Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back Paperback - 2013
by Andrew Zolli; Ann Marie Healy
Summary
Reporting firsthand from the coral reefs of Palau to the back streets of Palestine, Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy relate breakthrough scientific discoveries, pioneering social and ecological innovations, and important new approaches to constructing a more resilient world. Zolli and Healy show how this new concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which we can assess major issues afresh: from business planning to social development, from urban planning to national energy securityâÈ'circumstances that affect us all.
Provocative, optimistic, and eye-opening, Resilience sheds light on why some systems, people, and communities fall apart in the face of disruption and, ultimately, how they can learn to bounce back.
Details
- Title Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
- Author Andrew Zolli; Ann Marie Healy
- Binding Paperback
- Edition Reprint
- Pages 336
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Simon & Schuster
- Date 2013-07-09
- Features Bibliography, Index, Price on Product - Canadian, Table of Contents
- ISBN 9781451683813 / 1451683812
- Weight 0.63 lbs (0.29 kg)
- Dimensions 8.39 x 5.52 x 0.81 in (21.31 x 14.02 x 2.06 cm)
- Dewey Decimal Code 303.4
Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
THE
RESILIENCE IMPERATIVE
On January 31, 2007, the long, narrow alleys
and wide boulevards of Mexico City were filled with typical early morning sounds:
children running through open doors; families preparing for the day; and street vendors
cooking up tortillas, one of MexicoâÈçs main food staples.
Yet this was to be no ordinary day. On this day, the price of
cornâÈ'the main ingredient in tortillasâÈ'would hit an all-time high of 35 cents a
pound, a price that would have been unfathomable just a year before. Corn was
suddenly 400 percent more expensive than it had been just three months earlier. With half
of all Mexicans living below the poverty line, a sudden increase of this magnitude was
not just a nuisance, it was a potential humanitarian and political crisis.
As the sun lifted higher in the sky, the voices of tens of thousands of
citizens, farmers, and union activists could be heard gathering in one of the
cityâÈçs central squares. Above their heads, they raised not weapons, but ears of corn. The tortilla riots, as they came to be called, echoed throughout
the day, taking over one of the main downtown streets and challenging the new government
of President Felipe CalderÃćn. Well into the evening, protestors chanted, âÈêTortillas sÃÿ, pan no!âÈëâÈ'a pun on
CalderÃćnâÈçs National Action Party, the PAN, which also means
âÈêbreadâÈë in SpanishâÈ'and barked out their suspicions about just who was
behind the rise in prices: the government, big business, and the wealthy elite of the
country. Union leaders and television celebrities railed against corporations
for price fixing and chastised the beef and pig ranchers for hoarding their grains.
While the ranchers and political leaders were natural objects of class
indignation, they were not, this time at least, the principal culprits. Indeed, the
protestors could scarcely have guessed the truth: The slowly burning fuse that had
ignited the explosion in corn prices had been lit several years before and a thousand
miles away by a seemingly disconnected eventâÈ'Hurricane Katrina.
HereâÈçs how: In August 2005, the impending winds of the devastating
hurricane had prompted the mass evacuation and shutdown of the 2,900 oil rigs that dot the
Gulf Coast from Texas to Louisiana, disrupting almost 95 percent of oil production in
the Gulf for several
months. In the aftermath of the storm, the price of gasoline in America surged,
in some places by as much as 40 cents per gallon in a single day. This spike in oil prices made
cornâÈ'the primary ingredient in the alternative fuel ethanolâÈ'look relatively
cheap by comparison and spurred investment in domestic ethanol production. U.S. farmers,
among the most efficient and most heavily subsidized in the world, were encouraged to
replace their edible corn crops with inedible varieties suitable for ethanol production.
By 2007, even Congress had gotten in on the act, mandating a fivefold increase in
biofuel productionâÈ'with more than 40 percent of it to come from corn.
Amid the euphoria of this ethanol investment bubble, almost no one
considered potential impacts on MexicoâÈçs peasant farmers, who, in the decade
between the passage of NAFTA and the arrival of Katrina, had found
themselves thrust into international competition with powerhouse U.S. agribusinesses
north of their border. American corn growers routinely sold (many would argue dumped)
their product on Mexican markets at almost 20 percent less than it cost to produce it. Unable to
keep upâÈ'even with the support of their own domestic subsidiesâÈ'many rural
Mexican farmers had switched the variety of corn they grew, switched crops altogether,
or abandoned their farms, swelling the ranks of Mexico CityâÈçs underclass and
further accelerating MexicoâÈçs position as a primary market for cheap U.S.
varieties.
As NAFTA took hold, this expanding corn import market had also become
increasingly dominated by a tiny clique of powerful transnational corporations, mostly
headquartered in the United States, including Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, along
with their Mexican
subsidiaries. These companies accelerated the transition already at work by
doing what dominant incumbents instinctively do: concentrating power, tightening their
control over the market, and squeezing out smaller suppliers. The result: Mexico, famous
as the place that domesticated the growing of corn ten thousand years ago, soon became a
net food
importerâÈ'and the third largest of U.S. agricultural
productsâÈ'much of it channeled through a tiny constellation of companies.
It was against this backdrop that, in the year that followed Katrina, with
increasing amounts of the United StatesâÈç domestic supply being diverted to
ethanol, the price of corn became inextricably coupled to the price of oilâÈ'not
only because ethanol and oil are comparable fuels, but also because it takes an enormous
amount of petroleum-derived fertilizers to grow corn in the first place. As the price of
a barrel of petroleum fluctuated, the price of a bushel of corn began increasingly to
move in lockstep. When global speculation drove the cost of a barrel of oil to nearly
$140, the now-linked price of corn also skyrocketed, provoking what may become an
archetypal experience of the twenty-first century: a food riot.
âÈò âÈò âÈò
We are, of course, used to these kinds of stories.
Each week, it seems, brings some unforeseen disruption, blooming amid the thicket of
overlapping social, political, economic, technological, and environmental systems that
govern our lives. They arrive at a quickening yet erratic pace, usually from unexpected
quarters, stubbornly resistant to prediction. The most severe become cultural
touchstones, referred to in staccato shorthand: Katrina. Haiti. BP. Fukushima. The
Crash. The Great Recession. The London mob. The Arab Spring. Other nameless disruptions
swell their ranks, amplified by slowly creeping vulnerabilities: a midwestern town is
undone by economic dislocation; a company is obliterated by globalization; a way of life
is rendered impossible by an ecological shift; a debt crisis emerges from political
intractability. If it feels like the pace of these disruptions is increasing, itâÈçs
not just you: It took just six months for 2011 to become the costliest year on record
for natural disasters, a fact that insurance companies tie unambiguously to climate change.
Volatility of all sorts has become the new normal, and itâÈçs here to stay.
While the details are always different, certain features of these
disruptions are remarkably consistent, whether weâÈçre discussing the recent global
financial crisis, the geopolitical outcomes of the war in Iraq, or the surprising
consequences of a natural disaster. One hallmark of such events is that they reveal the
dependencies between spheres that are more often studied and discussed in isolation from
one another. The story of the tortilla riots, for example, makes visible the linkages
between the energy system (the oil rigs) the ecological system (Katrina), the
agricultural system (the corn harvest), the global trade system (NAFTA), social factors
(urbanization and poverty), and the political systems of both Mexico and the United
States.
We tell such stories to encourage humility in the face of the
incomprehensible complexity, interconnectivity, and volatility of the modern
worldâÈ'one in which upheavals can appear to be triggered by seemingly harmless
events, arrive with little warning, and reveal hidden, almost absurd correlations in
their wake. Like pulling on an errant string in a garment, which
unravels the whole even as it reveals how the elements were previously woven together,
we make sense of these stories only in retrospect. Even with a deep understanding of the
individual systems involved, we usually find it difficult to untangle the chain of
causation at work. And for all of the contributions of the much-ballyhooed Information
Age, just having more data doesnâÈçt automatically help. After all, if we could
actually see each of the individual packets of data pulsing through the Internet, or the
complex chemical interactions affecting our climate, could we make sense of them? Could
we predict in detail over the long term where those systems are headed or what strange
consequences might be unleashed along the way? Even with perfect knowledge, one
canâÈçt escape the nagging suspicion weâÈçre ballroom dancing in the middle of a
minefield.
So what to do?
If we cannot control the volatile tides of change, we can learn to build
better boats. We can designâÈ'and redesignâÈ'organizations, institutions, and
systems to better absorb disruption, operate under a wider variety of conditions, and
shift more fluidly from one circumstance to the next. To do that, we need to understand
the emerging field of resilience.
Around the world, in disciplines as seemingly disconnected as economics,
ecology, political science, cognitive science, and digital networking, scientists,
policymakers, technologists, corporate leaders, and activists alike are asking the same
basic questions: What causes one system to break and another to rebound? How much change
can a system absorb and still retain its integrity and purpose? What characteristics
make a system adaptive to change? In an age of constant disruption, how do we build in
better shock absorbers for ourselves, our communities, companies, economies, societies,
and the planet?
Like a developing Polaroid, the insights, lessons, and rules of thumb they
are discovering are revealing an entirely new fieldâÈ'a set of generalizable
insights for building social, economic, technical, and business systems that anticipate
disruption, heal themselves when breached, and have the ability to
reorganize themselves to maintain their core purpose, even under radically changed
circumstances.
With this in mind, consider how the Mexicans might have been spared their
difficulties. Larger stockpiled reserves of corn, more diversified food crops, better
real-time data, and better modeling of the impacts of U.S. corn crop diversion might
obviously have helped; so too might a mechanism to rapidly secure alternative suppliers
in a crisis, or restructuring the market to dampen the monopoliesâÈç power, or
investments in social programs for the poor to mitigate the effects of the price spike.
Or one might just as readily have intervened in another point in the causal
chainâÈ'say, by diversifying U.S. energy productionâÈ'so that even a major
hurricane wouldnâÈçt spur the diversion of corn to ethanol production in the first
place.
The strategies implied in each of these interventionsâÈ'ensuring that
there are sufficient reserves available to any given system; or diversifying its inputs;
or collecting better, real-time data about its operations and performance; or enabling
greater autonomy for its constituent parts; or designing firebreaks so that a
disturbance in one part does not disrupt the wholeâÈ'are, at their core, strategies
of resilience. As weâÈçll see, they can be applied at any scale, from whole
civilizations to communities and organizations, to the lives of individual people.
Defining resilience more precisely is complicated by the fact that
different fields use the term to mean slightly different things. In engineering,
resilience generally refers to the degree to which a structure like a bridge or a
building can return to a baseline state after being disturbed. In emergency response, it
suggests the speed with which critical systems can be restored after an earthquake or a
flood. In ecology, it connotes an ecosystemâÈçs ability to keep from being
irrevocably degraded. In psychology, it signifies the capacity of an individual to deal
effectively with trauma. In business itâÈçs often used to mean putting in place
backups (of data and resources) to ensure continuous operation in the face of natural or
man-made disaster. Though different in emphasis, each of these
definitions rests on one of two essential aspects of resilience: continuity and recovery
in the face of change.
Throughout this book, we will explore resilience in both systems and
people. Accordingly, we frame resilience in terms borrowed from both ecology and
sociology as the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to
maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed
circumstances.
To see what we mean, letâÈçs explore a metaphor used widely in resilience
research. Imagine for a moment you are overlooking a vast landscape of imaginary
hills and valleys, stretching out in every direction. Like something from a Borges
fantasy, each valley in this panorama presents a significant variation on your present
circumstance, an alternative reality with its own unique characteristics, opportunities,
resources, and dangers. Each hill in this landscape can be thought of as the
critical threshold or boundary separating these worldsâÈ'once you pass its peak, you
will, for good or ill, inexorably roll into the adjacent existential valley below. In
some of these new circumstances, you may find life quite easy; in others, you may find
things challenging; and in a few you may find your new reality so difficult that
adaptation is all but impossible.
As in real life, any number of sudden and serious disruptions might cause
you to be âÈêflippedâÈë over the threshold separating your present context and a
new one: Perhaps you experience a flood, or a drought, an invasion, or an earthquake, or
perhaps your valley becomes too sparsely populated or too crowded to occupy. Perhaps
your business encounters an economic or energy shock, a technological or competitive
shift, a sudden shortage of raw materials, or the pricing in of environmental factors
that were previously unaccounted for. Unfortunately, many of these thresholds may be
crossed only in one direction: Once forces have compelled you into a new circumstance,
it may be impossible for you to return to your prior environment. YouâÈçll have
entered a new normal.
To improve your resilience is to enhance your ability to resist being
pushed from your preferred valley, while expanding the range of alternatives that you can embrace if you need to. This is what resilience
researchers call preserving adaptive capacityâÈ'the
ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling oneâÈçs core
purposeâÈ'and itâÈçs an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption
and volatility.
There are, of course, many ways to expand your range of habitable niches.
You could reduce your material needs in order to subsist in more resource-poor settings;
you could learn to use a wider array of resources, so you could survive, MacGyver-like,
on whatever might be locally available; you could invent a new technology, liberating
yourself from a traditional constraint; you could modify tools designed for one niche to
suit another; or you could learn to collaborate with the local denizens so that you
donâÈçt have to go it alone.
As it is for people, so it is for systems, businesses, nations, and even
the planet as a wholeâÈ'all can occupy a number of different, stable states, some
vastly preferable to others. Planetary boundaries (so named by the resilience researcher
Johan RockstrÃĊm and his colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre) are
thresholds that keep the entire biosphere from flipping, suddenly and potentially
catastrophically, into a new state: They include factors like the acidification of the
oceans, the loss of biodiversity, human transformation of the land, and the availability of
clean water. Of the nine thresholds RockstrÃĊmâÈçs team has identified,
three are currently exceeded; another four are approaching their limit. Like Russian
nesting dolls, these planetary boundaries set the limits and context for all human
activities, from settlement and migration to conflict and commerce, and spur the
development of new forms of technology and exchange.
Enhancing the resilience of an ecosystem, an economy, or a community can
be achieved in two ways: by improving its ability to resist being pushed past these
kinds of critical, sometimes permanently damaging thresholds, and by preserving and
expanding the range of niches to which a system can healthily adapt if it is pushed past
such thresholds.
In principle, there are as many ways for a complex system to adapt as
there are circumstances for it to adapt to. However, the
dynamics of our present eraâÈ'including the relentless quest for
organizational efficiencies, the deep stressing of ecological systems, and the
interconnections that bind us allâÈ'move certain approaches to the forefront. These
patterns, themes, and strategies appear again and again, in large ways and small,
wherever resilience is found.
PATTERNS OF RESILIENCE
From economies to ecosystems, virtually all resilient systems employ
tight feedback mechanisms to determine when an abrupt change
or critical threshold is nearing. As weâÈçll see in the next chapter, in an
ecosystem like a coral reef, certain speciesâÈç behavior can change to prevent a
system from flipping into a degraded state. In a human context itâÈçs much the same,
though when people do it, weâÈçre often supported by an array of tools and
technologies that provide us with a greater sense of situational awareness.
For example, the venerable check engine light on your carâÈçs
dashboard, if attended to, can be thought of as maintaining the resilience of the engine
(and hopefully, the driver) by helping you understand that something is wrong under the
hood and encouraging you to quickly get to a mechanic. In a much more sophisticated but
analogous way, weâÈçre now in the midst of a massive real-time instrumentalization
of many human systems, from health care to business operations and international
development. WeâÈçre soaking the world in sensors, and the feedback data that these
sensors produce is a powerful tool for managing systemsâÈç performance and
amplifying their resilienceâÈ'particularly when those data are correlated with data
from other such systems.
The U.S. Geological Society, for example, is building a tool called the
Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED) that links its seismometers to the social media service. When a
quake is detected, the TED instantly scans for tweets about the location and severity of
damage and maps them geographically, enabling faster and more targeted disaster
response. Similarly, in sub-Saharan Africa, health researchers are building powerful predictive models of disease outbreaks by studying
migration patterns derived from peopleâÈçs cell-phone usage; by studying where they
are calling, they deduce where they are moving, and can assign medical resources to
where they will be needed in the future, not just where they are needed in the present.
These same researchers found that they can determine the economic well-being of citizens
by passively studying the denominations in which they buy airtime for their cell phones.
Buying airtime in $1 increments is a sign of greater well-being than buying airtime in
10-cent increments; a sudden, downward shift in buying habits may be an early warning
sign of an impending
economic disruption. All of these approaches rest on sorting, sifting, and
combining open, real-time data from vast sensor networks and using them to create
meaningful feedback loops.
When such sensors suggest a critical threshold is nearing or breached, a
truly resilient system is able to ensure continuity by dynamically
reorganizing both the way in which it serves its purpose and the scale at
which it operates. Many resilient systems achieve this with embedded countermechanisms,
which lie dormant until a crisis occurs. When that happens, they are dispatched, like
antibodies in the bloodstream, to restore the system to health.
Another way to bolster a systemâÈçs resilience is to de-intensify or decouple the system
from its underlying material requirements or to diversify the resources that can be used
to accomplish a given task. Under duress, some resilient systems may even detach
themselves entirely from their larger context, localizing their operations and reducing
their normal dependencies.
For example, many global companies have awakened to the fact that we are
approaching a critical threshold concerning reliable access to water, driven by the
competing needs of agriculture, human consumption, and industry. Sustainability experts
at Nike recently calculated that it takes a whopping 700 gallons of water to produce a
single organic cotton
T-shirt. (Think about that the next time you stand in front of a wall of
three-dollar tees at Walmart.) ItâÈçs little wonder that they, and others in their industry, are now aggressively pursuing efforts to develop less
water-intensive approaches to production and manufactureâÈ'for example, by using
less water to grow cotton and dye textiles. TheyâÈçre trying to decouple water from
apparel, to the greatest degree possible.
This kind of reorganization is made feasible by certain structural
features of resilient systems. While these systems may appear outwardly complex, they
often have a simpler internal modular structure with
components that plug into one another, much like Lego blocks, andâÈ'just as
importantâÈ'can unplug from one another when necessary. This modularity allows a
system to be reconfigured on the fly when disruption strikes, prevents failures in one
part of the system from cascading through the larger whole, and ensures that the system
can scale up or scale down when the time is right.
Herb Simon, the polymathic psychologist, political scientist, economist,
and computer scientist, demonstrated the importance of this kind of modularity with a
famous parable about two watchmakers, Hora and Tempus. Both craftsmen built watches of
equal complexity and beauty, comprising hundreds of parts. Yet HoraâÈçs business
flourished, while TempusâÈçs business failed.
The reason? Hora built his watches modularly, fitting individual
components into hierarchical assemblies that could be snapped together to complete the
whole. Tempus, on the other hand, simply built his watches piece by piece until each was
completed.
In SimonâÈçs parable, the watchmakers are occasionally interrupted by
a phone call with more orders for watches. When that happens, they must restart the task
they were doing prior to the interruption. As such, Tempus must begin each watch over
and over again, while much of HoraâÈçs prior work is preserved. And boy, does it
make a difference: If both watchmakers are interrupted just 1 percent of the time, Hora
will complete 9 watches for every 10 he tries to build. Tempus, on the other hand, will
finish just 44 watches for every 1 million.
To encourage this beneficial modularity, many resilient systems are diverse at their edges but simple at their
core. Think of the DNA in a cell, or the communications
protocols governing the Internet: These specialized languages encode a vast menagerie of
inputs and outputs, yet as protocols, they remain utterly basic, evolving slowly, if at
all. The electrical grid, for example, in effect translates power generated from a
number of sourcesâÈ'from nuclear power plants to windmillsâÈ'into countless
useful forms of work. At the center of this vast machine is an unchanging language of
currents, voltages, and electrons. The resilience of the overall power system is
improved as we expand the diversity of sources that feed it and improve the efficiency
of the tasks that we use the resulting electricity for, yet the underlying core protocol
of the system remains unchanging. (The converse is also true: Like the Mexican food
system, the resilience of the power system is reduced as we narrow the diversity of
sources that feed it.)
This modularity, simplicity, and interoperability enable the components of
many resilient systems to flock or swarm like starlings when the time is right and to break into islands when
under duress. These are the very features that make things like cloud computing
possibleâÈ'in which groups of linked, redundant servers swarm together, scaling up
and down to complete a given task, then disband. Similarly coordinated approaches to
resilience are found in realms as seemingly disparate as bacteria and the
battlefield.
Yet this kind of modular distributed structure is only part of the story.
Paradoxically, resilience is often also enhanced by the right kind of clusteringâÈ'bringing resources into close proximity with one another.
But itâÈçs a special kind of clustering, one whose hallmark is density and
diversityâÈ'of talent, resources, tools, models, and ideas. ItâÈçs this kind of
clustered diversity that ensures the resilience of innovation hubs like Silicon Valley
and the old-growth forest alike.
These principlesâÈ'tight feedback loops, dynamic reorganization,
built-in countermechanisms, decoupling, diversity, modularity, simplicity, swarming, and
clusteringâÈ'form a significant part of the tool kit for systemic resilience. Taken
together, they form a powerful vocabulary for evaluating the resilience or fragility of
the big systems like cities, economies, and critical infrastructure
that underwrite our contemporary lives. Using this toolkit, we can ask: How can we
create more effective feedback loops between our actions and their consequences? How
might we decouple ourselves from a scarce underlying resource, or make our
infrastructure more modular?
Understanding these principles also suggests resilienceâÈçs
distinction from, and relationship to, some important related ideas. For example, though
the words are often used interchangeably, resilience is not robustness, which is typically achieved by hardening the assets of a system.
The Pyramids of Egypt, for example, are remarkably robust structures; they will persist
for many thousands of years to come, but knock them over and they wonâÈçt put
themselves back together.
The same holds true for redundancy, which is
also a time-tested way to improve the ability of a system to persist even when
compromised, but is also not quite the same thing as resilience. Keeping backups of
critical components and subsystems is certainly wise on its face, as anyone whoâÈçs
been stuck on a lonely road with a flat tire and no spare can attest. Highly resilient
systems are frequently also highly redundant systems. But
backups are costly, and in good times there can be a great deal of pressure placed on a
system to eliminate them to improve efficiency. Worse still, these backups may become of
little or no use when circumstances change dramatically.
Finally, and perhaps most counterintuitively, resilience also does not
always equate with the recovery of a system to its initial
state. While some resilient systems may indeed return to a baseline state after a breach
or a radical shift in their environment, they need not necessarily ever do so. In their
purest expression, resilient systems may have no baseline to return toâÈ'they may reconfigure themselves continuously and fluidly to adapt
to ever-changing circumstances, while continuing to fulfill their purpose.
None of this is to say that resilient systems never fail. Regular, modest
failures are actually essential to many forms of
resilienceâÈ'they allow a system to release and then reorganize some of its
resources. Moderate forest fires, for example, redistribute
nutrients and create opportunities for new growth without destroying the system as a
whole. (Paradoxically, they do so by ensuring that fire-resistant species are not
crowded out by nonresistant ones as a healthy forest reaches its peak.) When human
beings intervene in this cyclical process and prevent these necessary smaller fires from
happening, a forest can build up so much kindling that a small accidental fire can
become catastrophic. Just ask a Californian.
More broadly, resilient systems fail gracefullyâÈ'they employ
strategies for avoiding dangerous circumstances, detecting intrusions, minimizing and
isolating component damage, diversifying the resources they consume, operating in a
reduced state if necessary, and self-organizing to heal in the wake of a breach. No such
system is ever perfect, indeed just the opposite: A seemingly perfect system is often
the most fragile, while a dynamic system, subject to occasional failure, can be the most
robust. Resilience is, like life itself, messy, imperfect, and inefficient. But it
survives.
FROM SYSTEMS TO PEOPLE
In the latter chapters of this book, weâÈçll turn our attention from
the resilience of systems to that of the people and communities who live with them. As
we do, some of the same themes reappear, along with some new ones.
WeâÈçll start by exploring new insights into the resilience of
individual people. And here there is good news: New scientific research suggests that
personal, psychic resilience is more widespread, improvable, and teachable than
previously thought. ThatâÈçs because our resilience is rooted not only in our
beliefs and values, in our character, experiences, values, and genes, but critically in
our habits of mindâÈ'habits we can cultivate and
change.
As we expand our frame to consider the resilience of groups, new themes
emerge. The most important of these is the critical role of trust and cooperationâÈ'peopleâÈçs ability to
collaborate when it counts. WeâÈçll look at two cases of cooperation in the midst of
a crisis, one from Haiti and one from Wall StreetâÈ'the former spectacularly
successful, the latter spectacularly unsuccessfulâÈ'and explore concrete things we
can do to build, and harness, collaborative systems.
Also, as weâÈçll see again and again, establishing a âÈêwarm
zoneâÈë of diversity plays an enormous role in resilience
and is one of its most important correlates. Whether itâÈçs the biodiversity of a
coral reef or, in the social context, the cognitive diversity of a group, increasing the
diversity of a systemâÈçs constituent parts ensures the widest palette of latent,
ready responses to disruption. The trick is to balance such diversity with mechanisms
that ensure that these diverse actors can still cooperate with one another when
circumstances dictate.
In our travels, wherever we found strong social resilience, we also found
strong communities. And here we donâÈçt mean wealthy. Resilience is not solely a
function of the communityâÈçs resources (though of course those help) nor defined
solely by the strength of their formal institutions (ditto). Instead, we found resilient
communities frequently relied as much on informal networks,
rooted in deep trust, to contend with and heal disruption. Efforts undertaken to impose
resilience from above often fail, but when those same efforts are embedded authentically
in the relationships that mediate peopleâÈçs everyday lives, resilience can
flourish.
Finally, when we found a resilient community or organization, we almost
always also found a very particular species of leader at or near its core. Whether old
or young, male or female, these translational leaders play a
critical role, frequently behind the scenes, connecting constituencies, and weaving
various networks, perspectives, knowledge systems, and agendas into a coherent whole. In
the process, these leaders promote adaptive governanceâÈ'the ability of a
constellation of formal institutions and informal networks to collaborate in response to
a crisis.
These elementsâÈ'beliefs, values, and habits of mind; trust and
cooperation; cognitive diversity; strong communities, translational leadership, and
adaptive governanceâÈ'make up the rich soil in which social resilience grows. Taken together, they suggest new ways to bolster the resilience
of communities and organizations, and the people who live within them.
âÈò âÈò âÈò
The concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which we can view
major issues afresh: from business planning (how do we hedge our corporate strategy to
deal with unforeseen circumstances?) to social development (how do we improve the
resilience of a community at risk?) to urban planning (how do we ensure the continuity
of urban services in the face of a disaster?) to national energy security (how do we
achieve the right mix of energy sources and infrastructure to contend with inevitable
shocks to the system?). These all affect the one circumstance that matters to each of
us: our own (how do we ensure our personal resilience in the face of lifeâÈçs
inevitable hardships?).
In all of these contexts, resilience forces us to take the
possibilityâÈ'even necessityâÈ'of failure seriously, and to accept the limits of
human knowledge and foresight. It assumes we donâÈçt have all the answers, that
weâÈçll be surprised, and that weâÈçll make mistakes. And while we advocate for
it here as a desirable goal, resilienceâÈ'a property of systemsâÈ'is not always
a virtue in and of itself: Terrorists and criminal organizations are also highly
resilient, often for the same reasons listed above. As weâÈçll see, when exploring
resilience, we often have as much to learn from the âÈêbad guysâÈë as we do from
the âÈêgood.âÈë
Yet resilience-thinking does not simply call us into a defensive crouch
against uncertainty and risk. Instead, by encouraging adaptation, agility, cooperation,
connectivity, and diversity, resilience-thinking can bring us to a different way of
being in the world, and to a deeper engagement with it. Bolstering our chances of
surviving the next shock is important, but itâÈçs hardly the sole benefit.
âÈò âÈò âÈò
In the discussion that follows, there are other recurring principles.
The first of these is holism. In a complex system, bolstering
the resilience of only one part or level of organization can sometimes (unintentionally)
introduce a fragility in another, which in turn can doom the
whole. Considering the connected whole, on the other hand, can work to our advantage:
When we do so, efforts we undertake in one part of a system can unlock greater
resilience in another.
The deeper lesson is that to improve resilience we often need to work in
more than one mode, one domain, and one scale at a timeâÈ'we have to think about the
aspects of a system that move both more slowly and more quickly than the one we are
interested in, or examine aspects that are, at once, more granular and more global.
Consider the constellation of forces at work in the story of the tortilla riots, for
example: Some, like Katrina, moved very quickly; others, like the strengthening
correlation between corn and oil prices, moved more moderately; and still others, like
the economic concentration of international import markets, moved more slowly. It was
the shearing forces between these different systems, each with their own velocity, that
amplified the disruption. No attempt to correct the system could succeed for long
without accounting for their interplay.
You will also notice that strategies for resilience often distill
principles that are given their purest expression in actual, living things, whether
embodied in an individual cell, a species, or an entire ecosystem. This should hardly be
surprisingâÈ'resilience is a common characteristic of dynamic systems that persist
over time, and life on Earth is the most dynamic and persistent system anyone has ever
encountered.
Yet this is not an endorsement of some vague âÈêKumbayahâÈë
naturalism. Living systems are messy and complex, and they operate in ways that are less
than perfectly efficientâÈ'they are in a state of constant, dynamic disequilibrium. Encoded within each one are a diverse array of
latent tools and strategies that are only occasionally, if ever, called upon. Carrying
around this menagerie of rarely used but useful mechanisms imposes a real cost on the
cell, the organism, or the ecosystem by increasing its complexity, slowing its growth,
decreasing its peak efficiency, and limiting the resources available to nourish
individual components at the expense of the whole.
Similarly, applying such strategies to the real world
of human affairs isnâÈçt easy, certainly not politically. Doing so involves trading
away the certainty of short-term efficiency gains for the mere possibility of avoiding or surviving a hypothetical future emergency which
may never materialize. Selling umbrellas in the sunshine is a tough job in the best of
circumstances (ask any civic or corporate leader), but itâÈçs even more difficult in
the short-term-obsessed world of impatient stockholders, quarterly earnings reports,
biannual elections, and constrained municipal budgets. If it were otherwise, weâÈçd
be living in a less bubble-prone world, and no one would groan as they lined up for a
fire drill.
Living systems are also profoundly cyclical,
rooted in what ecologist C. S. âÈêBuzzâÈë Holling, one of the founding figures
of resilience research, termed the âÈêadaptive cycle.âÈë This is marked by four
discrete, looping phases, starting with a rapid growth phase
in which underlying resources come together, begin to interact, and build on top of one
another, like an early-stage forest. This is followed by a conservation phase, in which, like a more mature forest, the system becomes
increasingly efficient at locking up and utilizing resources, but also becomes
increasingly less resilient as it does so. This is followed by
a release phase, in which resources are dispersed, often in
response to a disruption or collapse, and then finally a reorganization, when the cycle begins anew.
While not every system goes through precisely the same process, the
adaptive cycle helps us understand the resilience of many entities beyond the realm of
ecology. In industry, for instance, the adaptive cycle is omnipresent. Think how often
this story is repeated (and experienced) in business: An entrepreneurial company creates
a new and highly desirable product or service. By optimizing that innovation and
rigorously eliminating alternatives, it grows very rapidly. It becomes a highly
profitable incumbent, squeezing out smaller rivals. Then, when a competitorâÈçs
disruptive innovation takes hold, it suddenly finds that the very optimization that made
it successful is now maladaptive, and the organization rapidly declines. As a result,
human resources are released to start the entrepreneurial cycle anew. Growth,
conservation, release, reorganization. Sound familiar? ItâÈçs
the story of the rise and fall of Detroit in the face of the oil shocks of the 1970s;
the story of MicrosoftâÈçs rise and fall in the face of the web in the 1990s; the
story of Sony and the iPod in the 2000s.
A related theme in the resilience discussion is the importance of
networks, which provide a universal, abstract reference system for describing how
information, resources, and behaviors flow through many complex systems. Having a common
means to describe biological, economic, and ecological systems, for example, allows
researchers to make comparisons between the ways these very different kinds of entities
approach similar problems, such as stopping a contagionâÈ'whether an actual virus, a
financial panic, an unwanted behavior, or an environmental contaminantâÈ'when it
begins to spread. Having a shared frame of reference allows us to consider how
successful tactics in one domain might be applied in anotherâÈ'as weâÈçll see in
newly emerging fields like ecological finance.
Of course, most of the pressing challenges that confront us exist at a
different kind of boundary: the one where people and some other technical, ecological,
financial, or social system interact. In the language of systems analysis, these human
and nonhuman systems are coupledâÈ'the behavior of each
system influences the other in complex feedback loops whose effects may be difficult to
traceâÈ'just as the price of corn was coupled to the price of oil after Hurricane
Katrina. Unfortunately, as weâÈçll see, itâÈçs the tendency of most coupled
systems to become brittle over timeâÈ'to lose rather than gain in their ability to
adapt. When that happens, a systemic flipâÈ'frequently to a less desirable state of
affairsâÈ'becomes more difficult to avoid.
Globalization is, in some sense, the mother of all coupled systems, and
for all its benefits and wonders, it has often accelerated the loss of adaptive capacity
by spinning incomprehensibly vast and interconnected webs across the planet, increasing
the latent dependencies between farflung entities of all types. Globalization has often
allowed us to optimize a single variableâÈ'for example, resource extraction or
consumptionâÈ'and temporarily delay or hide the
environmental feedback associated with that optimization. Globalization also binds
together systems with radically different time signaturesâÈ'financial transactions
that happen in milliseconds, social norms that evolve over years, and ecological
processes that normally take millennia. As these interactions grow, the possible
sources, speed, and consequences of disruption are all magnified, as is the pain we
feelâÈ'in our individual lives, communities, institutions, and
environmentâÈ'when that disruption arrives.
MITIGATION, ADAPTATION, AND TRANSFORMATION
This ever-increasing complexity and fragility has spurred a whole
spectrum of social and political responses. Some, in what we might call the
âÈêIcarusâÈë camp, tell us that we need to prune humanityâÈçs footprint,
slow down, simplify, and think local. British and American activists in this camp, for
example, are already planning so-called Transition TownsâÈ'communities that are
designed to weather an abrupt anticipated end of global oil supplies and the equally
abrupt arrival of
climate change. Their strategies are designed to lessen a communityâÈçs
dependence on the larger, hydrocarbon-dependent economy, using means ranging from
backyard farming to local energy production. To many in the Icarus camp, an imminent
collapse isnâÈçt something to be feared, but rather something to be embraced, since
it will bring about a more balanced, less consumptive, and more rewarding way of
life.
While the followers of Icarus promote a return to smaller scales, members
of a âÈêManifest DestinyâÈë camp argue that itâÈçs impossible to turn back,
and that we will have to engineer our way out of inevitable problems. For good or ill,
they argue, we humans run the planet; with billions of wealthy, wasteful people walking
the earth, billions of poor people striving for the opportunity to join them, and
billions more as yet unborn about to swell humanityâÈçs ranks, the exploitation of
resources is unpreventable.
While acknowledging this is troubling, members of the
Manifest Destiny camp suggest that these challenges will also provide the spur for new,
ever more efficient innovations, many of which are already becoming available, and which
can lead us ultimately into something approaching equilibrium with our terrestrial home.
In the meantime, what we must do is accept responsibility for and alleviate our
inevitable impact on the planet by using technological tools already at hand. Since we
canâÈçt be smaller, we must be smarter.
Between these poles, much of the conversation in the last decade about
adapting to global risks has been shaped by a now more commonplace framework, that of
sustainability.
As originally envisioned, the goal of sustainabilityâÈ'to achieve a
broad equilibrium between humanity and our planetâÈ'was both admirable and
inarguable. But as a practical organizing principle, sustainability is now looking
increasingly long in the tooth. In part, this is natural: Most ideas have a social life,
and a half-life, and at four decades old, the sustainability movement has lasted much
longer than other movements. In that time, however, what counts as
âÈêsustainableâÈë has been continuously expanded to the point of
meaninglessness. (Our favorite recent example: Del Monte Produce pitched its
plastic-wrapped, unpeeled single-serve bananas as âÈêsustainableâÈë because they
would keep fresher longer in vending machines, necessitating fewer deliveries. If covering an
unpeeled fruit in petroleum-based packaging is sustainable, what isnâÈçt?)
More seriously, sustainability suffers in two respects: First, the entire
notion that the goal should be to find a single equilibrium point runs counter to the
way many natural systems actually workâÈ'the goal ought to be healthy dynamism, not
a dipped-in-amber stasis. Second, sustainability offers few practical prescriptions for
contending with disruptions precisely at the moment weâÈçre experiencing more and
more of them. Resilience-thinking, on the other hand, can provide a broader, more
dynamic, and more relevant set of ideas, tools, and approaches. As volatility continues
to hold sway, resilience-thinking may soon come to augment or supplant the
sustainability regime altogether.
To see why, consider this thought experiment:
Imagine we gather all of the people who are concerned about a major global
disruptionâÈ'irrevocable climate change, for example, though it could be any major
future crisisâÈ'and place them, metaphorically, in a single car. (For the moment,
letâÈçs leave out the folks who donâÈçt believe in climate change, or
donâÈçt believe itâÈçs a big deal.) Now (in the experiment only!) letâÈçs
send that car accelerating toward a cliffâÈ'a climatological point of no return.
At the beginning of the carâÈçs journey, one group in the car will
hold moral authority: those who align themselves with risk mitigation. âÈêTurn back!âÈë they shout. âÈêHit the brakes! Or
at the very least take your foot off the accelerator!âÈë At this point in the
carâÈçs journey, this is precisely the moral and proper thing to do.
However, as their calls go unheeded, and the car approaches a point where,
even if the brakes were hit, the car would still likely skid over the edge, another
group will come to occupy the moral high ground: those who align themselves with risk
adaptation. âÈêWe had better build some air bags and a
parachute,âÈë they say, âÈêsince we could go over whether we like it or
not.âÈë As above, at this point in the carâÈçs journey, this is a moral and
proper thing to advocate.
In between these two points, there is usually a transitionâÈ'sometimes
generationalâÈ'between those who believe the best path is to avoid the danger and
those who want to prepare for its aftermath. Early on, the mitigationists accuse the
adaptationists of throwing in the towel and conceding defeat too early; later, the
adaptationists accuse the mitigationists of wasting time and diverting resources trying
to stop the inevitable.
Broadly speaking, the contemporary sustainability movement has been
(rightfully) preoccupied with risk mitigation for some time. Yet as irrevocable global
changes of all sorts edge closer, a shift toward adaptionâÈ'and with it, an
increasing focus on resilienceâÈ'is under way. And not just in sustainability, but
in many areas of significant future riskâÈ'from global economics
to public health, poverty alleviation to corporate strategy.
This is not to say that we must abandon hope and accept every calamity as
inevitable. Rather, the resilience frame suggests a different, complementary effort to
mitigation: to redesign our institutions, embolden our communities, encourage innovation
and experimentation, and support our people in ways that will help them be prepared and
cope with surprises and disruptions, even as we work to fend them off. This in turn buys
us time to embrace longer-term transformationâÈ'what we, following the preceding
metaphor, might think of as the wholesale reinvention of both the car in which we are
riding and the cliff it is approaching. Give the car wings, and you change the context
so utterly that we would eliminate the need for brakes or parachutes altogether.
But in order to do any of that, we must first understand where fragilities
come from. So that is where we will turn first.
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