“Building in resilience” as improvising?

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The typical divide across pre-disaster/disaster/post-disaster becomes more complicated when you talk to practicing emergency managers. They can go into great deal about efforts to “prepare for,” “mitigate,” and “prevent” situations even when already in immediate response and restoration, and not just beforehand.

It would however be a mistake, I think, to see preparation, mitigation and prevention as a continuous set of practices, albeit punctuated from time to time.

To telegraph ahead, what changes are different configurations of socio-technical interconnections around which ongoing prevention, preparedness and mitigation efforts are undertaken—from now into and across immediate response and initial restoration of services.

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To see what this means for resilience, start this way.

Some infrastructure operators and emergency managers we interviewed say they are best in response and restoration when following plans; others say they are at their best when surprised by the unexpected. This means operations people may look like cowboys to the engineer department because both cognitively understand the same system differently: “I don’t think you respond to 92 breaks in 13 days without having the ability to adapt on the fly,” said a city’s water distribution manager.

But this may be less a matter of different professional orientations and more about orientations with respect to different “scales of operation,” even within the same city.

For engineers, seismically retrofitting a bridge represents efforts to manage ahead latent interconnectivity so that it does not become manifest during or after an earthquake, e.g., the bridge holds and traffic is not disrupted there. For operations people, even if the seismically retrofitted bridge does fail in the earthquake and traffic disrupted, improvisations are still possible, both by the city departments involved and by commuters who individually or collectively organize alternatives. The respective interconnectivities, before and after, of course look very different.

Improvising after failure may seem like weak beer compared to the promise of better avoiding failure in the first place, but not foregrounding the necessity of improvisations (and improvisational skills) leads to confusion about “building in resilience” and its role in emergency management.

All the money and political will beforehand won’t get rid of the key role of improvisation in emergency management. There is no planner’s workaround for improvisation. This means the question, “When is ‘resilient-enough’ enough?,” is not answerable by planners.