Resilience and Adaptive Systems

We’ve discussed fragility and resilience for a few weeks, but another characteristic of resilient systems deserves additional thought. Resilient systems are noteworthy for their ability to adapt to changing conditions in their organizational and/or natural ecosystems.

Resilience is defined as the ability to absorb disruption and maintain function, so it makes sense that an organization or community’s ability to adapt to disruption is one way it becomes more resilient. These systems also become more resilient when they view themselves as integrated whole systems. Adaptive capacity is measured by its impact on the whole system. When only one part of the system adapts, it can create unintended negative consequences for other parts of the organization.

Organizations adapt more easily when led by the view that everything is integrated. An intuitive understanding of how whole systems interact is a big part of this adaptive capability.  Organizations won’t become more resilient if they adapt only in certain parts, it just creates more problems.

Adaptation and resilience

Adaptive capacity starts with the ability to see disruption coming. Most disruption comes from the dynamic shifts in the larger surrounding system.  When an organization operates as a closed system, it can be caught unprepared because leaders and others aren’t paying attention to things happening outside their organization. If we are only focused inward, we miss seeing what might be coming at us.

Being closed-minded means only tracking feedback that agrees with one’s own worldview. (It can also lead to the Iceberg of Ignorance effect we discussed last week.) Just because we would like our thinking reinforced doesn’t make it so. Feedback can contradict our beliefs and does so constantly. Proactive, effective adaptation requires us to challenge our beliefs. We must open up to what is coming toward us even if we don’t like what we see.

Complex thinking and resilience

Fostering a complex adaptive practice that enhances resilience requires that ability to think systemically. To do this, we need to see all the connectivity in our organizations, in addition to thinking of our organizations and communities as integrated whole systems. This view invites us to step back and see how dynamics flow through the system, and how relationships form and become stronger. We must actively look for blocks to connectivity within the system. We have to understand the patterns of movement in our organizations and find the areas of greatest synergy.

It’s only when we see the system as a whole that we develop adaptive strategies that won’t cause more disruption. COVID was an example of a strategy that attempted to adapt, but failed to view the system as a whole and thus failed. In one corner, we had subject matter experts telling us how the impact of a pandemic could be minimized by using a public health lens and knowledge about how disease spreads in a system. Others were using an economic lens and saw the public health lens as disruptive to commerce. Educators adapted based on their lens regarding remote learning; politicians brought a lens that was based on maintaining support. Unfortunately this sometimes meant pandering to resistance to lockdowns and quarantines designed to slow the spread of the virus.

Resilience and COVID

Our COVID strategy failed because there were few places that integrated all the different lenses and saw the system as a whole. Maybe this was happening in certain think tanks, but unfortunately, the complexity of the system was not represented on the nightly news or in our political dialogue. As of last month, over 1.1. million lives were lost due to COVID, and no one really knows the total impact of the pandemic.

Yesterday, the federal COVID public health emergency officially ended. I’m hoping we are learning to live with disruption more effectively.  Perhaps this hard lesson will help us, as leaders, better understand the connectivity and integration of the whole system. That, in turn, will remind us to shape our adaptive strategies using a whole system, integrated view. This helps us respond more readily to the disruptions that will most certainly be facing us in the future.