through change.