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Resilience is a Verb

Resilience is a potential capacity to be grown, rather than an end state to be achieved

Source

Woods, David. (2018). Resilience is a Verb. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329035477

TL;DR

This is a very readable paper on resilience engineering. At a high level, Woods’ proposal is that resilience is better thought of in terms of a system’s potential capacity, rather than a state to be achieved. Adaptive capacity is “the potential for adjusting patterns of activities to handle future changes in the kinds of events, opportunities and disruptions experienced.” Systems run in a degraded mode, continually experience SNAFUs, and are sustained by the adaptive responses of people (SNAFU Catchers).

Summary

As laid out in Resilience Engineering : Concepts and Precepts, resilience is about what a system can do, including the capacity to: 1. anticipate to mitigate; 2. synchronize to reduce coordination friction/misalignment; 3. promptly respond; 4. proactively learn.

Adaptive capacity is a potential held in reserve rather than an essentialist system property. This implies some level of system self-awareness so that there are explicit junctures to evaluate whether the current course is appropriate (pivot, proceed, pause). Adaptive capacity is a optional reserve, not a mandate for continual change:

Adaptive capacity does not mean a system is constantly changing what it has planned or does so all the time, but rather that the system has some ability to recognize when it’s adequate to continue the plan, to continue to work in the usual way, and when it is not adequate to continue on, given the demands, changes and context ongoing or upcoming.

Adaptive capacity is a latent system property and all systems are messy and running degraded. SNAFUs (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up) is the steady state and SNAFU Catching occurs when people are able to detect, mitigate, and compensate on an ongoing basis. People provide the adaptive capability that makes the system work.

There’s a cycle of 1. systems growing in scale, tempo, and complexity (interconnectedness, Law of Stretched Systems); 2. actors in the system exploiting those changes for new purposes; 3. creating new SNAFUs which move the system to a new normal and move things back to 1.

Rather than viewing SNAFU Catching as everpresent and necessary, organizations often “rationalize this core finding away on grounds of rarity, prevention, compliance.”. It’s more appealing to view SNAFUs as uncommon, obsolete due to prior improvements, or caused by a lack of human compliance. The emphasis on compliance and work-to-{plan, role, rule} pushes the adaptive capacity underground. People can be put in double-bind situations where rule compliance is at odds with system stability, so opportunities for learning and alignment are foregone.

Despite continual improvements and increases in tempo, complex systems catastrophically fail when encountering new circumstances. It’s sort of unexpected those types of failures don’t happen more often. Why not? People are constantly SNAFU Catching and transparently compensating, mitigating, and acting in ways to support the system.

At an organizational level, this implies a need for continual adaptation. Internet services are an exemplary testbed to explore these concepts. These systems function and evolve because of SNAFU catching, not despite the existence of SNAFUs:

Organizational systems succeed despite the basic limits of automata and plans in a complex, interdependent and changing environment because responsible people adapt to make the system work despite its design—SNAFU Catching.

Organizations need four capabilities to support continual adaptation: 1. initiative, favoring local cognitive units; 2. reciprocity across people and teams to load balance as demands shift while acknowledging this shift will trigger compliance violations; 3. recognizing tangible surprises to drive learnings; and 4. effective learning reviews of effectively handled surprises.

To be proactive in learning about resilience shifts the focus: study how systems work well usually despite difficulties, limited resources, trade-offs, and surprises—SNAFU Catching.

See also the SNAFU Catchers writeup for a more technology focused view.

Notable Quotes

As organizations focus on making systems work faster, better, and cheaper, they develop new plans embodied in procedures, automation, policies, and forcing functions. These plans are seen as effective since they represent improvements relative to how the system worked previously. When surprising results occur, the organization interprets the surprises as deviations—erratic people were unable to work to plan, to work to their role within the plan, and to work to the rules prescribed for their role. The countermeasures become more stringent pressures to work-to-plan, work-to-role and work-to-rule.

References

Attributions

Photo by Pedro Sanz on Unsplash