Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back

This is one of the few books, I wished had not ended. Very much recommended for anyone who is wondering why systems fail catastrophically.This book defines concept of resilience: the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.Rest of this review contains key concepts and arguments defined in this book.Patterns of resilience include: tight feedback mechanism, interoperability, modularity (diverse at edges, but simple at core), decoupling, diversity, modularity, simplicity, swarming and clustering.Resilience is often enhanced by kind of clustering - bringing resources into close proximity of each others.Resilience is not robustness. Robustness is typically achieved by hardening the assets of the system.Resilience does not always equate with the recovery of the system to it's original state. In their purest expression, resilient systems may have no baseline to return to. Regular modest failures are essential to many forms of resilience. Resilient systems fail gracefully. Resilience is like life itself, messy, imperfect, and inefficient, but it survives.Resilience of groups: trust and co-operation, warm zone of cognitive diversity, rally on informal networks, rooted in deep trust, translational leaders and adaptive governance play critical role.In complex systems, bolstering the resilience of only one part or level of organisation can sometimes unintentionally introduce fragility.Encoded in resilient systems are diverse array of latent tools and strategies that are rarely if ever called upon.Living system cycle termed "adaptive cycle": growth, conservation, release and re-organisationIt is tendency of most coupled systems to become brittle over time and lose their capability to adapt.Sustainability vs. resilience.Chapter 1: Robust Yet FragileRYF = Robust Yet Fragile.Telltale signs of a system flip: critical slowing, synchronization.Sleeping functional group: Swiss WIR and batfish.Chapter 2 Sense, scale and swarmModulating "metabolism" up and down: operation hemorrhage and TB.Three principles of self-monitoring, self-healing and self-repairing: 1. real time monitoring, 2.anticipation, 3. isolation or decouplingResilience in action: Build systems with modular component parts, arranged in networks and connected by open "skinny waist" protocols; imbue the parts with distributed intelligence, give people right information and incentives.Resilient systems embrace and ethic of decentralization and shared control - no single entity is in charge but neither they are utterly anarchic.Chapter 3 Power of ClustersEvery single organism in biology scales up and down predictable way. Power laws.Superlinear scaling: increasing returns from scale. For example cities.Absent any adaptation, any system that follow single exponential growth curve inevitable collapse. If you live by single curve - reaping the benefits of single mode of wealth and capital creation - you can also die ignominious death by the same single curve!The only way to avoid collapse is to invent steam engine, electrical lights, computing, the Internet,...How cities continue to innovate: the answer is in their clustering of density and diversity.Samboja Lestari reforestation.Chapter 4 Resilient MindStory of 4 holocaust survivor child: languish or flourish.Kübler-Ross: five stages of mourning as basis of trauma management: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Applicable only to dying patients, very questionable to others.Ego-resiliency: capacity to overcome, steer through or bounce back from adversity.Hardiness of a person:1. belief that one can have meaningful purpose in life2 belief that one can influence one's surroundings and outcome of events and3. belief that positive and negative experiences will lead to learning and growth.Mindfullness meditation styles: focused attention and open monitoring.Chapter 5 Co-Operation When It Counts33 liberty street vs. mission 4636 in HaitiPrisoner's dilemma: always defect, tit for tat, tit for two tats, discriminatory tit for tatHumans are consistent in their code of honor, but endlessly fickle with reference to whom the codes apply.Inequity aversion.Chapter 6 Cognitive Diversityrisk compensation = risk homeostasis = risk temperature: if something safer comes up, people use the "freed up" safety margin to something else: seat belts, safety caps, hiv treatments,cultures of risk: BP, Bay of Pigs, groupthink, red team universitytwo labs compared: labs filled with more diverse array of scientists tended to use broader, more long distance analogies, drawing on concepts and prior results well outside the target field of study.The diversity in lab B is not free - it takes additional time to harmonize and integrate diverse team members.Members cannot be so diverse that they diverge in terms of values, differ on the end goal, or can't bridge their methodological differences.Remembering expected and unexpected results: sometimes data that you don't like, you don't even process.Diversity warm zone. Resilient cultures are rooted in diversity and difference and are tolerant of occasional dissidentChapter 7 Communities That Bounce BackBangladesh arsenic poisoning from water wells. Painting wells in red/green vs. ceasefire in ChicagoStep 1 interrupt contagion, step 2 change the thinking, step 3 change the normsEach happy person you know, your own happiness raises 2%, each unhappy person you know, your own happiness decreases 4%, however the happiness infection lasts twice as long.Chapter 8 Translational Leadermiddle-out leader, translating between up and down in organization and in-out from organization.four stages: 1. autonomous clusters, 2. intentional network weaving with hub-spoke model, 3 close triangles of the network, 4. leader becomes indirect and core/periphery network takes overCore of strongly affiliated hubs at the center of the social system is connected to a constellation of people and resources on the periphery through weak tiesYou must build your network before you need it.Create the context, trust in the participants and know when to let go.Chapter 9 Bringing Resilience HomeResilience is often found in having just the right amounts of these properties- being connected but not too connected- being diverse, but not too diverse- being able to couple with other systems when it helps but also being able to decouple from them when it hurts-> strategic looseness, intentional stance of both fluidity of strategies, structures and actions and fixedness of values and purposesEvery journey towards greater resilience begins with continuous, inclusive and honest efforts to seek out fragilities, tresholds and feedback loops of a system - grasping it's holistic nature, identifying potential sources of vulnerabilities, detecting directionality of it's feedback loops, mapping its critical tresholds and trying to understand the consequences of breaching them.Adhocracy = informal team roles, limited focus on standard operating procedures, deep improvisations, rapid cycles, selective decentralization, empowerment of specialist teams and general intolerance of bureaucracyResilient scenario planningHancock bank during Katarina hurricane disaster.

After reading a bunch of books about the political and economic issues facing the U.S., I wanted to read something that focused on more than just a tick list of discrete symptoms & solutions that might get us back on track. While the term 'resilience' is not exactly a common concept compared to others like 'sustainment,' this book promised to look at how components and people function within systems. Zolli and Healey describe how seemingly innocent decisions made early in varied ecosystems (e.g., fishing coral reefs, sinking wells to find clean water in Bangladesh) have led to eventual disasters and that solutions typically need to interact in unexpected ways to bounce back (or ahead) to a future state that might get individual people, groups, countries, organizations, or our planet functioning again. "Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back" absolutely addresses those issues, but you have to "work for it" to follow the authors' logic and observations that will help to address the disruptions that increasingly confront us.Given that resilience is not generally discussed, the Introduction goes through a challenging baseline discussion to position the concept. By listing some sample disruptions -- Katrina, Haiti, BP, Fukushima, the Crash, the Great Recession, the London Mob, the Arab Spring -- they help to set the stakes. As they point out near the end of the book, some of these ecological or socioeconomic time bombs may be difficult for Americans to understand because we've been fortunate enough to be largely insulated from fragilities and disruptions that others in the world have had to deal with. "In a world temporarily devoid of consequences, the slow erosion and increasing inelasticity of our political, financial, socioeconomic and ecological systems scarcely seemed to matter." But now our systems are breaking down and we see ourselves as losing our dominance.As you get into the book, at first it feels reminiscent of a Malcolm Gladwell book in that Zolli and Healy look at 2-4 seemingly isolated stories in each chapter ... then show how they come together to demonstrate resilience. Criticism of Gladwell's very popular books is that he is a journalist more than a scientist and that he doesn't get too deeply into any issue or its consequence. That is not the case here as Zolli has researched in greater depth and Healy has a way of presenting the material in a dramatic way. And so, these chapters and stories are deep and require concentration to connect the learnings. Perhaps a better comparison of this book is to the books of Edward Tufte. Tufte's "Visual Explanations" has my favorite chapter ever where he compares how John Snow uncovered the real cause of cholera in 1854 London by looking at data honestly to NASA's decision to launch the 1986 shuttle Challenger when the data showed it would explode at lower temperatures. Similarly, the authors here juxtapose different stories and synthesize important ideas that must be understood and complied with if we are to recover from the political and environmental crises that now threaten us.Their treatment also reminds me of the kinds of presentations that can be seen at TED conferences. I was fortunate enough to attend one in 2000 where many of the then unknown experts have gone on to become important leaders and voices. Zolli and Healy share stories and describe a collection of experts in a way that you are intrigued by how they came to their interest and areas of expertise. As other reviewers have noted, these stories go in to some detail and, again, one has to concentrate to see how these all fit together. My favorite such stories were 1) the Haiti response and how responders used their strong ties, their weak ties and adapted technology to save people fast, 2) Red Team U and how our military is encouraging front-line commanders to consider different options that align better with the strategies and tactics of our enemies, and 3) how Opower and Robert Cialdini are using data to persuade electricity users to conserve by comparing their usage to that of their neighbors.This book and writing technique seems quite different from many of the books written by pundits and personalities we see in the media. Since we "know" those people better, we tend to flock to those books, but the end result is that we see simplistic recommendations and more issues than solutions. And thus, in comments to news stories different camps line up against each other and sling insults back and forth. "Resilience" probably won't sell as many books as those more-recognized authors, but the sense I got from reading it is more hopeful and realistic in what we'll need to consider to address coming issues. The stories describe some pretty dreadful scenarios that we will definitely have to address -- perhaps as a planet -- but Zolli and Healy give us hope that there are experts out there who can help lead the way to solutions but that at the same time we'll all have to participate.

Great read supported by relevant stories and examples of resilience at many levels. Valuable on a personal and professional level

Excellent book...gives you an insight on resilience and deliberate development of the same.

Libro sicuramente interessante che apre a nuove prospettive, però un po' limitato per un uso scientifico/accademico (vedi anche la mancanza di rimandi diretti alla bibliografia nel testo). Utile come introduzione all'argomento.

I finished reading Resilience several months ago, and it already feels like it's joined that short list of books that has fundamentally shaped my thinking. I've been recommending it to pretty much everyone I know.At it's heart, this book is about how individual people succeed in changing the things they care about, when others have decided that it's too hard to do so. It would be an interesting enough book if it went no further than describing examples of that happening - which it does.But it also suggests positive ideas for how more of us might accomplish that; and draws parallels between unexpected domains from conservation to gang culture to subsistence farming to financial services that demonstrate that those same ideas might succeed in drawing together interests from astonishingly different stakeholders to create initiatives such as the Kilimo Salama micro-insurance scheme for Kenyan farmers that reconcile global economic and technology trends with the creation of local growth social and economic growth.The value of this book is in its exploration of a broad set of examples in order to draw out a set of insights that would or arise from an in-depth study of any individual subject. My professional career invovles the study of cities and communities that are creating meaningful changes for themselves. Zolli's concept of the "Translational Leader" as described in this book precisely describes the remarkable individuals that I have found at the heart of cities and communities that have achieved such transformations; and his exploration of the concept goes further than anything else that I've read in providing ideas for how to identify or assist such people - as his own "PopTech" programme does. (The book is not an advertisement for the programme, by the way; it doesn't even mention it. I found it subsequently when researching the author's history).Don't read this if you're expecting an in-depth analysis of any particular field of study, or for a deep technical analysis of resilient systems in technology, biology, engineering or ecology;But do read it if you're interested in why it is that people from any of those disciplines, and many others besides, actually succeed in creating a meaningful change in the way that their / our community works; and if you're more interested in the unusual characteristics that enable them to do so than in the details of the traditional disciplines that you can read about in many other, less remarkable, books.

復元力を扱った解説書であり、今週の本が少ないので貴重なものと考える。