It has long been recognized that the resilience of any system, whether human or natural, involves the capacity of that system to adapt its structure, although not necessarily function, to a new configuration in response to long-term socio-ecological change. Thus over the long-term, enhancing resilience involves more than simply improving the ability of a system to resist an immediate threat or recover to a stable, past state. However, despite the prevalence of adaptive notions of resilience in academic discourse, it is apparent that infrastructure planners and policies largely continue to struggle to comprehend longer-term system adaptation in their understandings of resilience. Instead a short-term, stable system perspective (STSS) on resilience is prevalent: our purpose here is to identify and problematize this perspective. In so doing, we present research that developed a heuristic 'scenario-episode' tool to address, and challenge, this STSS perspective as it plays out within the context of UK infrastructure resilience. Thus, our goal is to help resilience practitioners better understand the capacities of future infrastructure systems to respond to natural and malicious threats.