When the status quo shifts, as it always does, uncertainty follows. Come what may, we’ll all be better off if society sustains high levels of trust, good leadership and cooperation.
Resilience thinking
Change is hard, it’s also remorseless and effects everyone including the government
We want change, but our governments keep doing the same thing. In many cases governments exert stronger control to ensure things stay the same. The irony here is that, over time, the more our leaders attempt to hold things the same, the more things change and slip out of their control. That’s the nature of complex systems. (Part 3 in our series on change.)
A resilient world is built on humility
A resilient world would acknowledge our dependence on the ecosystems that support us, allow us to appreciate the limits of our mastery, accept we have much to learn, and ensure our people are well educated about resilience and our interconnection with the biosphere.
Resilience – the good, the bad and the ugly
For all the value and insight that comes with resilience thinking, it has collected some unfortunate baggage along the way. It can be clunky when it comes to implementation, and our political and corporate leaders are quick to hide behind the notion of resilience as a way of shirking responsibility.
Losing it – the consequences of stepping over the threshold
There are limits to how much a complex system can be changed and still recover. Beyond those limits the system functions differently because some critical feedback process has changed. These limits are known as thresholds. Sometimes it’s easy to cross back over to the identity you want, sometimes it’s difficult and sometimes it’s impossible. The concept of ‘thresholds’ is central to understanding the resilience of your system.
The perils of command and control and the pathology of Natural Resource Management
The initial successes of command and control of natural resources come with a costs that are usually never acknowledged. Over time, the composite result is increasingly less resilient and more vulnerable ecosystems, more myopic and rigid institutions, and more dependent and selfish economic interests all attempting to maintain short-term success. We need to work with the complexity of nature, not subjugate it.
The myth of the optimal state: adaptive cycles and the birth of resilience thinking
The key to sustainability is a systems capacity to recover after a disturbance, not the ability to hold it in a notional optimal state. Complex systems are constantly moving through adaptive cycles of rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganisation. You can’t ‘hold’ it in one condition of ‘optimal sustainable yield’ because the system continually self organises. The myth of the optimal state stems from our mistaken belief that we are in control and the systems we are managing are simple systems.
Thinking resilience – navigating a complex world
Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure and feedbacks – to have the same identity. Resilience is the ability to cope with shocks and keep functioning in much the same kind of way.
Solving sustainability – It’s complicated AND complex. Do you know the difference?
Why is climate change so difficult to solve? Because it’s a complex problem and complexity is something humans don’t deal with well. Our political leaders will tell you they are in control, and that they have a plan, a simple solution that solves the problem of climate change without anyone having to change. Simple solutions never solve complex problems but they can make them worse.