Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Resilience 101
This is essentially a re-posting with some elaboration of the discussion that occurred in the email thread around the title and tagline of this project. On one had it pulls together a primer on various things that people generally mean when they evoke the term "resilience," before I start posting bits of discussion about how it could be useful, provocative, and appropriate for our use.
The concept is definitely diverse in application, as you can tell from the lovely disambiguation page for the term on Wikipedia.
The largest and best definition I've encountered was one Jamais threw out in the course of our GFO work:
Resilience is the capacity of [a system, community, person] to withstand shocks, repair itself when necessary and improve itself when possible.
The goal of resilience is to thrive.
That's from Jamais' Foreign Policy piece, of which I'm a know fan. There he's really looking at the resilience of systems, particularly systems that are in some way designed.
I've also found the Resilient Futures Network an interesting group of thinkers on the subject of resilient systems as a framework for foresight--I like their emphasis on the irreducible complexity of systems, and on envisioning and actualizing resilient futures on multiple levels (personal, community, organizational, regional, national, global, etc).
The fast emerging issues at hand demand that we explore strategies for mitigation, adaptation, resilience and resilient futures – with the understanding that these all are component parts of a whole-systems approach to problem solving and opportunity creation.
...
Resilient futures principles and practice draws on complexity and network theory, and defines movement toward a resilient future as: whole systems (people, places, organizations) proactively transforming in a flow with and focusing forward of conditions, and prospering. In doing so, resilient futures integrates sustainability, mitigation, adaptation and conventional views of resilience, while opening the door to a more opportunistic approach for holistic outcomes in sync with the fundamentals of the current human condition.
(They seem to have undergone their own organizational transformation lately--used to be a more loosely affiliated group of .org'ers.)
For counterpoint, some stuff on resilience in personal health and that whole valence. Here are some personal resilience guidelines from the Mayo Clinic and UCSF. Here's a perspective brief from the California Health Policy Forum about resilience as a healthy aging strategy. And from a pop-psych angle, this this piece in Time Magazine last year about the relationship between happiness and resilience.
A little deeper look at the systemic resilience stuff, if you're interested, is from the world of ecosystem management and food systems. Here's a couple chapters from a just-releasted textbook on the subject I've found useful in digging into more conceptual nuance:
15. Resilience-Based Stewardship: Strategies for Navigating Sustainable Pathways in a Changing World
12. Managing Food Production Systems for Resilience
These dig into deeper applications of concepts from resilience in ecology: modularity, loose and tight coupling, feedback dynamics.