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p.5 If we cannot control the volatile tides of change, we can learn to build better boats. We can design - and redesign - 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.
p.6-7 The strategies implied in each of these interventions... are, at their core, strategies of resilience... Defining resilience more precisely is complicated by the fact that different fields use the term to mean slightly different things... each of these definitions rests on two essential aspects of resilience: continuity and recovery in the face of change.
p.7 Throughout this book... 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.
p.8 preserving adaptive capacity - the ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling one's core purpose... an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility.
p.8 There are, of course, many ways to expand your range of habitable niches... you could learn to use a wider array of resources, so you could survive, MacGyver-like, on whatever might be locally available
p.9 virtually all resilient systems employ tight feedback mechanisms to determine when an abrupt change or critical threshold is nearing... we're often supported by an array of tools and technologies that provide us with a greater sense of situational awareness.
p.10 When... 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.
p.11 While these [JLJ - resilient] systems may appear outwardly complex, they often have a simpler internal modular structure with components that plug into one another... and - just as important - 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.
p.16 The concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which we can view major issues afresh... resilience forces us to take the possibility - even necessity - of failure seriously, and to accept the limits of human knowledge and foresight. It assumes we don't have all the answers, that we'll be surprised, and that we'll make mistakes... 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.
p.17 strategies for resilience often distill principles that are given their purest expression in actual, living things... This should hardly be surprising - resilience is a common characteristic of dynamic systems that persist over time
p.17-18 Living systems are messy and complex... 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 organism... by increasing its complexity... applying such strategies to the real world of human affairs... 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.
p.21 Resilience-thinking... can provide a broader, more dynamic, and more relevant set of ideas, tools, and approaches.
p.23 the resilience frame suggests a... 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 transformation - what we... might think of as... wholesale reinvention... but in order to do any of that, we must first understand where fragilities come from.
p.25 This is a book about why things bounce back. In the right circumstances, all kinds of things do... Each is resilient, or not, in its own way.
p.27 It is at this moment in our thought experiment that you have painfully discovered that, in systems terms, your tree farm design is robust-yet-fragile (or RYF)
p.32 In reality, such failures are more often the result of the almost imperceptible accretion of a thousand small, highly distributed decisions - each so narrow in scope as to seem innocuous - that slowly erode a system's buffer zones and adaptive capacity.
p.35 to improve the resilience of the system as a whole, we first need measurement tools that take the health of whole systems into account, not just their pieces.
p.47 the derivative contracts themselves were mind-bogglingly complicated. The simplest of these ran some two hundred pages - the most advanced varieties required reading in excess of one billion pages.
p.48 According to Sugihara, in a complex system, there are telltale warning signs of a critical transition, or system flip... "When a system is under stress, it can be thrown out of equilibrium more easily, and it is slower to recover. Without sufficient recovery time, small perturbations can be amplified until the system is oscillating wildly out of control - everything squealing from one stable state to another - like a car being oversteered on an icy patch."
p.53 The best way to determine the appropriate levels of inoculation... is to model crises before they occur... Stress testing gave a snapshot of each bank's health and risk exposure
p.59 an essential strategy of many resilient systems... embedded countercyclical structures that can respond proportionally, and in the same time signature, to disruptions as they emerge. These structures are part of an essential inventory of diverse tools often found in resilient systems... Like all inventory, this diversity imposes a carrying cost. And because such structures are latent in a system - they are only called upon when a crisis emerges - it can be difficult to place a value on them when things are in a more humdrum state of affairs. In a relentless quest for greater systemic efficiency, this diversity can be lost and unmourned - until it's too late.
p.60 resilience takes more than just the right structure - it takes the right kinds of processes: measuring the whole health of the system... modeling and stress-testing the system... scanning for emerging disruptions and mobilizing the right, inclusive responses when they strike... building in feedback and compensatory systems... that help keep the system in check. Most of all, it requires keeping the system dynamic and reconfigurable... it is in such dynamism that many systems' resilience rests.
p.64 to achieve its aims - all it needed to do was provoke a costly response.
p.65 Rooted in its networked structure, its ability to modulate its operational metabolism, and its ability to swarm... powerful lessons for designing positive forms of systemic resilience in domains far beyond terrorism.
p.71 Both TB and terror networks maintain their resilience amid sustained attack by moderating their metabolism, scaling down to near dormancy for long periods of time, and scaling up to strike when the time is right. Both depend on mechanisms for probing their target's responsiveness and dynamically reorganizing at the right moment. Both spread by provoking an overreaction from their target hosts. And both succeed by swarming in coordinated, simultaneous attacks. These similarities are starting to suggest new, biologically inspired metaphors for tacking terror networks.
p.74-75 the modern grid powering North America is larger and more ubiquitous than the domestic Internet, and just as complex... It is characterized by tight couplings of human organizations and businesses, a system so big, more than 20 percent of all electrical infrastructure purchases on Earth are used just to keep the North American grid operating.
p.105 The orangutan people looked out for the orangutans; the leopard people looked after the leopards. [JLJ - ?? sounds correct but...]
p.106 Long-term resilience would require... the creation of adaptive capacity.
p.110 "Nature is able to recover from almost anything because of its biodiversity: the structural biodiversity and the species biodiversity," Smits says. "This is the underlying basis of resilience in systems. We must find a way to replicate that if we have any chance of survival."
p.126 In short, they bounced back.
p.149 Structures create their own behavior
p.194 In collaboration with [professor of geography at University College London] John Adams, [Gerald] Wilde postulated that humans are constantly balancing risk, safety, and reward in a dance that is analogous to a thermostat.
p.199, 202 Fort Leavenworth... home to... the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies... war games enable militaries to think about how enemies, civilians, and partners - collectively "the others" on a battlefield - might respond to a hypothetical situation... [Greg] Fontenot wanted to take this "think like the others" war gaming approach to new heights of sophistication, remove it from the simulated context altogether, and embed it in real units doing real fighting and real peacekeeping.
p.204-205 Scott Page, a professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan... points to the diversity prediction theorem, an empirically tested mathematical model that shows that a crowd's collective accuracy equals its average individual accuracy minus its collective predictive diversity.
p.211 social resilience often rests on the adaptive capacity of a community, or its ability to sense, interdict, and intervene.
This capacity cannot simply be imposed from above - instead it must be nurtured in the social structures and relationships that govern people's everyday lives.
p.225 When designing the initial strategies for a new public health crisis, we would frequently start with very little information. That would force us to ask basic questions: What is behind this? How is this happening? How is it spreading?
p.244 Without compensatory mechanisms... rapidly moving processes (like market transactions) layered on top of very slow ones (like ecosystem recovery) can erode the adaptive capacity of the system as a whole.
p.255 "...Scientists can study this thing to death but Palauans need to get down to business and do their work... The work is building adaptive capacity. All people can do is build adaptive capacity."
p.258 key principles of social network creation: Build your network before you need it. Build direct relationships so that, in a pinch, reconfiguration and collaboration can emerge quickly, but not so many relationships that things become densely overconnected. And most important, create the context, trust in the participants, and know when to let go.
p.262 seeking fragilities does not guarantee finding or eliminating them. Surprises are by definition inevitable and unforeseeable, but seeking out their potential sources is the first step toward adopting the open, ready stance on which resilient responses depend.
p.264-265 wherever we find social resilience... we often find a rich stew made up of bits and pieces of public and private organizations, informal social networks, government agencies, individuals, social innovators, and technology platforms, all working together in highly provisional, spontaneous, and self-organized ways... It's called adhocracy. It's characterized by informal team roles, limited focus on standard operating procedures, deep improvisation, rapid cycles, selective decentralization, the empowerment of specialist teams, and a general intolerance of bureaucracy. In the digital age, an adhocracy can be put together in a plug-and-play, Lego-like way, well suited in fast-moving, fluid circumstances where you don't know what you'll need next.
p.272 "...when the community members have scenarios in hand it changes the nature of their conversation. It lets stakeholders play things out in a particular direction, see the risks and rewards of a particular scenario and how it might get into dangerous territory and fail, but without the real-world consequences of doing so." ...this form of serious play encourages community members to think through the complex and less-than-obvious second- and third-order implications of a given set of choices... A community that learns to discuss one possible disruption is better prepared to deal with any possible disruption.
p.272 the path to resilience doesn't mean the elimination of every disturbance.
p.273 Weathering the occasional disruption is one of the most important ways systems learn, by turning the spotlight on potentially severe fragilities without causing the system to flip completely into a degraded state. They also serve as mechanisms of creative destruction (to borrow Schumpeter's famous phrase) that can clear a path for new arrangements... Modest, regular disruptions also amplify the internal diversity of the system - ensuring that some part of it is continually [JLJ - "renewing" is substituted here] the whole.
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