Not to worry, we’ll scale up later, soothes the techno-managerial elite. Later on, presses the happy-talk, we’ll relax assumptions and add realism. Anyway, we know how to reduce inequality (just give them money!), overpopulation (just don’t have babies!) and save the environment (just don’t cut down the trees!). So many of these just-do-this suffocate in their repetitive fat of “Well, this time is different,” “This time we really don’t have any other choice,” and “This time, you have to believe us, failure is not an option here and now.”
The chief problem with “start simple here and now” is that each scale/level is complex in its own right. The shoreline only looks smooth on the map. “Keep it simple” and “Break it down to essentials” only work, if they work at all, when context complexity is first admitted as helpful. “Which do you find to be simpler,” asks novelist and essayist, William Gass: “The radio that goes on when you turn a single knob, or the one that won’t work because the parts are all lined up on the floor?”
When I hear someone telling us “Keep it simple!” I immediately suspect they’ve lost the plot, like the actor playing Hamlet, who finished the bedroom scene with Gertrude but forgot to kill Polonius.
For many policy practitioners, incompleteness is the stuff of their working lives. At any point, problems remain to be addressed, obstacles surmounted, and goals attained, along with fires to put out, constraints to be lifted, objectives to be met, missions to be fulfilled, and crises to be faced. These policy and management worlds become one in terms of unwanted interruptions, and interruptions make for unfinished business. The only thing not interrupted are disasters, which is why they are so often described as “complete.”
Briefly put, issue incompleteness is the persistence of unfinished business for policymakers, politicians and policy analysts. Granted, interruptions can arise out of complexity and leave us with uncertainty and, of course, tasks do get done of sorts. A few things even turn out better than we could have hoped for. Fires are contained, problems handled, goals addressed, objectives recongized–work does get done. But–and this is the point–our policy worlds are recognizably incomplete and unfinished for all that.
This point has to be pushed further, though. All manner of granularities and context are involved when it comes to managing or coping ahead with the interruptions and unfinished business.
I
There is a sense in which each of our mental models of a complex policy and management issue always unfinished, if it matters to us. By way of example, Jean Cocteau, French litterateur, records the following interchange of composer, Darius Milhaud:
[Milhaud] shows his old housekeeper a very faithful painting of the great square at Aix. You see, it’s the square at Aix. Answer: ‘I don’t know.’ What? You don’t recognize the square at Aix? ‘No sir, because I’ve never seen it painted before.’
The rub isn’t how well the painting (or any representation for that matter) depicts that which it is a painting of, but rather that representations problematize recognition itself. Moving toward uncertainty (from the direction of certainty–we’ve seen the square–or from the direction of unstudied conditions–but never before as painted) means not only that we have a better appreciation of reality as contingent, provisional or messy. We also end up seeing how the incompletion of representation drives the very production of more representation.
Of the original Venus De Milo statue, Cocteau asks, “Suppose a farmer finds the arms. To whom do they belong? To the farmer or to the Venus de Milo?” Or to something or someone altogether different? To ask the latter question is to open up incompletion, where knowledge is unsettled and knowledgeable gives way to inexperience.
II
Is this sense of incompleteness at the micro level the felt part of an irreducible particularity of being, that sense we never body forth as representative or total? George Steiner recounts a childhood experience:
. . .if there are in this obscure province of one small county (diminished Austria) so many coats of arms, each unique, how many must there be in Europe, across the globe? I do not recall what grasp I had, if any, of large numbers. But I do remember that the word ‘millions’ came to me and left me unnerved. How was any human being to see, to master this plurality? Suddenly, it came to me, in some sort of exultant but also appalled revelation, that no inventory, no heraldic encyclopedia, no summa of fabled beasts, inscriptions, chivalric hallmarks, however compendious, could ever be complete.
But what is to be learned from a run of such individual experiences across more diverse people?
As I understand it, this diversity means no single or new representation could ever complete social reality or erase the initial condition that other recastings are both irresistibly forthcoming and inescapably required. Yes, the photograph recasts the way racing horses were portrayed compared to earlier paintings of them; no, the photograph is not the only or exhaustive way to portray racing horses. So for the policy and management worlds.
III
In those worlds, we have the techno-managerial elite still talking like this. “If people acted at the level of rationality presumed in standard economics textbooks, the world’s standard of living would be measurably higher,” assured Alan Greenspan, former chair of the US Federal Reserve.
So what if really-existing markets are one of the most diverse and hybridized of social institutions? So what’s wrong with believing that the answer to always-incomplete regulation must be always-incomplete markets?
Suspended somewhere between the always-incomplete pull of utopia and the never-good enough push from dystopia is more like the policy and management realism we–you and I–know and experience.
What to do when there isn’t even a homeopathic whiff of “next steps ahead” in the policy-relevant document you are reading? Yes, it’s a radical critique that tells truth to power, yes it is a manfesto for change now; yes, it’s certain, straightforward and unwavering.
But, like all policy narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, the big question remains: What happens next? Without provisional answers, endings are premature. “The thing is that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending,” in the words of Nobel poet, Joseph Brodsky.
II
“It is an interesting fact about the world we actually live in that no anthropologist, to my knowledge, has come back from a field trip with the following report: their concepts are so alien that it is impossible to describe their land tenure, their kinship system, their ritual… As far as I know there is no record of such a total admission of failure… It is success in explaining culture A in the language of culture B which is… really puzzling.” Ernest Gellner, social anthropologist
Thomas Carlyle’s mock philosopher, Dr. Teufelsdröckh asks in Sartor Resartus: “Am I a botched mass of tailors’ and cobblers’ shreds, then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?” That is: patched together when it comes for purposes of understanding.
III
There is talk of revolution, whispers of reform, and everything seems possible except departure from the norm. Sean O’Brien (“If I May”)
But then again: Consider the same norm–e.g., even cobblers should be happy–but change the point of departure. For example, Japanese adult pornstar, Jin Narumiya, has announced he’s retiring as a porn actor:
Dear Always Supportive People
I am celebrating my 28th birthday today. I have been able to do my best in my activities because of the support of all of you. Thank you so much. As some of you may already know, I have retired from pornoactor. There are three reasons. The first is that as I continued my activities, I lost sight of my own meaning life. I was chased by mysterious pressure, and before I knew it, my mind was empty. I was able to do my best even though I was on the edge of my mentality because I had people who supported me and were looking forward to my work, but I reached my limit and made time to face myself for a while. During this time, I focused on getting in touch with nature, meditating, and recovering my empty mind. Who am I? What is happiness? I faced these questions seriously, and the answer I came up with was retirement. And to take on a new challenge.The second is at work. I saw the reality of working in pornoactor and not being able to expand my work. And all you can do is get naked and have sex. I’ve had people say that to me. This made me feel very frustrated. It also made me very sad. So I wanted to challenge myself in a new field and achieve results, and look back at those who made me feel frustrated. Third, I wanted to live my life in a way that I could love myself more. I want to do what I want to do and make those who are involved with me happy. And I want to create the best life possible.I have been supported by many people in my life. I am helpless on my own. I cannot do anything. So we need your support going forward. I will soon start a new journey. I would like to make this journey exciting together with all of you. Thank you for reading this far. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents for giving birth to me, everyone who has always supported me, and all my friends who support me behind the scenes.
“If it were possible, I would have such priest as should imitate Christ, charitable lawyers should love their neighbours as themselves, . . .noblemen live honestly, tradesmen leave lying and cozening, magistrates corruption, &c., but this is impossible, I must get such as I may.” Robert Burton from his The Anatomy of Melancholy.
IV
quin etiam refert nostris versibus ipsis cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata; . . .verum positura discrepitant res. (Indeed in my own verses it is a matter of some moment what is placed next to what, and in what order;…truly the place in which each will be positioned determines the meaning.) Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
In other words, one answer to “What happens next?” is to juxtapose disparate quotes in order to extend the endings we have. There must be a sense in which such extensions are forced and since forced, any resonance (no guarantees) is compelling. This is a high-stakes wager that answers to “What happens next?” are alternative versions of what I would have thought instead.
For an example of recasting a complex policy issue through the juxtaposition of disparate quotes, see “The analogy, ‘we are at sea’, remade for the Anthropocene” in my When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene.
All you need to say is this: “Current conceptualizations of [x, y and z] are not theoretically equipped to unpack and examine their politics. This is because they have yet to grapple with the concept of power.”
The cost of the forgone alternative is core to graduate training in policy analysis. But there are huge problems with this concept. Start with a 1977 conversation between Nicholas Kaldor, the Cambridge economist, and his Colombian counterpart, Diego Pizano.
Kaldor asserts: “There is never a Pareto-optimal allocation of resources. There can never be one because the world is in a state of disequilibrium; new technologies keep appearing and it is not sensible to assume a timeless steady-state” (Pizano 2009, 51). Pizano counters by saying the concept of opportunity costs still made sense, even when market conditions are dynamic and unstable. But Kaldor insists,
Well, I would accept that there are some legitimate uses of the concept of opportunity cost and it is natural that in my battle against [General Equilibrium Systems] I have concentrated on the illegitimate ones. Economics can only be seen as a medium for the “allocation of scarce means between alternative uses” in the consideration of short run problems where the framework of social organization and the distribution of available resources can be treated as given as heritage of the past, and current decisions on future developments have no impact whatsoever. (Ibid, 52)
Consider the scorpion’s sting in the last clause. Even if one admitted uncertainty into the present as a function of the past, a dollar spent now on this option in light of that current alternative could still have no impact on the allocation of resources for a future that is ahead of us.
Why? Because markets generate resources and options, not just allocate pre-existing resources over pre-existing alternatives. “Economic theory went astray,” Kaldor added, “when theoreticians focused their attention on the allocative functions of markets to the exclusive of their creative functions, which are far more important since they serve as a instrument for transmitting economic changes” (Ibid, 52).
Source Pizano, D. 2009. Conversations with Great Economists. New York: Jorge Pinto.
2. “If implemented as planned. . .”
How many times have we heard something like, “If implemented as planned…,” “If the right structures are in place…,” or “Given market-clearing prices…”? Just like that older version: “Monarchy is the best form of government, provided the monarch possesses virtue and wisdom.”
‘If implemented as planned’, when we know that is the assumption we cannot make. ‘If the right structures are in place.” when we know that “right” is unethical without specifying just what the structures are, often case by case. “Given market-clearing prices,” when we know not only that markets in the real world often do not clear (supply and demand do not equate at a single price) – and even when they do, their “efficiencies” can undermine the very markets that produce those prices.
Admit it: We could as well believe that the surest way to heat the house in winter is by striking a match under the thermometer outside.
So, what to do? What follows in points 3 – 7 is what to assume instead.
3. The questions that matter
Someone asserts that this policy or approach holds broadly, and that triggers your asking:
Under what conditions?
With respect to what?
As opposed to what?
What is this a case of?
What are you–and we–missing?
Under what conditions does what you’re saying actually hold? Risk or uncertainty with respect to what failure scenario? Settler colonialism as opposed to what? Just what is this you are talking about a case of? What are you and I missing that’s right in front of us?
4. Economics and high reliability
Economics is as important to contemporary policy analysis as are reliability and safety to contemporary public management. At their limits, not only are they in conflict, they are categorically different (i.e., they are not in a so-called trade-off).
Economics assumes substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure high reliability (which includes safety) assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures without which there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services. There is a point at which high reliability and trade-offs are immiscible, like trying to mix oil and water.
One way of thinking about the nonfungibility of infrastructure high reliability is that it’s irrecuperable economically in real time. The safe and continuous provision of a critical service, even during (especially during) turbulent times, cannot be cashed out in dollars and cents and be paid to you instead of the service.
Which is to say, if you were to enter the market and arbitrage a price for high reliability of critical infrastructures, the markets transactions would be such you’d never be sure you’re getting what you thought you were buying.
5. Differences in assumptions that matter
When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be contextualized if we are to analyze and to manage case-by-granular case.
When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identification not only of emerging better practices across cases and modifiable in light of new cases, but also of greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given case diversity.
What I and others mean by calling for greater collaboration is not more teamwork or working with more and different stakeholders, but that they “bring the system into the room” for purposes of making the services in question reliable and safe.
When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple the decoupled real-time activities in ways that better mimic, but can never reproduce, the coupled nature of the wider system environment.
When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to those changes.
When we need more experimentation, we do not mean a trial-and-error learning where the next systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial destroying survival.
Where others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous components, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and only then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from the different standards.
6. Prediction isn’t what you think it is.
We are so used to the idea that predicting the future is more or less about accuracy that we forget how murky and unclear the present is. To paraphrase Turgot, the French Enlightenment philosopher and statesman, we have enough trouble predicting the present, let alone the future. Indeed, the future is not something up ahead or later on, but better understood as present prospection. As in: trying to predict the future is the current mess we’re in.
One implication is that to predict the future is to insist that the present messes can be managed differently. The notion that what will save us ahead has yet to be invented misses the more policy-relevant point that pulling out a good mess or forestalling a bad mess or taking on different messes today is also a way to change tomorrow. Think of it this way: The only place the future is more or less reliable is now, and only if we are managing our messes, now.
So what? Such is why a risk estimate must never be confused with being a prediction, i.e., if the risk is left unattended, failure is a matter of time. But is your failure scenario detailed enough to identify and detail conditions for cause and effect upon which prediction is founded? Without such a scenario, you cannot assume more uncertainty means more risk; it may mean only more uncertainty over your estimate of risk.
7. Social trust and distrust
Almost all discussions of really-existing policy and management are colored by considerations of societal trust and distrust.
But trust is a good example of how a social value is specified and differentiated by and through infrastructures. Broader discussions about “trust requires shared values” miss the fact that team situation awareness of systemwide reliability operators is much more about knowledge management, distributed cognition, and keeping a shared bubble of system understanding than it is about “trust” as a singularly important social value.
For that matter, distrust is as core as trust. One reason operators are reliable is that they actively distrust the future will be stable or reliable in the absence of the system’s vigilant real-time management. There has been much less discussion of the positive function of distrust as a social value. In contrast, “distrust” often takes the adjective, “polarizing.”
So too for the related “dread.” Widespread social dread–as in the societal dread that drives the reliability management of very hazardous infrastructures–is almost always taken to be negative. Here too, though, dread has a positive function.
Every day, nuclear plant explosions, airline crashes, financial meltdowns, massive water-supply collapse—and more—are avoided that would have happened had not operators and managers in these large systems prevented their occurrence.
Why? Because societal dread is so intense that these events must be precluded from happening on an active basis. (It might be better to say that we don’t know “societal dread” unless we observe how knowledgeable professionals operate and manage complex critical infrastructures.)
There is such fear of what would happen if large interconnected electricity, telecommunications, water, transportation, financial services and like did fail that it is better to manage them than not have them. We’ve structured our lives to depend on these systems, at least for right now.
All of us of course must wonder at the perversity of this. But that is the function of this dread, and distrust for that matter, isn’t it? Namely: to push us further in probing what it means to privilege social and individual reliability and safety over other values and desires. We are meant to ask: What would it look like in world where such reliability and safety are not so privileged?
For the answer to that question is altogether too evident: Most of the planet already lives in that world of unreliability and little safety. We’re meant to ask, precisely because the answer is that clear.
“Imagine being me,” I don’t say to the friend who has lost, over the past seven years, both parents, her only brother, a cousin, an uncle, a childhood crush, a newly discovered half sister and beloved family dog to a cruel array of accidents, crimes of passion, and unpronounceable afflictions too ghastly and protracted to fathom, “with all that ahead of me.”
Let’s assume the basic unit of analysis and management is the planet.
Assume also that having to act planetarily is due to the awful messes created by the nation state: their sovereign boundaries and transboundary impacts and geopolitics to name the usual suspects. Even phrases like “systemic risk” seem to miss the fact that the planet is the platform for action from the get-go.
But so what?
II
I suggest that those who take the politics and practices of complexity seriously are a global nation on what is first and foremost Planet Earth. The implications of this nation on this planet differ from what one might first suppose.
III
First, what is “taking the politics of complexity seriously”?
This is a politics that can’t be homogenized or left undifferentiated. A politics reminding us that what works is often at the smaller scale, where the gatherers of information are its users. A politics that starts with cases to be analyzed in their own right. A politics that resists getting lost when scaled up but compels asking at each scale, What am I missing right in front me?
A politics where no matter how tightly-coupled the world, people’s stories are not as connected. A politics that insists if you believe everything is connected to everything else, then nothing is reducible to anything else, and if you believe both, then the starting point is not interdependence or irreducibility, but the kaleidoscopic granularity in between. If everything is connected, not everything adds up.
Not everyone, of course, subscribes to this credo, but I am saying people who are of like mind are to be found everywhere.
Not only are they found globally, they have those demerits of the nation state: The glboal residents are site- and case-based. Contingencies are unavoidable and variable and matter for differentiating really-existing policy and management.
IV
What does the credo mean practically?
When I and others call for better recognition and accommodation of complexity, we mean the complex as well as the uncertain, unfinished and conflicted must be particularized and contextualized, case-by-granular-case.
When I and others say we need more findings that can be replicated across a range of cases, we are calling for identification not only of emerging better practices across cases, but also of greater equifinality: finding multiple but different pathways to achieve similar objectives, given diverse cases.
When I and others call for more system integration, we mean the need to recouple decoupled activities in ways that better mimic but can never reproduce the interconnected nature of the wider task environment.
When I and others call for more flexibility, we mean the need for greater maneuverability across different performance modes in the face of changing system volatility and options to respond to changes.
When I and others call for more experimentation, we do not mean a trial-and-error learning where the next systemwide error ends up being the last systemwide trial destroying survival.
Where others talk about risks in a system’s hazardous elements, we point to different systemwide reliability standards and only then, to the different risks and uncertainties that follow from the different standards.
What then is the role of the global nation subscribing to this credo and those practices in its dealings with the self-proclaimed planetary techno-managerial elites?
The politics and practices of complexity are oppositional and corrective, a form of resistance to Earth techno-solutionism.
What else can we do, senior executives and company boards tell themselves, when the entire business is on the line? In this emergency, we have to risk failure in order to succeed!
But what if the business is in a critical service sector? Here, when upper management seeks to implement risk-taking changes, they rely on middle-level reliability professionals, who, when they take risks, only do so in order to reduce the chances of failure. To reliability-seeking professionals, the risk-taking activities of their upper management look like a form of suicide for fear of death.
II
When professionals are compelled to reverse practices they know and find to be reliable, the results are deadly. Famously in the Challenger accident, engineers had been required up to the day of that flight to show why the shuttle could launch; on that day, the decision rule was reversed to one showing why launch couldn’t take place.
Once it was good bank practice to hold capital as a cushion against unexpected losses; capital security arrangements now mandate they hold capital against losses expected from their high-risk lending. Mortgage brokers traditionally made money on the performance and quality of mortgages they made; in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, their compensation changed to one based on the volume of loans originated but passed on.
Originally, the Deepwater Horizon rig had been drilling an exploration well; that status changed when on April 15 2010 BP applied to the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) to convert the site to a production well. The MMS approved by the change. The explosion occurred five days later.
In brief, ample evidence exists that decision rule reversals that required professionals in high-stakes situations to turn inside out the way they managed for reliability have instead led to system failures: NASA was never the same; we are still trying to get out of the 2008 financial mess and the Great Recession that followed; the MMS disappeared from the face of the earth.
Forcing cognitive flips on the part of reliability operators and operators—that is, exile them to conditions they do not know but are told they must nonetheless be skilled for—is the surest way to throw acid into face of high reliability management.
III
“But, that’s a strawman,” you counter. “Of course, we wouldn’t deliberately push reliability professionals into unstudied conditions, if we could avoid it.”
Really?
The oft-recommended approach, Be-Prepared-for-All-Hazards, looks like the counsel of wisdom. It however is dangerous if it flips mandates around to requiring emergency organizations to cooperate around many more variables, using information they will not have or cannot obtain, for all manner of interconnected scenarios, which if treated with equal seriousness, produce considerable modeling and analytic uncertainties.
I. Saying something more definitive about “resilience”: 4 points
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.
II. Resilience isn’t what you think
The opposite of the coping herder, who can only react to external shocks, is the resilient herder, who bounces back from the same. But how true is that? Both occur at the individual level, and the opposite of the individual is the collective (think “team situational awareness”), not a different individual with different behavior.
We observed reliability professionals in critical infrastructures undertaking four types of resilience at their system level, each varying by stage of operations in the system:
Table 1. Different Types of System Resilience
Reliability professionals adjusting back to within de jure or defacto bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);
Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by reliability professionals (restoration resilience);
Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving others different from system’s reliability professionals; and
Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others (recovery resilience)
Resilience this way is a set of options, processes and strategies deployed by the system’s real-time managers and tied to the state of system operations in which they find themselves. Resilience differs depending on whether or not the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations. (Think of pastoralist systems here as critical infrastructure.)
Resilience, as such, is not a single property of the system to be turned on or off as and when needed. Nor is it, as a system feature, reducible to anything like a “resilient” herder, though such herders exist.
Why does it matter that resilience is a systemwide set of options, processes and strategies? What you take to be the loss of the herd, a failure in pastoralist operations that you say comes inevitably with drought, may actually be perceived and treated by pastoralists themselves as a temporary disruption after which operations are to be restored. While you, the outsider, can say their “temporary” really isn’t temporary in this day and age, it is their definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.
To return to Table 1, herder systems that maintain normal operations are apt to demonstrate what we call precursor resilience. Normal doesn’t mean what happens when there are no shocks to the system. Shocks happen all the time, and normal operations are all about responding to them in such a way as to ensure they don’t lead to temporary system disruption or outright system failure. Formally, the precursors of disruption and failure are managed for, and reliably so. Shifting from one watering point, when an interfering problem arises there, to another just as good or within a range of good-enough is one such strategy. Labelling this, “coping,” seriously misrepresents the active system management going on.
Pastoralist systems, nevertheless, can and do experience temporary stoppages in their service provision—raiders seize livestock, remittances don’t arrive, offtake of livestock products is interrupted, random lightning triggers veldt fires—and here the efforts at restoring conditions back to normal is better termed restoration resilience. Access to other grazing areas (or alternative feed stocks or alternative sources of livelihood) may be required in the absence of fallbacks normally available.
So too resilience as a response to shocks looks very different by way of management strategies when the shocks lead to system failure and onward recovery from that failure. In this case, an array of outside, inter-organizational resources and personnel—public, private, NGO, humanitarian—are required in addition to the resources of the pastoralist herders. These recovery arrangements and resources are unlike anything marshaled by way of precursor or restoration resiliencies within the herder communities themselves.
There is nothing predetermined in the Table 1 sequence. Nothing says it is inevitable that the failed system recovers to a new normal (indeed the probability of system failure in recovery can be higher than in normal operations in large sociotechnical systems). It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from the new normal. To outsiders, it may look like some of today’s pastoralist systems are in unending recovery, constantly trying to catch up with one disaster after another.
The reality may be that the system is already at a new normal, operating to a standard of reliability quite different than you might think. (Imagine that wet season grazing areas were magically restored to pastoralists who already adapted to their disappearance. Real-time herder options would increase, but would the collective response be altogether positive now? That question can only be answered if you are first clear about what is the actual system being managed now and the operating standard of reliability to which it is being managed before the restoration.)
If you think of resilience in a pastoralist system as “the system’s capability in the face of its high reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty and complexity as well as exploit the upsides of new possibilities and opportunities that emerge in real time,” then they are able to do so because of being capable to undertake the different types of resiliencies listed here, contingent on the stage of operations herders as a collectivity find themselves.
Or to put the key point from the other direction, a system demonstrating precursor resilience, restoration resilience, emergency response coordination and recovery resilience is the kind of system better able to withstand the downsides of shocks and uncertainty and exploit their upsides. Here too, nothing predetermines that every pastoralist system will exhibit all four resiliencies, if and when their states of operation change.
The above raises a methodological point. If I and my colleagues can come up with four different types of system resilience—forget about the empirically different articulations of resilience at the micro and meso levels—we might pause over how useful any catchall term “resilience” is. More positively, when using the term resilience the burden of proof is on each of us to empirically differentiate the term for the case at hand.
To summarize, any notion that resilience is a single property or has a dominant definition or is there/not there or is best exemplified at the individual level is incorrect and misleading when system reliability is at stake.
III. Spread the word: We need more Extreme Climate Resilience Desks for real-time infrastructure operations!
Below I cut and paste from an email sent to me yesterday by Scott Humphrey, Executive Director of the Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region. It proposes an intervention that, I believe deserves wider distribution and application not just to marine infrastructures but to the real-time operations centers of other critical infrastructures as well.
Several months ago, I did this webinar for a maritime security audience. The webinar describes the Extreme Climate Resilience Desk concept. I’ve also presented at several conferences.
The concept focuses on creating a “Climate Resilience Desk” at the Marine Exchange of San Francisco to better anticipate and manage climate-related system shocks in maritime operations. Here’s a breakdown of the key points:
Bold Initiative: The proposed Climate Resilience Desk aims to enhance real-time awareness and management of climate-related shocks to maritime transportation, much like current systems handle port security and maritime traffic emergencies. This initiative is critical for adapting to the ‘new normal’ of constant, unpredictable climate events affecting maritime and associated sectors.
Case Study Analysis: A detailed case study from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017 is used to highlight how interconnected and seemingly unrelated factors like maritime transportation, rice production, and rain can intersect and create systemic shocks, illustrating the complex interdependencies in regional operations.
Water Management Challenges: The video discusses the challenges of managing waterways in the face of extreme weather events, such as the near-catastrophe at Oroville Dam in 2017. It underscores the need for an integrated approach to manage the reservoirs, dams, and spillways that are critical to the state’s water management system.
Operational Interdependencies: The importance of understanding and managing operational interdependencies in the San Francisco Bay Region is emphasized. This includes the interactions between rainfall, dams, rice shipments, and the capacity of waterways to handle sudden increases in water volume.
Infrastructure Needs: The proposed desk would use existing resources and data to support decision-makers, including pilots and tug operators, by providing them with timely, actionable information during extreme weather events.
Leveraging Data for Resilience: By aggregating publicly available data and utilizing advanced GIS systems, the Climate Resilience Desk could preemptively manage risks and maintain operations during climate shocks.
Stakeholder Collaboration: The initiative calls for increased collaboration among various stakeholders, including government agencies, emergency organizations, and private sector entities, to enhance maritime domain awareness and preparedness.
The proposed Climate Resilience Desk, through comprehensive data analysis and stakeholder cooperation, aims to transform how climate-related risks are managed, ensuring more resilient maritime and regional operations.
F. Scott Humphrey
Executive Director, Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region Chairperson, Harbor Safety Committee of the San Francisco Bay Region
Bold Initiative: The proposed Climate Resilience Desk aims to enhance real-time awareness and management of climate-related shocks to maritime transportation, much like current systems handle port security and maritime traffic emergencies. This initiative is critical for adapting to the ‘new normal’ of constant, unpredictable climate events affecting maritime and associated sectors.
Case Study Analysis: A detailed case study from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017 is used to highlight how interconnected and seemingly unrelated factors like maritime transportation, rice production, and rain can intersect and create systemic shocks, illustrating the complex interdependencies in regional operations.
Water Management Challenges: The video discusses the challenges of managing waterways in the face of extreme weather events, such as the near-catastrophe at Oroville Dam in 2017. It underscores the need for an integrated approach to manage the reservoirs, dams, and spillways that are critical to the state’s water management system.
Operational Interdependencies: The importance of understanding and managing operational interdependencies in the San Francisco Bay Region is emphasized. This includes the interactions between rainfall, dams, rice shipments, and the capacity of waterways to handle sudden increases in water volume.
Infrastructure Needs: The proposed desk would use existing resources and data to support decision-makers, including pilots and tug operators, by providing them with timely, actionable information during extreme weather events.
Leveraging Data for Resilience: By aggregating publicly available data and utilizing advanced GIS systems, the Climate Resilience Desk could preemptively manage risks and maintain operations during climate shocks.
Stakeholder Collaboration: The initiative calls for increased collaboration among various stakeholders, including government agencies, emergency organizations, and private sector entities, to enhance maritime domain awareness and preparedness.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 