What is Resilience?
Bend or Break? Resilient or Rigid?
At a superficial level, resilience can be described as: the ability to withstand or recover from a situation. At this level most people have experience of being resilient, and in most instances are intuitively resilient. However, to benefit from a deeper understanding of resilience requires us to open our minds to a new world-view and way of doing things. In taking this step, we also open the possibility of benefiting from a way of thinking, framework and process more attuned to the environment we face in the 21st century.
Such a world-view requires us to acknowledge that:
- The planning processes of the 20th century were designed for relatively slow and static conditions, limited and narrowly focused geographies or places, linear process, command and control management, rigid process and ‘machine like’ cause and effect thinking. Evidence clearly illustrates that this approach has a very limited application and is highly risky in the dynamic, fast changing, non-linear, complex and connected world of the 21st century.
- As quantum and chaos physics explains, Newton’s classical physics of order, control and finite reduction that has dominated 20th century process is at best a partial description of how the world, business, economics, societies, ecologies and people really work. The world is better described as a complex adaptive system (CAS), and by treating it any other way certainly at best spells high risk and very limited success, but more likely total system shift or failure.
- Businesses, communities and ecologies are systems within a greater, whole system - a plexus, or system of systems. They are complex in that they are networked with multiple-scale nodes and connections that are active and interdependent, they have degrees of inherent flexibility, and if managed with an adaptive management approach may have the propensity to successfully adapt to all manner of change.
- If the people intervening in the system don’t understand these concepts, then there is a high probability that when critical conditions change and the system needs to adapt, the system will breakdown and ‘flip’ into a state that bares little or no resemblance to its previous form and function. In other words, the system (ie. business, community, ecology, organization) and its prior resilience is changed forever and cannot be returned to its previous state. (To get a sense of this think of the horse and cart company that didn’t become the Ford Motor Company; the food bowl regions that are now arid; debt ridden suburbia; leveraged investment vehicles which are now worthless; poverty traps and deregulated economies and markets which have marginalized operators not able to keep up).
- This concept and practice of resilience allows the idea of sustainability and change to coexist. Though this may appear to be a paradox, in a world where nothing is sustainable and change is inevitable, the only way to achieve a sensed of sustainability in a changing world is to be resilient.
- Resilient organizations, businesses and communities flow with changes in conditions and in fact see such changes as an opportunity for resilient innovation, dynamic transformation and ongoing prosperity.
