Systems of Resilience for Purpose Driven Businesses

For any purpose-driven business navigating the uncertainty of a post-pandemic world, there’s one element that will become increasingly solidified: resilience. This is a term that gets bandied around a lot, but what does it actually mean, emotionally, physically, psychologically or on both micro and macro levels?

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There are some core key principles to resilience that can be applied to multiple different scenarios and scaled accordingly. Looking at social-ecological systems (complex, integrated systems in which humans are part of nature) allows us to understand and apply some of the workings of nature and the building blocks of its complex systems to our own, which is tantamount to building sustainable businesses and processes of purpose, that compliment the wider world and its processes at large.

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What is Resilience?

Resilience can be defined as ‘the ability of a social-ecological system to absorb or withstand perturbations or other stressors such that the system remains within the same regime, essentially maintaining its structure and functions. It describes the degree to which the system is capable of self-organisation, learning and adaptation’.

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Resilience is a product of our innate links with the natural world, and the impact that we have on it. At high levels of resilience, a system is more likely to tolerate disturbances without collapsing into a qualitatively different state, controlled by a different set of processes. As applied to social-ecological systems (SES) the added capacity of humans allows for change to be anticipated and alternative future pathways to be influenced.

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At lower levels of resilience, a system is more vulnerable to active stressors and disturbances that it could previously cope with. Passively, gradual changes in environment can also trigger abrupt system responses if they surpass threshold levels. Restoring a system to its previous state can be complex, expensive, and sometimes impossible - especially if it also means a requirement for conditions that existed well before the point of collapse to be restored.

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On a social-ecological level, the 7 principles that have been identified for building resilience and sustaining systems include: maintaining diversity and connectivity, managing slow variables and feedbacks, fostering complex adaptive systems thinking, encouraging learning, broadening participation, and promoting poly-centric governance systems.  

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Adaptive Capacity

Systems with high adaptive capacity are more able to re-configure without significant changes in their crucial functions or services. A consequence of a loss of adaptive capacity is a loss of opportunity and constrained options during periods of re-organisation and renewal.

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However, this is arguably something that can be brought about voluntarily as a result of short term loss for longer term gain of adaptive capacity - as we explored in Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game, which highlights the importance of context when applying any universal principle.

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Adaptive capacity in ecological systems is related to genetic diversity, biological diversity and the heterogeneity of landscape mosaics. In social systems, the existence of institutions and networks that learn and store knowledge and experience, create flexibility in problem solving and balance power among interest groups that play an important role in adaptive capacity.

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Resilience is a key component of enhancing adaptive capacity. Addressing how people respond to change and how societies reorganise following this change requires 4 critical factors: the ability to learn to live with change and uncertainty, nurturing a diversity for resilience, combining different types of knowledge for learning, and creating opportunity for self-organisation towards social-ecological sustainability.

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Transformation

A transformation is a fundamental change which in order to be sustainable, requires radical systemic shifts in values, beliefs, patterns of social behaviour, and multilevel governance and management regimes. It has been described as a process with 3 distinct phases:

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1. preparing for change
2. navigating the transition
3. building resilience of the new trajectory of development
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‘Transformability’ is a similar concept and can be defined as ‘the capacity to create a fundamentally new system (including new state variables, excluding one or more existing state variables, and usually operating at different scales) when ecological, economic and/or social conditions make the existing system untenable’.

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Panarchy

No system can be understood or managed by focusing on it at single scale. All systems exist and function at multiple scales of space, time and social organisation, and the interactions across scales are fundamentally important in determining the dynamics of the system at any particular focal scale. This interacting set of hierarchically structured scales has been termed a "panarchy".

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Panarchy is a framework of nature's rules, hinted at by the name of the Greek god of nature - Pan - whose persona also evokes an image of unpredictable change. Since the essential focus of Panarchy is to rationalise the interplay between change and persistence, between the predictable and unpredictable, pan-archies represent structures that sustain experiments, test its results and allow adaptive evolution.

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The panarchy framework connects adaptive cycles in a nested hierarchy. There are potentially multiple connections between phases of the adaptive cycle at one level and phases at another level. Two significant connections are labeled 'revolt' and 'remember'. The smaller, faster, nested levels invent, experiment and test, while the larger, slower levels stabilise and conserve accumulated memory of system dynamics. In this way, the slower and larger levels set the conditions within which faster and smaller ones function.

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But missing in this representation, is the dynamic of each level which is organised in the four phase cycle of birth, growth and maturation, death and renewal. That cycle is the engine that periodically generates the variability and novelty upon which experimentation depends.

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As a consequence of the periodic, but transient phases of destruction (omega stage) and reorganisation (alpha stage), a system's structure and processes can be reorganised. This reshuffling allows for the establishment of new system configurations and opportunities for the incorporation of exotic and entirely novel entrants into the system. The adaptive cycle explicitly introduces mutations and rearrangements as a periodic process within each hierarchical level in a way that partially isolates the resulting experiments, reducing the risk to the integrity of the whole structure.

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In addition to this creative role, Pan has a destabilising role that is captured in the word panic, directly derived from one facet of his paradoxical personality. His attributes are described in ways that resonate with the attributes of the four phase adaptive cycle; as the creative and motive power of universal nature, the controller and arranger of the four elements- earth, water, air and fire (or perhaps, of K, alpha, r and omega).

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Adaptive Management

Adaptive management identifies uncertainties, and then establishes methodologies to test hypotheses concerning those uncertainties. It uses management as a tool not only to change the system, but as a tool to learn about the system. This approach is very different from a typical management approach of 'informed trial-and-error' which uses the best available knowledge to generate a risk-averse, 'best guess' management strategy, which is then changed as new information modifies the 'best guess'.

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The achievement of these objectives requires an open management process which seeks to include past, present and future stakeholders. Adaptive management needs to at least maintain political openness, but usually it needs to create it. Consequently, adaptive management must be a social as well as scientific process. It must focus on the development of new institutions and institutional strategies just as much as it must focus upon scientific hypotheses and experimental frameworks.

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Adaptive management attempts to use a scientific approach, accompanied by collegial hypotheses testing to build understanding, but this process also aims to enhance institutional flexibility and encourage the formation of the new institutions that are required to use this understanding on a day-to-day basis.

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Appendix

Social-ecological systems - Berkes F. and C. Folke, eds. 1998. Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

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Definition of resilience - Gunderson, L. H. and C. S. Holling, eds. 2002. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Systems of Humans and Nature. Island Press, Washington DC.

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7 principles of resilience - Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems. Ecology and Society 9:5

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Resilience in enhancing adaptive capacity - Folke C., J. Colding, and F. Berkes, 2002. Building resilience for adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems. In: Berkes F., J. Colding, and C. Folke (eds). Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

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