By Jamais Cascio on 3 April 2009 in Fast Company
image above: A classic example of resilience in the face of long odds.
What will a post-crash, truly 21st-century world look like? For people
thinking about global systems (economic, environmental, and social)
one idea stands out: resilience.
Resilience means the capacity of an entity--such as a person, an
institution, or a system--to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks,
and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards.
Resilience implies both strength and flexibility; a resilient
structure would bend, but would be hard to break. The term was once
found largely in psychology textbooks and material science research, but the systems design crowd has,
over the past few years, enthusiastically adopted the concept.
Designing for resilience takes on particular relevance as we think
about what happens after the current economic crisis passes. It's
easy, in the midst of a chaotic situation, to focus solely on
immediate issues, but periods in which everyone else is grappling with
the present are precisely when it's the most critical to think about
tomorrow. And while we can't predict exactly what will happen in the
future, we can get a pretty good sense of what kinds of drivers will
shape it--and how we might influence those drivers.
What would a more resilient world look like? There's no universal
"resilience theory" just yet, but some of the principles employed by ecologists and designers thinking about
resilient systems give us a hint.
Two factors stand out as core assumptions of a resilience approach:
the future is inherently uncertain, so the system needs to be as
flexible as possible; and failures happen, so the system needs to be
able to identify failures early and not make things worse as a result.
These may seem like common-sense notions, but today's global systems
work best when everything's running smoothly and predictably.
Resilient systems are optimized for rough roads with sudden turns.
Resilient flexibility means avoiding situations where components of a
system are "too big to fail"--that is, where the failure of a single
part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes
from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts),
collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized
from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively
respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected
loss of components.
A good comparison of the two models can be seen in the contrast
between the current electricity grid (centralized, with limited diversity)
and the "smart grid" model being debated (decentralized and highly
diverse). Today's power grid is brittle, and the combination of a few
local failures can make large sections collapse; a smart grid has a
wide variety of inputs, from wind farms to home solar to biofuel
generators, and its network is designed to handle the churn of local
power sources turning on and shutting off.
The recognition that failure happens is the other intrinsic part of a
resilience approach. Mistakes, malice, pure coincidence--there's no
way to rule out all possible ways in which a given system can stumble.
The goal, therefore, should be to make failures easy to spot through
widespread adoption of transparency through a "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" embrace of
openness, and to give the system enough redundancy and slack that it's
possible to absorb the failures that get through. If you know that you
can't rule out failure, you need to be able to "fail gracefully," in
the language of design.
The difference between brittle failure and graceful failure can be
seen vividly in how different coastal areas deal with ocean surges (whether from
storms or tsunamis). Levees, seawalls, and other "hard barriers" can
be completely effective unless breached--but once breached, can (and
often will) fail catastrophically. Regions relying on abundant coastal
wetlands, mangrove forests, and similar "soft barriers," conversely,
are likely to see a bit of flooding, but the mass of the ocean surge
will be absorbed and dissipated by the environment.
You don't have to be trying to come up with a new global economic
model to appreciate resilience. Increasingly, the concept is taking
root in organizations of all types as a strategic guideline, and becoming part of the language of design
for everything from software to cities. In some circles, it's starting to replace
"sustainability" as an environmental driver.
One reason why the idea of resilience resonates with those of us
engaged in foresight work is that, as troubling as it may be to
contemplate, the current massive economic downturn is likely to be
neither the only nor the biggest crisis we face over the next few
decades. The need to shift quickly away from fossil fuels (for both
environmental and supply reasons) may be as big a shock as today's
"econalypse," and could easily be compounded by accelerating problems
caused by global warming. Demographic issues--aging populations,
migrants and refugees, and changing regional ethnic make-ups--loom
large around the world, notably in China. Pandemics, resource
collapse, even radically disruptive technologies all have the
potential to cause global shake-ups on the scale of what we see
today... and we may see all of these, and more, over the next 20 to 30
years.
It's going to be a bumpy ride--we should be ready.
Jamais Cascio covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. Cascio is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-founded WorldChanging.com, and also blogs at OpenTheFuture.com.
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