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Resilience as often described can seem like a more complex form of business continuity planning, a new take on ecological sustainability, or some new mantra for leadership and personal development. Historically, all of the often described contexts for resilience were basically about the ability of people, natural complex adaptive systems or organizations to absorb and rebound from some type of external induced shock to return to some previously known operating condition.
Over time, the more advanced advocates and observers of resilience in the real world noticed that the ability to sustainably transform to a state or capability not previously known may well be the most important and interesting feature as we rush headlong into increasing complexity and a profound sense of accelerating change.
Many of the systemic challenges and opportunities that we currently face, and certainly those that on our short term horizon, will require a degree of transmutational alchemy not easily contemplated for fear of what other unanticipated changes would be provoked. Many of the systemic risks that we currently face all possess a certain "unchartered frontier" aspect also referred to as submerged risks. The unseen systemic linkages experienced in the global economic system since October 2008 provide many salient examples of the way in which tipping points can be rapidly breached and can cascade additional disruptive events across networks and systems with very little, or no warning. Events precipitated in one systemic risk domain can also cascade with no warning into other multiple risk domains creating even more intensified systemic risk linkages and causal networks of unanticipated consequence.
Human civilization is now living at the doorstep of this risk threshold with very thin adaptive capacity at the biosphere level of being a complex adaptive system. In other words, civilization has reached the tipping point of disequilibrium or unsustainability which confounds tranditional problem solving approaches. As one way to think about our species dilemma, there are no effiicient enzymes at the planetary level to properly monitor and regulate metabolic functioning of the species interacting with all other organic life at the planetary somatic whole.
When thought of in the proper context, resilience is as much about being enabled to seek out and embrace opportunities as being able to proactively manage risks or respond confidently to life altering disruptive events.
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