Adaptability is the capacity of actors to manage the resilience of a system

Adaptability describes the capacity of actors to manage the resilience of a system by influencing “the system’s trajectory (relative to a threshold) and the positions of thresholds.”[1]

If you think of a system as a ball moving around in a basin of attraction, then managing for resilience is about understanding how the ball is moving and what forces shape the basin. The threshold is the lip of the basin leading into an alternate basin where the rules change. The capacity of the actors in the system to manage resilience is described as adaptability. This might be by moving thresholds, moving the current state of the system away from a threshold, or making a threshold more difficult to reach. … If the system is stuck in an undesirable basin of attraction then it might be that it’s impossible or too expensive to manage the threshold or the system’s trajectory. In such cases it might be more appropriate to consider transforming the very nature of the system—redefining the system by introducing new state variables.[2]

Transforming the very nature of the system (i.e., creating a new system) is referred to as Transformability.

#systems #resilience

See also:

  1. Resilience Thinking – Walker and Salt (2012), ch. 5, § “Key Points on Resilience Thinking.” ↩︎

  2. Ibid., ch. 3, § “Slow Variables.” ↩︎