1. The problem with calling for more research on resilience is the path dependency now long entrenched: The proliferation of new types of resilience exceeds the operationalization of the constructs already out there. More research should mean more operationalization, but there are no guarantees if the past is our guide.
In other words, resiliencies have been differentiated conceptually, but many of the conceptual constructs remain equally devoid of the details and specifics for relevant policy and management, case by case. One of the best things Paul Schulman and I did in our research on electricity infrastructures was to develop an empirical measure of when and how the transmission grid operators moved within, outside, and back into their real-time bandwidths for reliable service provision.
Operationalizing requires not thinking in terms of abstract nouns, like “resilience” or “adaptive capacity,” but thinking adverbially. To ask, “What does it mean here and now to act resiliently with respect to this rather than that,” has the great virtue of pressing for identification and specification of the practices that actually constitute “acting resiliently.” We can all talk about safety culture, but it is quite another matter to identify and differentiate the specific practices of doing this resiliently rather than that in real time.
2. “Building in resilience” can have the same kind of abstractness associated with “designing leadership:” far too easy to recommend rather than operationalize. But even if planners knew the adverbial specifications of “building in resilience” for emergency management, none of this would lessen the priority role of improvisation and ingenuity by professionals in emergency response.
There is no planner’s workaround for improvisation. This means the question, “When is ‘resilient-enough’ enough?,” is not answerable by planners on their own.
3. Resilience, at the conceptual level, is said to be optimizing the ability to absorb or rebound from shocks, while minimizing the need to anticipate these shocks ahead of time. Anticipation, in contrast conceptually, is to optimize the ability to plan ahead and deal with shocks before they happen, while minimizing having to cope with shocks when they do occur. Consider the resulting Table 1:
System planners would like managers to be both optimally anticipatory and resilient at the same time—indeed that managers maximize their “readiness” for whatever arises, whenever. These all-embracing demands of planners and project designers can, however, reduce the managers’ much-needed capacity to balance anticipation and resilience case by case. Indeed, to do the latter requires respect for the granularities of resiliencies, not their abstractions.
4. Readers are familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to emergencies, without however providing the details for that implementation, here and now rather than then and there.
While it is too easy to make such calls, notice the positive practical implication: Those who do know (some of) the details and practices have much to say about the respective abstractions called variously, “resilience”.
We know that real-time operators and managers of critical infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring infrastructure operations back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time. (The latter aren’t what most planners and designers consider “comprehensive and holistic”!)
Two inter-related implications follow. First, these operators and managers are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operationalized definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination matter for and in practice. There is no reason to believe these operational definitions have been sufficiently canvassed to date by scholars of resilience, let alone macro-planners and designers.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 