Resilience Under Stress

Floods, fire, and drought. Starting around 1450, Texas had a 37 year long exceptional drought that decimated the population. Disasters have happened time and time again. Faced with these disasters some communities folded, others rebuilt, and still others redesigned how they lived. Once thriving towns are now abandoned ghost towns. What makes for community resiliency? What makes an organization able to handle problems? What makes for bouncing forward through problems?

In business, often the breaking comes from not just one little problem, but when problems cascade building one upon another. Large scale failures often happen when multiple little failures right after another. One small failure triggers another failure which further cascades more failures. These cascading failures happen in most systems, the more complex, the more likely a cascading failure will bring it down. We see these cascading failures in banking, power grids, ecologies, and in the "cloud" such as AWS.

How to prevent such massive failures? We need resiliency. Resiliency is not the avoiding of problems (although that really helps). It is the ability of small failures to not bring down the whole system. It is the ability to bounce back after problems hit.

For people, we learn that resiliency comes from supportive relationships, being able to adapt to new situations, and positive experiences. As we learn to cope with threats that we can manage, we develop the resiliency we need. As such, resiliency is what is called an "emerging phenomenon." An emerging phenomenon means that it develops from our interactions with our social environment. Resiliency does not come from will power and "grit." It is as much a product of the community as it is of the person.

For business, resiliency has to be designed into the business. Resiliency is about flexibility, redundancy, and distributed decision making, not production optimization. Highly optimized businesses are generally not resilient.

Resiliency can be built into the team by who is on the team, how the team faces problems, and the level of trust within the team. Teams that are resilient bounce forward when faced with challenges.

One way to build resiliency is to have the team to look for points of failure, places where things can go wrong, build ways to mitigate those failures, and test them. Teams that expect failures tend to challenge all assumptions and find creative solutions to those failures. Failures will happen. When we look for all the reasons why a failure could happen, we can reduce them.

Another aspect of resiliency is to spread decision making throughout the team. In order to do that, the team has to buy into the vision and work to make that vision happen. When people, no matter what their position in the organization is, are educated about the vision and empowered to make the right decisions, they tend to work together to find and fix problems before they cascade into a major failure.

What if what we know is wrong?

The most dangerous knowledge is that which we "know to be true" but are wrong. It is not true. We do well to question our assumptions. History has many examples of leaders "knowing" that they could beat another country only to be defeated in war. Many an inventor "knew" that they could succeed only to disappear into history. Question the assumptions and make plans for if I am wrong.

The illusion of knowledge is most dangerous knowledge; when what we know just isn't correct. As human beings, when faced with ambiguity, we will grab onto an incorrect explanation over not knowing. We will fixate on a story about the ambiguity rather than sitting with it and waiting for the ambiguity to be made clear.

We are in an overload of information. Nobody can handle all the information available. We have to reject most information we receive. Unfortunately, that means that we often miss the small, quiet information that would make a huge difference if we knew it.

How to be open to the important stuff? Look for the odd stuff, the things that don't fit our easy explanations, and check out the interesting stories. Be curious. Stories that make us feel good because they fit into what we want to believe to be true should be doubted the most.

Living in doubt is healthy living. The universe is changing on us too fast to remain confident that we know what we think we know. Spend time reflecting and asking what do I really know and what do I just think I know. I could be wrong.

The best thing to do is to make plans of how to change if I am proven to be wrong. The process of making such plans helps to avoid the worst failures.

Risky World

Computers talk to each other via "IP Addresses." Unfortunately, some of those addresses have been mapped to physical addresses which are not accurate. One house in the middle of Kansas had millions of IP addresses mapped to it because the mapping company used their location as a default for unfound addresses. The people living there have been visited by FBI, police, people looking for runaway children, and more.