Understanding the drivers of ecological stability is essential to the consistent delivery of the services nature provides and the sustainable development of human societies. To best understand ecological stability and its drivers requires an integrative approach including theory, experiments, and natural observations across a range of study systems. In this talk I will chart my personal history in ecological stability research, including theoretical work on the persistence of ecosystem services under species extinctions, conceptual work on the scale-dependence of stability and its drivers, and empirical work using experimental aquatic communities exposed to species extinctions and heatwaves in Horonai stream, Hokkaido. In future, I think two main catalysts will stimulate advances in our understanding of ecological stability. Firstly, increasing availability of high-resolution time series data from sources such as eDNA and passive acoustic monitoring. I demonstrate the use of acoustic monitoring for thinking about fundamental questions concerning stability using a case study across the island of Okinawa during typhoon Trami in 2018. My results suggest that natural forests provide vital spatial insurance through which landscape scale resilience to typhoons is achieved, while habitat degradation erodes the diversity of responses to typhoons displayed across sites. Such response diversity is conceptually important as a key driver of insurance effects and stability through its role in shaping species asynchrony. Finally, I discuss some work I’ve been doing to advance response diversity research, with a particular focus on international and diverse collaboration as the second catalyst I expect to stimulate future discoveries concerning ecological stability.