Why resilience is a term worth preserving

Vinay Gupta, creator of the hexayurt, writes over at over at one of his sites  a criticism of resilience:

The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution » why it’s not resilience.

Presenting this attack on the term resilience  is certainly controversial and ignites a good and much needed debate.  But we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The term resilience, especially with regards to systems, has its origins in ecological study, and it has much to say about the distinctions Vinay points out if one were to be led only by dictionaries. However,  I feel  quite uncomfortable surrendering this term when so much work and science has gone into clarifying and establishing nuance for it.

"Beginning with the work of C. S. Holling in the early 1970s, researchers began to look at conditions far from the steady state where instabilities can cause a system to shift into an entirely different regime of behavior, and where resilience is measured by the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before the system is restructured."

The distinction in the literature and science is between "engineering resilience" which is the way the above post defines the term, and "ecological resilience".

The engineering definition of resilience focuses on efficiency, constancy and predictability - concepts that align with engineering desires for "fail safe" designs. These are usually associated with engineers.

The other focuses on persistence despite change and unpredictability.  These are usually associated with evolutionary biologists and resource managers and focus on "safe- fail" designs.

As such the rules outlined by Simon Levin, Professor of biology and ecology at Princeton, for addressing resilience in this later state I think are a better point of departure for a more holistic view of resilience.  He outlines 8 many of which will seem counter intuitive to policy makers brought up in an era of "fail safe" (a term credited to Wohlstetter at RAND for defining an approach to avoiding nuclear catastrophe).

They are:

1. reduce uncertainty,
2. expect surprise,
3. maintain heterogeneity,
4. sustain modularity,
5. preserve redundancy,
6. tighten feedback loops,
7. build trust
8. and do unto others (I wonder whether this ought be "tit for tat" or the golden rule - do unto others as you would have them do on to you, or do unto others as they do unto you)

Points 3-5 are especially contradictory to the way we deal with policy focused on economies of scale, efficiency and optimized outcomes for predictive purposes , as opposed to emergence, evolution and adaptability.

However, it is also naive to think that we don't need to maintain some sort of engineering resilience for certain types of systems that still require fail safe.  Both notions of resilience need to exist, it primarily a matter of context, and for which we need to create a framework for policy makers to understand.

Dr. Linton Wells over at STAR-TIDES introduced into this discussion some thoughts introduced by Dick O'niell, I believe for this reason.  Specifically the idea of the C-C-C construct (simultaneous Collaboration, Competition and Conflict).   Its also interesting that this was brought up int he context of Dave Snowden's work in classifying knowledge domains, which in my mind is some of the most thoughtful work brought to that rather disappointing practice of Knowledge Management.

Disappointing because Snowden's frameworks have not gotten broad adoption at the edge of networks and most KM has focused on tools that only address optimization and conservation of reductionist approaches to business process almost exclusively focused on engineering principles.  It is perhaps why most KM initiatives I have seen end up being glorified IT exercises. (If you have $6.50 recommend you read Leader's Framework for Decision Making - Snowden and Boone 2007) One of the things that resonated with me about Snowden's work was is that it treats organization and KM initiatives as ecosystems.  It values the cultural aspects of narrative, of multiple filters, and qualitative distinctions in the nature of problems and information spaces. It is one reason I find ecology not only a useful reference in information systems design, but a central one.

In the context of this three CCC famework then the attached redrawn (and imperfect of the orginal found in Panarchy : understanding transformations in human and natural systems ) diagram  http://ilabra.org/file/panarchypng  of how Holling and Gunderson define this flow of adaption and the role of resilience as it applies to connectedness and potential of systems, needs to be considered outside, temporal and linear constraints.  Of course this discussion is a subset of the larger issue of resilience across a broad spectrum of problems.  But it is perhaps a central one in defining a framework for policy to begin to outline strategy that is appropriate when faced with wicked problems that may support all C's at once.

Previously, I related Holling and Gunderson's work to current economic policy (my opinions on the economic policy matter little here) I think what is valuable is the framework which outlines the "nature myths"  that inform views of complex systems.

I think we have grown impatient with working the language and the formation of narrative. In my mind, the term resilience is one worth conserving, we are still moving from an "r" strategy in terms of an idea toward the "K"  in diagram.  While I think Vinay is right to ignite a debate and question the use of this increasingly trendy term which may be corrupted by policy makers, and for which there is currently some conflict in understanding,  I think he is wrong in trying to destroy the term or invent new language (move toward semantic competition) at this point in time.

Terms need to have some permanence and be grounded in a body of work. To borrow from the framework, there are times for acts of conservation, of group forming and increasing connectedness around language with a bit of rigour.  Isn't it a bit early to toss out resilience and try and invent new language for concept that I think gets to some models we can agree on and has the backing data and body of knowledge? 

I for one am not yet willing to surrender the term resilience to the pathological destruction of language that happens in bureaucracy quite yet.

Attachment	Kind	Size
DownloadPreview panarchy.png Open View Info Properties	PNG image	43.92 KB

Preview: Image

panarchy.png

• Open
• Preview
• View
• Download
• Info
• Properties