Connected resilience a 'grand challenge' for the 21st century

© 2019 David Denyer. All rights reserved.
PROFESSOR SPEAKER ADVISOR
Leadership
Change
Resilience
www.cranfield.ac.uk/oracl
www.daviddenyer.com
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Connected Resilience a
'Grand Challenge' for the
21st Century
Professor David Denyer

Connected Resilience: a 'Grand Challenge'
for the 21st Century?
In this article, I argue that we need to consider connected resilience as a 'Grand Challenge' for the
21st Century. Grand Challenges are complex challenges with far-reaching societal implications
that lack a clear solution. They reflect the reality that society is increasingly interdependent – a
system of systems – where challenges and changes have the potential to disrupt people,
organisations, communities, economies and societies. Wellbeing, informal networks, and
community engagement are just as crucial in building connected resilience as robust infrastructure
and systems. Within this more integrated and holistic framework, connected resilience involves the
mobilization of cooperation to generate the possibility of collective action to produce a system-wide
ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to and learn from challenges and disruptions in
order to survive and prosper.

Connected Resilience: a 'Grand Challenge’
Disruptive events
The perception that the incidence and impact of recent disruptive events are increasing has
heightened the significance of connected resilience. Health agencies, governments, and
businesses around the world are stepping up efforts to tackle a new coronavirus (COVID-19) that
originated in China's Wuhan city. The Director General of the World Health Organization said, 'a
virus is more powerful in creating political, social and economic upheaval than any terrorist attack.
It's the worst enemy you can imagine.' COVID-19 is a system-wide problem that calls for a
global response.

Disruptive events
COVID-19 is unprecedented outbreak that has been met with an unprecedented response, yet it is
easy to forget that it isn’t the only disruptive event that has occurred during the first three months
of 2020:
• A United States drone strike killed a prominent Iranian military commander leading to escalating
political and military tensions. Meanwhile, ash began falling from Taal volcano in the Philippines
on an island south of the capital city Manila. In both locations, governments and organizations
struggled to put together country and regional evacuation plans.
• Travelex, the travel money services firm, was struggling to get its customer-facing systems back
up after a ransomware attack. The company guaranteed that there was no compromise to
customer data after hackers demanded $6 million for 5GB of sensitive customer information
they claim to have accessed.

Disruptive events
• UK suffered the wettest February on record and the worst winter floods in recent times as a
consequence of Storms Ciara, Dennis and Jorge in part because the rain was so widespread
but also because it has fallen on ground already saturated. The Environment Agency has
warned the country needs to brace itself for ‘more frequent periods of extreme weather like this’
due of climate change.
• Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, ordered a national review into the country's
bushfire fire crisis. The Royal Commission will include the impact of climate change, the
operational response at a state and local level, and the role of the Federal Government.

Disruptive events
• Police in London shot dead a man after he stabbed two people in what was described as a
terror-related incident. It was the third terror attack to hit the UK since security services lowered
the national threat level from severe to substantial in November, meaning attacks were deemed
"likely" rather than "highly likely."
• We are facing an unprecedented global climate emergency with severe consequences for our
ecosystems, economies and societies. In the words of the extinction rebellion, "To survive, it's
going to take everything we've got.“
Slowly emerging challenges (e.g., climate change, rising levels of obesity, aging populations), as
well as shocks and crises (e.g., terrorist attacks, extreme weather events, pandemics), are
continually testing the resilience of systems (natural or designed).

Extreme events are complex, wicked problems
For the purposes of this article, I use the term 'extreme event' as the overarching category label
(recognizing that some commentators use this term differently- for two excellent review papers see
Hällgren et al. 2018 and Hannah et al. 2009). In other words, the spread of a virus, escalating
political and military tension, cyber-attacks, bushfires, terrorist attacks and the impact of climate
change (such as mass starvation, disease, flooding, storm destruction, forced migration and war)
are all categorically extreme events (see also Buchanan and Denyer, 2013).

While appearing to be diverse and unrelated, extreme events all share some
essential characteristics:
1. Extreme events not only cause harm, service loss, or emergency they also generate surprise
and shock because they create a mismatch between people's way of thinking (e.g., what is
safe, acceptable, ethical, tolerable, normal) and one's environment. Extreme events disrupt
both in terms of interruption and in terms of being disturbing, unsettling, and
upsetting. Recovering from an extreme event, therefore, requires a "full cultural
readjustment… of beliefs, norms, and precautions, making then compatible with the newly
gained understanding of the world" (Turner, 1976).
2. The causality of extreme events usually involves the combination and interaction of numerous
factors, at different levels (e.g., individual, group, government, societal), over time.

3. Extreme events proceeded through broadly comparable phases: pre-crisis or incubation
period, incident, crisis response management, investigation and learning, and
[sometimes] change.
4. Extreme events shape the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape because
the responses of governments, regulators, other agencies implicated in these events are
scrutinized in detail by the public and media. The role of the media often also plays a
significant role, shaping public perception and often transforming 'incidents' into 'extreme
events' worthy of a front-page story.

5. Extreme events can be described as wicked problems due to the multiplicity of stakeholders,
ambiguity relating to the causes, lack of precedents, the opportunity cost and unintended
consequences of intervention, and the inability to define an achievable endpoint – how safe is
safe enough?
Extreme events are 'system of systems' problems. Ackoff (1971) used the phrase system of
systems to describe "dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems
that interact with each other." Each part of the system is contained in a more extensive system and
is the product of the interactions of its components. The world's political, economic, social,
technological systems have become increasingly interconnected and interdependent over many,
many years.

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the futility of attempts to contain or control the movement of
people all around the world. It has also highlighted the interdependencies in supply chains,
information networks, technologies, and economies. Responding effectively to extreme events
requires coordinated action across multiple and geographically dispersed stakeholders with
divergent interests and values and dispersed and diffused power systems.
These trends appear to be shifting systems further away from the complicated domain where
optimization and efficiency were the core approaches to the realm of complexity, where rapidly
changing environments, interdependencies and fragmentation require fundamentally new
approaches. While complexity has always existed in some form, this new era of volatility,
uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) will require us to acknowledge and work with the
fact that extreme events now appear to be a wicked and complex processes.

Towards #connectedresilience
If extreme events are complex, wicked problems, then building resilience to extreme events
requires connected resilience - a holistic approach encompassing governments, agencies,
businesses, and communities. It also requires multi-disciplinary knowledge including engineering,
the environment, politics, finance, and business and organisation studies. To make progress on
connected Resilience, diverse communities need to mobilize cooperation and deliver contextually
appropriate collective action. However, connected Resilience is challenging to achieve due to
complex and fragmented institutions, dispersed and diffused power structures, confidence-sapping
histories of failure. The combination of these factors raises serious questions about how rapidly
systems can respond to changing pressures, threats, disturbances, and perturbations (such as
pandemic, climate change, or cyber-attacks).

Connected Resilience – a TOOLKIT, METHODOLOGY, or a
PHILOSOPHY?
Connected Resilience is a philosophy, methodology and a set of tools, concerned with addressing
extreme events in a system-centric way* (Source: adapted from Bourton Group).

Connected Resilience – a TOOLKIT, METHODOLOGY, or a
PHILOSOPHY?
Our experience is that where policymakers and industry leaders embrace connected resilience as
a philosophy, they are more likely to transform the whole system for good. In the sections below, I
outline some initial principles, methods, and tools that could serve to stimulate discussion.

Connected Resilience as a Philosophy
The concept of Resilience is widely applied to in several fields, and while definitions differ between
sectors and disciplines, underlying principles remain constant:
• Systems (e.g., ecosystems, people, organizations, communities, societies) are exposed to
disturbances and disruptive events (natural and human-made and both sudden and slow-
onset),
• Resilience is the capacity of a system to retain and restore essential basic structures and
functions during and after disturbance and disruptive events,
• A system is resilient if it can adjust and adapt its functioning before, during, or following events
(changes, disturbances, and opportunities), and thereby sustain required operations under
both expected and unexpected conditions.

Connected Resilience as a Philosophy
• Resilience is a dynamic process, rather than a property of the system itself.
• Resilience involves proactivity as well as reactivity. It is about adapting before the context
affects the system in an uncontrolled manner,
Collective Resilience is about reducing the number of people affected by disruption (e.g., to the
provision of an essential service) with a specific focus on protecting people in vulnerable
situations. No matter what the context, connected resilience is about putting yourself in the shoes
of end-users to understand how disruption could cause intolerable harm. It is about investing in
and designing resilience to ensure the secure, safe, and sustainable functioning of critical systems
and services for all - creating a bedrock for wellbeing and prosperity.

Connected Resilience as a Methodology
In a previous article, I offered the 4Sight methodology as a structured framework that helps
organizations achieve and sustain organizational Resilience. Read more: Beyond 'Plan-do-check-
act': Leading with 4Sight - http://bit.ly/35KKkqM
The 4Sight methodology can be extended to a system of systems-level:
Foresight: know what to expect. Anticipating, predicting, and preparing for the future. Developing
a shared understanding of system vulnerabilities and for continuous attention to anomalies that
could be symptoms of more significant problems in a system. Promoting dialogue and information
between organizations, where mutual threats and opportunities can be understood, addressed,
and seized by working in partnership with other organizations and stakeholders.

Insight: know what is going on. Interpreting and responding to present conditions. This involves
systematically gathering and sharing vital information and evidence from diverse sources to build,
refine and update system-wide situational awareness continually. It includes developing KPIs and
metrics designed to track and encourage progress towards resilience goals of the whole system.
COVID-19 demonstates that evidence never speaks for itself and instead, science and information
is often interpreted differently by governments and organisations.

Response: know what to do. Proactive responses are aimed at avoiding or trapping future
problems such as building redundancy into systems through duplication and diversification,
thereby removing single points of failure, e.g., multiple forms of power generation serving
overlapping parts of a city. Reactive responses are aimed at mitigating the consequences of
inevitable incidents such as developing integrated, system-wide crisis response arrangements that
considers all stakeholders and supports rapid and coordinated decision-making and
action. COVID-19 also demonstates the challenge of achieving a coordinated system-wide
response and there are several examples of goverments and organisations taking unilateral
action. COVID-19 shows us how quickly events can unfold one day actions (e.g. resistricting travel,
working from home, banning mass events and closing schools) look like costly over-reactions and
a few days later they can be interpreted as ‘too little too late’. In a crisis, solutions can’t be
objectively judged as right or wrong, just better or worse.

Oversight: know who has authority and accountability. Systems of systems problems transcend
traditional borders and boundaries. As such, they also transcend existing systems of rules,
protocols, and practices by which resilience is governed, directed, and controlled. Connected
resilience requires new processes for identifying, prioritizing, managing and monitoring critical risks
across the entire system. It also involves setting clear standards and expectations not only for the
Resilience of individual organizations but for the system as a whole, including a consideration of
how disruption could affect system integrity.

Hindsight: know what has happened. Learning the right lessons from experience and ensuring
that system-wide Resilience is continually improved as the environment changes. It requires
moving beyond the classic 'blame game' and asking 'Whose fault was it?' and understanding that
future Resilience can only be enhanced if the people and organizations are willing and able to
change behavior as a result of experience.

Connected Resilience as a Toolkit
A toolkit can be a set of questions, activities, and tools to assist that help us to imagine, describe,
represent and assess challenges and disruptions and assist in the planning and delivery of
connected Resilience. Such approaches will benefit from trans-disciplinary expertise and multi-
functional practitioner involvement. There are many existing tools that that could be employed.
Many of these tools will be derived from the domains of risk management, business continuity and
crisis management. Systems thinking tools and approaches are also widely used to address
challenging resilience problems. Design thinking is also being employed to solve social issues as
well as to drive innovation. New technologies such as AI and machine learning have the potential
to enhance Resilience by building models that improve decision making, tailor services, and
improve risk management. Modeling tools can be used to examine the system-wide effects and
impacts of ongoing challenges and disruptive events. Probabilistic improvements in Resilience can
be measured within alternate scenarios of the future (e.g., with radical climate change or the
spread of a virus, with global supply chain disruption).

Connected Resilience as a Toolkit
Tools can be implemented on their own, but the greatest value will always come as part of a
comprehensive toolkit for connected Resilience. Such a toolkit can only be designed with a
network of policymakers, practitioners, organisations and academics with a shared interest in
contributing to developing a more coherent agenda around this topic. We suggest that a program
of workshops and roundtables are used to assemble expert opinion and research evidence to
come to a group consensus on the philosophy, methodology, and toolkit for connected Resilience.
All the above adds up to a worrying but also exciting agenda for policymakers, industry leaders,
and academics. There is much to be done to meet the challenge of connected resilience. In my
view, addressing extreme events in a system-centric way constitutes a 'grand challenge' for
everyone involved in the resilience field.

David runs the Organizational Resilience and Change
Leadership (ORaCL) Group at Cranfield University, which
works in three areas of expertise: developing leadership
capability, designing organizational change and building
organizational resilience. We are world-renowned
researchers, impactful educators, engaging speakers, and
trusted advisors to organizations across all sectors.
We are an experienced group of academics and
practitioners from different disciplines and backgrounds
who share a passion for ideas, problem-solving, and
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We act as an information hub and community builder,
connecting an extensive network of external experts,
industry leaders, public officials, and researchers with
interest in organizational resilience, change, and
leadership who want to share experiences, exchange
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Connected resilience a 'grand challenge' for the 21st century

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