Aspects and perspectives on resilience

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Resilience means different things to different people. The ISO, in standard 22300:2018 (Security and Resilience - Vocabulary) states that it is the "ability to absorb and adapt in a changing environment".

Fundamentally, resilience (whether for life in general, business, societal or in nature) is about the ability to flex and adapt as things change. If we can try to anticipate what could occur (whilst not being able to predict the future), we can be better prepared to act early and purposefully.

This paper asks the following question: as organisations navigate their way through the impacts and continued challenges arising from COVID-19, are they looking beyond their own resilience, and working with others to ensure strong cooperative and purposeful resilience across their eco-system and their wider environment?

This summary piece from the Harvard Business Review describes the  book, Managing the Unexpected, which continues to be a good body of knowledge on resilience.

Novel risks are possible events whose likelihood or consequences cannot be assessed either because no one has yet envisioned them, or because of high uncertainty about what their likelihood or consequences might be.

How can we anticipate them, and adapt ourselves as required to best deal with them?

This paper organises the technical approaches to the question of what is resilience and how to engineer it in complex adaptive systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts across the globe - including on the public perception of how well leaders and institutions can prepare for and respond to risks and shocks. This piece published by the World Economic Forum discusses aspects and elements.

It crippled ports and paralysed some of the world's largest corporations. It froze government agencies. This article by WIRED describes how a single piece of code crashed the world.