Resilience in Practice

Cities have become the central framework to sustain human life. While growth may seem an attractive option, we are well aware that growth alone leads to undesirable cities. Applying resilience as a strategy, rather than growth, is a more effective means to arrive at both economic health and a genuinely flourishing city. The same principle applies to organizations.

Growth vs. Resilience in Cities

A city wanting to improve itself can see that growth is not necessarily a good thing. Growth will fluctuate and end. While a growing city increases resource flows, this can only be temporary. Eventually it will either shrink or run into a resource shortage. With increased size, resource consumption tends to grow in a non-linear fashion, as do overhead costs for infrastructure and management. Ensuring quality of life, safety, and healthy living environments during growth is no trivial task. What will steer that? What is its target? And when growth ends, the challenge becomes how to flourish in either condition, while becoming resilient for the long run.

If the city focuses on resilience rather than growth, the result is, as a necessary consequence, a more diversely mixed, flexible, and dynamic urban landscape. It will have fewer monocultures of office parks and suburbs (which eventually drive traffic congestion out of bounds). It leads to dealing differently with resource management. This costs in investment terms, but pays off in the long run with clean, healthy living conditions and lower utility and maintenance costs.

The resilience-focused city restructures itself to allow for changes in demographics and lifestyles. It shapes itself according to its inherent strengths. When implemented effectively, this leads to better living conditions for all inhabitants, creating a more attractive city, attracting more businesses and investment, which then causes economic growth.

Rather than growth as a driver for economic wellbeing, resilience is used as the driver instead. Economic health is achieved through a different pathway, one that simply regards economic growth as a side-effect of being a great, beautiful, healthy, and future-proof place to live and work.

Creating a resilience policy automatically starts to influence other areas of systemic concern: energy, sanitation, poverty alleviation, infrastructure, cultural programs. It leads to a city in which health is increased through biodiversity growth. It means reduced transport loads through smarter reallocation of workforce distribution. These are win-wins that aid in concert, like instruments in an orchestra, to achieve benefits that drive the larger goal. A resilience-driven strategy maximizes positive benefits on the United Nations SDG program, which helps to acquire investment funds and achieve positive recognition worldwide.

Resilience in Organizations

The same pattern applies to organizations. A company focused on maximizing profit and growth may succeed for a while, until something unexpected happens that it did not prepare for. In our volatile economy, this is not unthinkable. It will be costly to survive the blow.

The most common method used to evade this is trend analysis: predicting the future through historic analysis. Based on these trends, expected outcomes are used as a forecast to strengthen the company where it is deemed weak. But reality does not necessarily follow trends, because trends cannot predict the future. Complex systems cannot be predicted well, and can rapidly change states. This is a poor form of preparing for the future.

If companies focus on resilience as a primary goal instead of growth, an entirely different strategy results. This strategy is based on how to ensure the company can use system dynamics to its advantage given any number of possible situations, by building its resilience to be healthy in the long run.

This may include having a healthy, diverse, and flexible labor force, as opposed to pure efficiency or growth as a focus for HR management. This allows the organization to quickly change its operations and be more resilient to rapid market shifts. Reducing reliance on limited resources creates economic resilience. This can be achieved by switching to bio-based materials instead of fossil resources, taking control of the material cycle, or establishing an industrial symbiosis with supply and delivery partners.

Becoming Unmissable

The deeper strategy is to focus on maximizing the company's value for society and embedding this value, so that the company becomes unmissable for society. A company may invest in better living environments, education, and closed loop resource flows, rather than entering new markets or saving labor costs. When a company becomes unmissable for society, it has a healthier long-term position and a greater human capital base to carry it forward in rough times.

This is something akin to the saying: "If you focus on cost, quality goes down, but if you focus on quality, the costs go down."

Six System Types

Before diving into complex analysis, it helps to recognize what kinds of systems we typically investigate in sustainability work. Six common system types have proven useful:

1. A Neighborhood, City, or Region. Any group of people living together in a geographically defined space. Cities contain all the elements of a complex system: diverse agents, interconnections across scales, emergent behavior, and constant change.
2. An Organization or Company. A group of people working together to achieve a certain goal, defined by an organizational boundary. Particularly suitable for context-dimension analysis.
3. A Product-Service System. The "ecosystem" in which a product or service lives. Ride-sharing services, capsule coffee machines, returnable bottle systems.
4. An Object Life Cycle. From primary energy source, through production and use, to end-of-life. Usually combined with another system view.
5. A Country's Food System. Food is an object that lives in a product-service system, within a life cycle, in a geographic context, driven by many organizations. Among the most complex and interconnected systems we deal with.
6. A Decision-Making System. The process of governance: who decides, on what basis, with what information, and what are the feedback loops.

An important rule of thumb: the system to take under investigation is usually a scale jump above the one defined as the subject. When a particular building is the subject, the system is usually the neighborhood or city. When a company's product is the subject, the system is usually the society in which that product is used.