Category: Resilience

How to Create Resilience Through Big Data

I’ve been invited by PopTech and the Rockefeller Foundation to give the opening remarks at an upcoming event on interdisciplinary dimensions of resilience, which is  being hosted at Georgetown University. This event is connected to their new program focus on “Creating Resilience Through Big Data.” I’m absolutely de-lighted to be involved and am very much looking forward to the conversations. The purpose of this blog post is to summarize the presentation I intend to give and to solicit feedback from readers. So please feel free to use the comments section below to share your thoughts. My focus is primarily on disaster resilience. Why? Because understanding how to bolster resilience to extreme events will provide insights on how to also manage less extreme events, while the converse may not be true.

One of the guiding questions for the meeting is this: “How do you understand resilience conceptually at present?” First, discourse matters.  The term resilience is important because it focuses not on us, the development and disaster response community, but rather on local at-risk communities. While “vulnerability” and “fragility” were used in past discourse, these terms focus on the negative and seem to invoke the need for external protection, overlooking the fact that many local coping mechanisms do exist. From the perspective of this top-down approach, international organizations are the rescuers and aid does not arrive until these institutions mobilize.

Read full article with links and graphics.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Creating Resilience through Big Data”

It occurred to me as I was reading Beatrice Benne's article, “Demystifying Pattern(s) of Change: A Common Archetype,” that America is facing calamity now because we've been so wildly successful at going through the adaptive change cycle, over and over. But the successes were short-term, and now all these short-term successes are adding up to a dead-end long-term strategy.

So it's not only important to successfully adapt, it's also important how you adapt. It's not only change itself but the quality of change that's important; and we can only measure quality by thinking in eons rather than years, decades, and centuries. Today's joyous rebirth can be tomorrow's problem child.

So Benne's patterns made me think of fractals because fractals repeat patterns in successively larger scales. Short-term patterns add up to larger long-term patterns. So successful change, in and of itself, can be extremely misleading. Of course this is common knowledge to systems thinkers.

It's the success of humans that is killing us as a species. We're similar to the rabbit plague of Australia. We have no natural predators to speak of except for our own species.

But the main point I wanted to make about the patterns illustrated in Beatrice Benne's article, is that each pattern can be a small section of a larger fractal pattern. Short-term successes can be collectively heading to long-term failure.

So the kind of insights required to solve short-term problems are often not enough. We need to start seeing these short-term patterns as small waves adding up to form a larger wave. And of course that's exactly what systems thinkers are doing. But sometimes it's good to state the obvious out loud.

Phi Beta Iota:  In order words, the corruption of short-term deal-making is the cancer of long-term resilience.  We've not only eaten our seed corn, we've been crapping in our water well.