Resilience in Man and Machine

An elementary school principal (or head teacher) decides to conduct a fire drill. The alarm sounds. Students file out the exit doors in an orderly fashion. Students and teachers assemble at the designated spots and teachers call roll. All are accounted for. The principal uses a watch and times how long this exercise takes to complete.

After the exercise is over, a teacher informs the principal that one of the exit doors normally used during the drill was not working due to apparently rusted hinges. The principal orders the door hinges replaced and writes up a report. Additionally, he notices that there was much congestion at the front doors to the school, where students were delayed exiting due to a single set of doors. The principal considers the cost of installing another set of doors at the front of the school, or re-routing some students to use the side doors.

What just happened here? It appears that the principal has just conducted an audit of the ability of the students and teachers to respond to an emergency condition. The drill simulates an actual emergency and information is obtained on how resilient the organization responds. The organization can either accept the results of the audit or it can make changes and repeat the drill until an acceptable level of response is obtained.

In a fierce rainstorm a driver on a crowded highway decides to increase the following distance between his vehicle and the one in front. He turns on his headlights, reduces speed and changes to the slowest-moving lane. As the rainstorm intensifies, the driver turns on the safety "flashers" and turns the windshield wipers to high speed. The defogger is engaged and air temperature set to midway between hot and cold to make sure that the windshield does not cloud up with fog and reduce visibility. The driver confirms to himself that his his four tires are new and have acceptable levels of tread, and that his brakes were recently replaced and should be in good condition. The driver turns off the radio and ends his cell-phone conversation, ensuring that he can give his driving his full attention. He carefully scans the roadway ahead for puddles of water or stopped vehicles at the limits of his perception. Suddenly, the driver notices that the car ahead is braking sharply and stopping. The extra following distance, reduced speed and focused perception on the emerging details from the road in front (procedures already in place and operating correctly) allow the driver to safely and comfortably brake and stop without incident.

The organization I work for likes to conduct audits. I recently was selected to participate in a timecard audit. The individual conducting the audit showed me my Lockheed Martin timecard entries for that week (a timecard entry has to be performed daily, using a Lockheed Martin online web page) and asked me questions about how I arrived at the numbers, what charge number I was using (a charge number identifies the specific contract and contract task I am working on), my understanding of the task to be performed, and what my manager had told me to charge. He asked me questions about direct and indirect charging. My verbal answers were immediately written down by an assistant, who was transcribing both the questions and the answers.

In addition, the organization I work for also recently selected me for a random security audit. One day when I drove into the facility entrance, a security guard pointed to the side and motioned that he wanted me to pull my car to the side near the entrance gate. He asked for identification, took down my license plate number, and told me to open all doors, the hatchback the hood of my car, and the glove compartment. The guard told me that my vehicle registration was expiring at the end of the month. The guard visually inspected my vehicle, then performed another kind of visual inspection involving the movement of a 1-foot in diameter convex mirror (mounted inches above the ground on caster wheels) around the outside of the car to inspect the underside of the car. The inspection took about 4 minutes. I was then told that everything was Ok and that I could proceed.

In addition, the software organization I work for recently was examined by an outside "tiger team" to answer questions about the way we build software. The team of experts spent 1 week in our space, asking some of the team members questions and examining our code. The tiger team wrote a detailed report, making recommendations and identifying several areas that they found to be deficient. The tiger team gave their opinion of the design approach used for the software. Our management team responded to the tiger team report and immediately began to implement several of the suggestions. A few months have passed, and our customer is said to be pleased with the progress we were making towards the trouble areas indicated in the report. What just happened here? An audit of an organization uncovered several unsatisfactory things, and corrective action was implemented in order to help the organization continue to develop software in a timely and efficient manner.

Periodically, a sign is posted at the main entrance that there is a "100 percent security inspection". This means that everything you are carrying into the building, no matter what it is, is examined. On one occasion, a security representative opened up my gym bag and began poking at my tee shirt, running shorts and bar of soap. Ladies have had their purses examined. Frequently, items are found which are not allowed in the building.

Organizations and people that want to operate (and continue to operate) in a real world filled with danger and uncertainty find that the effects of uncertainty are often mitigated by adopting a resilient position. A resilient position is full of capacity to rebound, to re-engage, and to counter an unexpected event. Audits of resiliency can help in making decisions to create or repair structures so that they are in place and ready if and when the unexpected hits.

What does this mean as far as a computer playing a game? If we want our machine to adopt a resilient position, we have to tell it how to conduct a resilience audit, and how exactly to respond to a favorable or unfavorable result of such an audit. Our machine then proceeds to operate on two fronts: a direct anticipation of specific events that are promising or likely, and the adoption of a resilient position as far as unexpected events might occur. Our machine attempts to force positions where unexpected events or events arriving from beyond our initial planning horizon happen in our favor. The resilient have an uncanny ability to get their needs met [Miller, 2005].

Resilience audits take time, time that could otherwise be spent examining promising positions. But eventually the game will follow a course that we did not consider, or only considered briefly. We ought to have structures in place, like our elementary school principal running a fire drill or our driver in the freeway rainstorm, which are poised and ready to engage to help us respond when the unexpected happens.

Alan Lakein has said "Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now" [Lakein, 1974]. Perhaps a resilience audit is nothing more than a way of bringing the future into the present, so that we can do something about it now, if we so choose. It is perhaps the most basic form of planning - run the audit and present the results. We then ask ourselves, do we want to score better on this test, are the costs of scoring better worth it, and finally, what can we do to score better on this test? Basic planning was never made so easy.