- Volatility is increasing and here to stay. The details are different but they share certain common characteristics and are always the result of many complex interactions. Can't control this type of disruption but we can build better systems by making them more resilient, having the ability to rebound and adapt. Continuity and recovery in the face of change
- To improve your resilience is to increase the effort it takes for a stimulus to force you off your baseline while also increasing your ability to adapt and bounce back once it happens. Preserving adaptive capacity. Truly resilient systems change dynamically to achieve its purpose as well as the scale at which it operates. Diversifying the resources in which the system operates makes it more resilient to change as it allows for modularity. Diverse at their edges but simple at their core - modularity, simplicity and interoperability vital
- The ways to adapt and the stimuli which force change are both nearly infinite
- Resilience is not robustness - robustness typically entails hardening the assets of a business. Redundancy is keeping a backup but is not resiliency either. Resilience is also not the recovery of a system to its initial state.
- Think of a tree which is strong but has no give. It can withstand a lot until it snaps. This is robust but not resilient
- Now, imagine bamboo. It is thin, flexible and can return to its original state given pretty much any wind. This is resilience
- Failures are often helpful to release resources and reset and trying to stop these small failures make systems more fragile and will eventually lead to a massive failure. A seemingly perfect system is often the most fragile and the one which fails often but in small ways may be the most resilient
- Psychic resilience comes from habits of mind and is able to be learned and improved upon over time.
- Optimism and confidence are some of the best traits to deal with depression and to become more resilient
- People exhibiting ego-resilience and ego-control are best at delaying gratification, being resilient and overcoming obstacles
- Hardiness - believe can find a meaningful purpose in life, one can influence one's surrounding and events, both positive and negative events will have lessons one can learn from. People of faith tend to be more resilient partially due to their "hardiness"
- Mindfulness meditation is a great tool to improve our resilience as it helps us create a space between our events, thoughts, emotions - an external "witness observer"
- Strong social resilience is found in societies with a lot of trust, a translational leader at it's core promoting adaptive governance
- Holism - bolstering the resilience of only one part of the system sometimes adds fragility to another area. To improve resilience you often need to work in more than one mode and one scale and one silo at a time. Take the granular and the global into account simultaneously
- 4 stages of adaptive growth - Fast growth (resources coming together), conservation (efficiency of resources used but less resilience), release (fall of system), reorganization (process starting over)
- Robust yet fragile - systems which are resilient to anticipated danger or change but not to the unanticipated. It is often thousands of small decisions which aggregate rather than one massive event which brings down a system
- Must be able to measure health of a system as a whole and not just its pieces to know if fragility is sneaking in
- In risk management, risks tend to be modeled as additive but in reality they are multiplicative. One failure makes future failures multiples more likely
- Signs of a system flip - becomes unstable near its threshold, too much synchrony or agents acting in union (over correlation and people must make similar choices to survive)
- The timing of force, change and its effects is often more important than its scope
- Real time data, better monitoring and isolation upon any sign of cascading failure are three important design features
- Protocols are the lingua Franca of systems
- There are universal scaling laws for biological organisms so that the larger the organism the slower the metabolism and the longer the average life span. The power of clustering comes from a similar phenomenon but in the case of cities, the larger they get, the "faster" they become and the average income increases but certain quality of life markers decrease - there are increasing returns to scale, super linear scaling. However, as this part of life increases, the pace of innovation needs to speed up too or else the city may spiral downwards. The increasing diversity helps with this
- Respect is the cheapest concession you can give in relationships and negotiation. It is also a positive sum trait where your dispersal of respect only increases the total
- Improving resilience is not about removing every possible disturbance. In fact, facing challenges which test you or your organization are vital. They show where improvements need to be made and can clear the path for creative destruction
What I got out of it
- A thorough overview of what resilience entails and many examples of both fragile and antifragile people, ecosystems, institutions, organizations and more
