The first item on the road to a measure of resilience is to remember that resilience is a context-dependent systemic property. It depends on the type of extreme event (X-event) you want to be resilient against. This point must be kept uppermost in mind, since it does no good to build resilience against a terrorist bombing when what happens is a hurricane or an Internet crash. So to set the stage for our Four As resilience measure, let’s assume we want to be resilient to an Inter- net failure. So that’s our target X-event. But even that’s not enough. We have to specify a few more details about the failure before we start measuring how well our protection is working. These details include whether it’s a purely in-house IT failure of a server or some other part of the local information-processing infrastructure or the failure goes outside your own organization. In the latter case, we then must ask if it’s local in the sense that the failure rests in your local ISP or if it’s global in the sense that the failure extends beyond simply your own provider. We can further subdivide the problem. But this is probably enough to get the general idea, which is that you have to have a very good idea of what you’re trying to be resilient against before you can even begin to put protection in place.
Tag: Resilience
Planning for the Unimaginable
One of the threads running through this book is the notion that there can be no human progress without X-events. Of course, here we are speaking of the kind of “progress” that’s revolutionary in character, not evolutionary. This is progress in which visible, meaningful change happens rapidly enough that we can often see the change taking place before our very eyes. The argument we’ve given for the claim that X-events are a necessary condition for this type of progress is that revolutionary change requires that existing social, economic, and/or political structures that have outlived their usefulness be swept away. But if there is anything the power structures in modern society—mostly politicians, banks, and megacorporations— want, it is to maintain the status quo. So the only thing that can overcome that sort of power-induced stasis is an “act of god,” i.e., an X-event, some- thing that the existing power structure is powerless to prevent.
Let’s not focus on the elimination of risk
In his book The Edge of Disaster, security expert Stephen Flynn speaks of a panoply of threats to our safety and well-being: a breakdown in the power grid, stoppages in the global food supply chain, a chemical accident in a major urban area, damage to urban water supplies, and so forth. In Flynn’s world of terror, the most likely threat is a terrorist attack that pushes panicked legislators to overreact by doing something stupid, such as tearing up the Bill of Rights!
What is Resilience?
In the summer of 1973, one of us (JC) took a position as one of the first scientists at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located at a former hunting palace of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, just a few miles south of Vienna in the village of Laxenburg, Austria. IIASA was a joint venture of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with several junior partners, the countries of eastern and western Europe, along with Canada and Japan. The research structure of the Institute was set up along the lines you’d find in a university, except that the “depart- ments” had names like Energy, Urban Studies, Water Resources, Methodology, and so forth, reflecting the fact that IIASA was set up to study questions common to the industrialized countries of the world.
Over the Edge of the Technology Cliff
In the latter half of the twentieth century, two of the highest-flying tech firms were Wang Laboratories, manufacturer of word processors, and Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian company that produced the famed Blackberry, which took the world of cell phones and electronic email by storm. It’s instructive to look at the timeline of these two companies, both in terms of technology and revenues, to see how things can go very badly very quickly for a company operating in a fast-changing environment.
Business Resilience
In the mid 1860s, mining engineer Fredrik Idestam established two ground wood pulp mills on the Nokianvirta River near Tampere, Finland giving rise to the name of the firm we all know today as Nokia. How that company trans- formed itself from a wood pulp company producing paper products to what was up until a few years ago the world’s largest cell phone manufacturing firm is a circuitous tale. This story is a fascinating account of how alert management can shift the focus of an entire organization in time with changes in the outside world so as to more effectively deploy available resources. At one time or another, Nokia proceeded from the production of paper to producing rubberized cables for telephone and electrical firms, as well as bicycle tires, and rubber boots. In the mid-twentieth century, Nokia expanded its repertoire to include consumer electronics by manufacturing electricity generation machinery, personal computers, and communication equipment. In 1992, the firm decided to abandon consumer electronics and focus solely on the rapidly growing telecommunication sector. This decision sowed the seeds of Nokia’s early dominance of the cell phone business when the company used its expertise to develop the GSM technology, which was later adopted as a de facto standard for mobile telephony in the 1990s. It’s estimated that by 2008 worldwide GSM connections were growing at a rate of over one million per day.
Social Mood and Complexity Overload
On the night of November 12, 1993 at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Royce Gracie was the last man standing in an eight-man martial arts tour- nament, which is now known as “The Beginning.” These fights were more like a street brawl with no rules, other than no biting and no eye-gouging. This tournament was televised on pay-TV, and served to introduce the new phenomenon of “ultimate fighting,” which turns out to have a huge world- wide following, as evidenced that by 2011 the Ultimate Fighting Cham- pionship (UFC) was estimated to be worth around $2 billion by Forbes magazine. Commentators have noted that the fascination with this form of combat dates back to ancient Greek and Roman gladiators who fought in the Roman Colosseum and elsewhere for the entertainment of spectators. It would appear that over the last several millennia people have not lost the urge to see violent combat between two humans engaged in a battle to the death. These ultimate fights serve as extreme examples of both complexity mismatches and social mood bias at the level of individual interaction. Let’s see why.
Drivers of social change
At a random moment in time, the generic behavior of any social system is to be in a trending pattern. In other words, if you ask how will “things” (e.g., the GDP of an economy, the financial market averages, the political climate) look tomorrow, the answer is that they will be just a bit better or a bit worse than today, depend- ing on whether the trend at the moment is moving up or down. This is a large part of what makes trend-following so appealing: it’s easy and it’s almost always right—except when it isn’t! Those moments when it isn’t are rare (infinitesimally small in the set of all time points, actually) and the event is usually surprising within the context of the situation in which the question about the future arises. These special moments when the current trend is rolling over from one trend to another are the critical points of the process. And if that rolling over involves great social damage in terms of lives lost, dollars spent, and/or existential angst, we call the transition from the current trend to the new one an X-event. In the natural sciences, especially physics, such a transition is often associated with a “flip” from one qualitatively different type of structure or form of behavior to another, as with the phase transition from water to ice or to steam.
It came from outer space
TIME: 65 million years ago.
PLACE: What is now the Yucatan Peninsula in eastern Mexico.
EVENT: The crash of an asteroid 20 kilometers across.
EFFECT: The end of the dinosaurs and most other life forms on Earth at the time.
Suppose you were a lumbering triceratops. What would your walnut-sized brain have registered when this fiery crash occurred? Answer: Basically, almost nothing beyond an unbelievably intense light in the sky before you were instantaneously reduced to a heap of ashes, or even obliterated entirely if you happened to be in the impact zone. Here’s the scenario.