Connected Resilience: a 'Grand Challenge' for the 21st Century?

In this article, I argue that we need to consider connected resilience as a 'Grand Challenge' for the 21st Century. Grand Challenges are complex challenges with far-reaching societal implications that lack a clear solution. They reflect the reality that society is increasingly interdependent – a system of systems – where challenges and changes have the potential to disrupt people, organisations, communities, economies and societies. Wellbeing, informal networks, and community engagement are just as crucial in building connected resilience as robust infrastructure and systems. Within this more integrated and holistic framework, connected resilience involves the mobilization of cooperation to generate the possibility of collective action to produce a system-wide ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to and learn from challenges and disruptions in order to survive and prosper.

Disruptive events

The perception that the incidence and impact of recent disruptive events are increasing has heightened the significance of connected resilience. Health agencies, governments, and businesses around the world are stepping up efforts to tackle a new coronavirus (COVID-19) that originated in China's Wuhan city. The Director General of the World Health Organization said, 'a virus is more powerful in creating political, social and economic upheaval than any terrorist attack. It's the worst enemy you can imagine.'  COVID-19 is a system-wide problem that calls for a global response.

COVID-19 is unprecedented outbreak that has been met with an unprecedented response, yet it is easy to forget that it isn’t the only disruptive event that has occurred during the first three months of 2020:

• A United States drone strike killed a prominent Iranian military commander leading to escalating political and military tensions. Meanwhile, ash began falling from Taal volcano in the Philippines on an island south of the capital city Manila. In both locations, governments and organizations struggled to put together country and regional evacuation plans.
• Travelex, the travel money services firm, was struggling to get its customer-facing systems back up after a ransomware attack. The company guaranteed that there was no compromise to customer data after hackers demanded $6 million for 5GB of sensitive customer information they claim to have accessed.
• UK suffered the wettest February on record and the worst winter floods in recent times as a consequence of Storms Ciara, Dennis and Jorge in part because the rain was so widespread but also because it has fallen on ground already saturated.  The Environment Agency has warned the country needs to brace itself for ‘more frequent periods of extreme weather like this’ due of climate change.
• Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, ordered a national review into the country's bushfire fire crisis. The Royal Commission will include the impact of climate change, the operational response at a state and local level, and the role of the Federal Government.
• Police in London shot dead a man after he stabbed two people in what was described as a terror-related incident. It was the third terror attack to hit the UK since security services lowered the national threat level from severe to substantial in November, meaning attacks were deemed "likely" rather than "highly likely."
• We are facing an unprecedented global climate emergency with severe consequences for our ecosystems, economies and societies. In the words of the extinction rebellion, "To survive, it's going to take everything we've got."

 Slowly emerging challenges (e.g., climate change, rising levels of obesity, aging populations), as well as shocks and crises (e.g., terrorist attacks, extreme weather events, pandemics), are continually testing the resilience of systems (natural or designed).

Extreme events are complex, wicked problems

For the purposes of this article, I use the term 'extreme event' as the overarching category label (recognizing that some commentators use this term differently- for two excellent review papers see H?llgren et al. 2018 and Hannah et al. 2009). In other words, the spread of a virus, escalating political and military tension, cyber-attacks, bushfires, terrorist attacks and the impact of climate change (such as mass starvation, disease, flooding, storm destruction, forced migration and war) are all categorically extreme events (see also Buchanan and Denyer, 2013) . While appearing to be diverse and unrelated, extreme events all share some essential characteristics:

1. Extreme events not only cause harm, service loss, or emergency they also generate surprise and shock because they create a mismatch between people's way of thinking (e.g., what is safe, acceptable, ethical, tolerable, normal) and one's environment. Extreme events disrupt both in terms of interruption and in terms of being disturbing, unsettling, and upsetting. Recovering from an extreme event, therefore, requires a "full cultural readjustment… of beliefs, norms, and precautions, making then compatible with the newly gained understanding of the world" (Turner, 1976).
2. The causality of extreme events usually involves the combination and interaction of numerous factors, at different levels (e.g., individual, group, government, societal), over time.
3. Extreme events proceeded through broadly comparable phases: pre-crisis or incubation period, incident, crisis response management, investigation and learning, and [sometimes] change.
4. Extreme events shape the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape because the responses of governments, regulators, other agencies implicated in these events are scrutinized in detail by the public and media. The role of the media often also plays a significant role, shaping public perception and often transforming 'incidents' into 'extreme events' worthy of a front-page story.
5. Extreme events can be described as wicked problems due to the multiplicity of stakeholders, ambiguity relating to the causes, lack of precedents, the opportunity cost and unintended consequences of intervention, and the inability to define an achievable endpoint – how safe is safe enough?

Extreme events are 'system of systems' problems. Ackoff (1971) used the phrase system of systems to describe "dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other." Each part of the system is contained in a more extensive system and is the product of the interactions of its components. The world's political, economic, social, technological systems have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent over many, many years. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the futility of attempts to contain or control the movement of people all around the world. It has also highlighted the interdependencies in supply chains, information networks, technologies, and economies. Responding effectively to extreme events requires coordinated action across multiple and geographically dispersed stakeholders with divergent interests and values and dispersed and diffused power systems. 

These trends appear to be shifting systems further away from the complicated domain where optimization and efficiency were the core approaches to the realm of complexity, where rapidly changing environments, interdependencies and fragmentation require fundamentally new approaches. While complexity has always existed in some form, this new era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) will require us to acknowledge and work with the fact that extreme events now appear to be a wicked and complex processes.

Towards #connectedresilience

If extreme events are complex, wicked problems, then building resilience to extreme events requires connected resilience - a holistic approach encompassing governments, agencies, businesses, and communities. It also requires multi-disciplinary knowledge including engineering, the environment, politics, finance, and business and organisation studies. To make progress on connected Resilience, diverse communities need to mobilize cooperation and deliver contextually appropriate collective action. However, connected Resilience is challenging to achieve due to complex and fragmented institutions, dispersed and diffused power structures, confidence-sapping histories of failure. The combination of these factors raises serious questions about how rapidly systems can respond to changing pressures, threats, disturbances, and perturbations (such as pandemic, climate change, or cyber-attacks). 

Connected Resilience – a TOOLKIT, METHODOLOGY, or a PHILOSOPHY?

Connected Resilience is a philosophy, methodology and a set of tools, concerned with addressing extreme events in a system-centric way* (Source: adapted from Bourton Group).

Our experience is that where policymakers and industry leaders embrace connected resilience as a philosophy, they are more likely to transform the whole system for good. In the sections below, I outline some initial principles, methods, and tools that could serve to stimulate discussion.

Connected Resilience as a Philosophy

The concept of Resilience is widely applied to in several fields, and while definitions differ between sectors and disciplines, underlying principles remain constant:

• Systems (e.g., ecosystems, people, organizations, communities, societies) are exposed to disturbances and disruptive events (natural and human-made and both sudden and slow-onset),
• Resilience is the capacity of a system to retain and restore essential basic structures and functions during and after disturbance and disruptive events,
• A system is resilient if it can adjust and adapt its functioning before, during, or following events (changes, disturbances, and opportunities), and thereby sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.
• Resilience is a dynamic process, rather than a property of the system itself.
• Resilience involves proactivity as well as reactivity. It is about adapting before the context affects the system in an uncontrolled manner,

Collective Resilience is about reducing the number of people affected by disruption (e.g., to the provision of an essential service) with a specific focus on protecting people in vulnerable situations. No matter what the context, connected resilience is about putting yourself in the shoes of end-users to understand how disruption could cause intolerable harm. It is about investing in and designing resilience to ensure the secure, safe, and sustainable functioning of critical systems and services for all - creating a bedrock for wellbeing and prosperity.

Connected Resilience as a Methodology

In a previous article, I offered the 4Sight methodology as a structured framework that helps organizations achieve and sustain organizational Resilience. Read more: Beyond 'Plan-do-check-act': Leading with 4Sight - https://bit.ly/35KKkqM  

The 4Sight methodology can be extended to a system of systems-level:

Foresight: know what to expect. Anticipating, predicting, and preparing for the future. Developing a shared understanding of system vulnerabilities and for continuous attention to anomalies that could be symptoms of more significant problems in a system. Promoting dialogue and information between organizations, where mutual threats and opportunities can be understood, addressed, and seized by working in partnership with other organizations and stakeholders.  

Insight: know what is going on. Interpreting and responding to present conditions. This involves systematically gathering and sharing vital information and evidence from diverse sources to build, refine and update system-wide situational awareness continually. It includes developing KPIs and metrics designed to track and encourage progress towards resilience goals of the whole system. COVID-19 demonstates that evidence never speaks for itself and instead, science and information is often interpreted differently by governments and organisations.

Response: know what to do. Proactive responses are aimed at avoiding or trapping future problems such as building redundancy into systems through duplication and diversification, thereby removing single points of failure, e.g., multiple forms of power generation serving overlapping parts of a city. Reactive responses are aimed at mitigating the consequences of inevitable incidents such as developing integrated, system-wide crisis response arrangements that considers all stakeholders and supports rapid and coordinated decision-making and action. COVID-19 also demonstates the challenge of achieving a coordinated system-wide response and there are several examples of goverments and organisations taking unilateral action. COVID-19 shows us how quickly events can unfold one day actions (e.g. resistricting travel, working from home, banning mass events and closing schools) look like costly over-reactions and a few days later they can be interpreted as ‘too little too late’. In a crisis, solutions can’t be objectively judged as right or wrong, just better or worse. 

Oversight: know who has authority and accountability. Systems of systems problems transcend traditional borders and boundaries. As such, they also transcend existing systems of rules, protocols, and practices by which resilience is governed, directed, and controlled. Connected resilience requires new processes for identifying, prioritizing, managing and monitoring critical risks across the entire system. It also involves setting clear standards and expectations not only for the Resilience of individual organizations but for the system as a whole, including a consideration of how disruption could affect system integrity.

Hindsight: know what has happened. Learning the right lessons from experience and ensuring that system-wide Resilience is continually improved as the environment changes. It requires moving beyond the classic 'blame game' and asking 'Whose fault was it?' and understanding that future Resilience can only be enhanced if the people and organizations are willing and able to change behavior as a result of experience.

Connected Resilience as a Toolkit

A toolkit can be a set of questions, activities, and tools to assist that help us to imagine, describe, represent and assess challenges and disruptions and assist in the planning and delivery of connected Resilience. Such approaches will benefit from trans-disciplinary expertise and multi-functional practitioner involvement. There are many existing tools that that could be employed. Many of these tools will be derived from the domains of risk management, business continuity and crisis management. Systems thinking tools and approaches are also widely used to address challenging resilience problems. Design thinking is also being employed to solve social issues as well as to drive innovation. New technologies such as AI and machine learning have the potential to enhance Resilience by building models that improve decision making, tailor services, and improve risk management. Modeling tools can be used to examine the system-wide effects and impacts of ongoing challenges and disruptive events. Probabilistic improvements in Resilience can be measured within alternate scenarios of the future (e.g., with radical climate change or the spread of a virus, with global supply chain disruption). 

Tools can be implemented on their own, but the greatest value will always come as part of a comprehensive toolkit for connected Resilience. Such a toolkit can only be designed with a network of policymakers, practitioners, organisations and academics with a shared interest in contributing to developing a more coherent agenda around this topic. We suggest that a program of workshops and roundtables are used to assemble expert opinion and research evidence to come to a group consensus on the philosophy, methodology, and toolkit for connected Resilience. 

All the above adds up to a worrying but also exciting agenda for policymakers, industry leaders, and academics. There is much to be done to meet the challenge of connected resilience. In my view, addressing extreme events in a system-centric way constitutes a 'grand challenge' for everyone involved in the resilience field.

Thank you for reading my post. Here on LinkedIn, I write about leadership, change, and organisational resilience. To read my future posts, join my network here and click 'Follow'. Also, feel free to connect with me via Twitter or Slideshare.

About David Denyer

David Denyer is a highly cited author, engaging keynote speaker and an inspiring educator. He is a Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change, as well as a Commercial Director, at Cranfield School of Management. He runs the Organizational Resilience and Change Leadership Group. David is a trusted advisor to the leaders of some of the world's most renowned companies and government organisations. He helps them to understand issues, identifies their specific needs and then works with them to produce solutions that bring immediate improvement to their business.

David also runs the Leading Organisational Resilience Programme at Cranfield, which is consistently rated as one of the world's top providers of executive development.

 References

Ackoff, R.L. (1971) Towards a System of Systems Concepts, Management Science Vol. 17, No. 11

Buchanan, D. A., and Denyer, D. (2013) Researching tomorrow's crisis: methodological innovations and wider implications, International Journal of Management Reviews 15 (2), 205-224

Hannah, S.T., Uhl-Bien, M., Avolio, B.J., & Cavarretta, F.L. (2009): "A Framework for Examining Leadership in Extreme Contexts." The Leadership Quarterly, 20 (6), 897–919.

H?llgren, M., Rouleau, L., & de Rond, M. (2018): "A Matter of Life or Death: How Extreme Context Research Matters for Management and Organization Studies." Academy of Management Annals, 12 (1), 111–153.

Turner, B.A. (1976) 'The Organizational and Interorganizational Development of Disasters' in Administrative Science Quarterly 21 (3): 378-397

 Acknowledgment

* The toolkit, methodology, or philosophy framework was inspired by the Bourton Group, who applied this framework to lean thinking.