Resilience is the Watchword of the Future

Diversity may be the foundation of the economy and society of the ninja future – but we also need to fortify our businesses, our communities and our nation so that they can succeed when confronted with external threats or adversity. In short, we need resilience. 

Innovation has been the buzzword for the past decade. Resilience is the watchword of the future.

Most of us assume we’ll always have access to basics like water, electricity and a phone signal. Yet our cities, towns and homes are increasingly vulnerable due to real changes in our environment and our dependence on technology.

We need to start thinking differently about how we can prepare for a rapidly changing world – and resilience will be the key. As extreme weather conditions grow more common, we need to take preparing and planning seriously. Add frequent power outages, periodic cyber intrusions, looming nuclear threats and rumbling trade wars to the mix, and we’re looking at many major cultural, economic and social shifts that require us all to be future ninjas.

In a 2018 interview in Washingtonian magazine, Washington, D.C.’s, first-ever chief resilience officer, Kevin Bush, compared the idea of resilience to your body’s immune system. “Cities are complicated systems of systems; there’s road systems, there’s health systems, there’s housing systems. They all come together and interact in ways we don’t always recognize.” He added that his job is to think about “How is our immune system weak and how is it strong? How can we build up immunities to things that we can expect coming on down the line?” Or, as CTA board member Dr. Carmichael Roberts, founder and managing partner at Boston-based Material Impact, a fund that invests in technologies that solve real-world problems, explained at CTA’s 2018 CEO Summit event: “Resilient technologies are those that even in the face of adversity keep the world healthy, safe, warm, powered, fed, and secure.”

My Dutch friend Martijn van der Linden, of NXP, agrees that resilience is critical, and he believes we should look to younger generations and startups – future ninjas – for the solutions. Older generations, he says, helped cause climate change, and as such focus primarily on reducing our environmental impact. Younger people, by contrast, are accustomed to abrupt changes in the environment and are providing practical solutions to confront and leverage these changes.

He highlighted two examples. The first was a group of Dutch students who, seeing the pollution caused by carbon-based fuels, developed a solar-powered car. The second was a company called LINA that transforms plants into 3-D-printed cars instead of using nonrenewable materials.

Other regions and sectors have also started to prioritize resilience. In the nonprofit sector, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – the largest private foundation in the United States – expanded its focus beyond education and health care to include emergency response and energy sustainability. Thanks to generous contributions from the foundation, several regions, including the Middle East, have been able to invest in resilience initiatives. And the Gates Foundation asked Carmichael, a serial entrepreneur and material sciences expert, to lead its investments in companies that offer solutions to energy dependence and promote resilience.

Not everyone is on board with this; some say it’s not enough to simply be resilient. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in Antifragile that resilience is not the opposite of fragility, as it implies. It’s not about simply building protections against adverse events. He characterizes resilience as defensive and incomplete, as it does not account for the unique strengths and advantages that can only arise from adversity.

Taleb makes the analogy to the human immune system: The body builds immunities by fighting off disease. It can only grow stronger in those specific ways by withstanding specific infections or overcoming certain suboptimal circumstances. Writ large, he contends that the health of a system – from the human body to a national economy – requires the failure of individual cells or businesses. Individual cells die. Startups fail. Yet the marketplace – like the body – succeeds because of failure, not in spite of it. He says the opposite of fragility is actually antifragility and that resilience alone is not enough.

Taleb, who also wrote about improbable events that are difficult to plan for in The Black Swan, and became a successful Wall Street investor, makes some fascinating and interesting points. Mainly, defensive planning is not enough to ensure survival: You must be able to adjust quickly to changing situations. Taleb calls it “antifragile.” I call it being a ninja.

These two ideas are mutually reinforcing – a both/and situation. Some companies may focus more on resilience, others on antifragility. As an industry, we need to do both: build bulwarks against bad situations and position ourselves to respond nimbly when things don’t go as planned. As painful as they are, natural disasters offer valuable learning opportunities and reinforce the need for this kind of protection and planning.

Resilience is all about surviving in the face of challenging or unexpected conditions or forces. People, groups, businesses, geographic entities and governments can all be – must all be – resilient. And they are all starting to realize it. In the last decade, Google searches for “resilience” have grown nearly 130 percent. In light of this growing interest, we dedicated an entire exhibit area and conference program to resilience at CES 2019.

Gary Shapiro is the author of Ninja Future: Secrets to Success in the New World of Innovation, from which this article is excerpted.