The Five R’s of Resilience

Whether it is political turmoil, personal life issues, outbreaks of disease, economic changes, technological changes, financial problems, health problems, or “just” a sudden job loss, we’re all going to go through difficult times at some point in our lives. And if you’ve observed other people (or yourself) for a while, you’ve probably also noticed that there are a lot of differences in outcomes for different people for very similar situations. The same is also true of systems. In most cases, the system or person that quickly recovers from a bad situation does so because they limit the damage the situation causes, are able to quickly return to normal operation, and because they have mitigated the long term negative impacts of the situation. In general, this also means that they anticipated the situation to some degree, learned from the situation when it occurred, and did not succumb to panic when the situation occurred. Resilience is tricky though, especially when it comes to emotionally charged situations or situations with a high degree of risk (arguably, you could say that an emotionally charged situation is a situation where there is a perception of a high degree of risk). Additionally, resilience is also tough to implement well, because the practices that improve resilience often decrease efficiency. This can be especially pernicious at the end of a long period of stability when efficiency has been prioritized over resilience – eventually something happens and things break. It can be hard to argue that resilience needs to be improved until a bad situation happens. One of the main drivers of civilization itself is a desire for resilience, so we’re often discussing how to make systems more resilient when we are talking about other topics. One could, for instance, argue that most mass political movements in the last century or two were, at their root, really just attempts to either improve stability for large groups of people or responses to that stability being disrupted. In short, resilience is a really big deal at every scale, and is something you should be considering at every scale as well. Resilience is a big topic and we aren’t going to cover it all this year. However, there are general principles to keep in mind when trying to make yourself, your family, your company, or a system for which you are responsible more resilient when dealing with sudden changes. The characteristics of resilience take effort, thought, and introspection in order to implement, but the results are worth it. Resilience makes it more likely that a person or system will be able to recover after a crisis, and it also tends to shorten the length of a crisis while reducing the damage that it does. Episode Breakdown What resilience isn’t Resilience is not simply toughness, although toughness can be a part of it. Simply being able to absorb damage does not make you resilient, as there comes a point where the damage overwhelms you. Toughness is part of robustness, however, which we will discuss shortly. Resilience is also not insurance. That is, having some backup plan that makes you whole after a disaster is helpful, but it does not reduce the damage done by a disaster. It is also not analysis paralysis. There is no point in building the “perfect” resilient system if you never launch it. There will always be some level of risk, but never doing anything is also an extremely risky position. “Passing the buck” is also not a resilient practice. Systems and people that outsource negative externalities to others are still at risk, because they eventually are recognized as a risk to those other people/systems. This means that they get cut off, making the next failure catastrophic. Robustness Robustness is the ability to absorb and withstand shocks to a system. In other words,