Resilience Thinking embraces the reality that things change

Change can be stressful, as it can trigger ambiguity aversion, loss aversion, fear instinct, negativity bias and other uncomfortable psychological experiences. Consequently, the default human tendency is to maintain systems as they are (the status quo bias) which leads to (or may be the result of) motivated reasoning, frozen thinking, and phenomenally persistent paradigms. By contrast, Resilience Thinking embraces the reality that change is a constant reality.

At the heart of resilience thinking is a very simple notion—things change—and to ignore or resist this change is to increase our vulnerability and forego emerging opportunities. In so doing, we limit our options.[1]

Humans “are great short-term optimizers. But we’re not so good over longer timeframes. That requires systems thinking. Resilience thinking is systems thinking.”[2] Thus, Resilience Thinking is Systems Thinking applied to the management of social-ecological systems as they change over time.

Business as usual is about increasing efficiency and optimizing performance of the parts of social-ecological systems that deliver defined benefits, but fails to acknowledge secondary effects and feedbacks that cause changes (sometimes irreversible changes) in the bigger system, including changes to unrecognized benefits. While increasing efficiency is important for economic viability, when undertaken without considering the broader system’s response it will not lead to sustainability; it can lead to economic collapse. Resilience thinking is about understanding and engaging with a changing world. By understanding how and why the system as a whole is changing, we are better placed to build a capacity to work with change, as opposed to being a victim of it.[3]

A corollary observation is that “we are not so good at responding to things that change slowly. In part this is because we don’t notice them and in part it’s because often there seems little we can do about them.”[4]

#systems #resilience

See also:

  1. Resilience Thinking – Walker and Salt (2012), ch. 1, § “Embracing Change—The Heart of Resilience.” ↩︎

  2. Ibid., ch. 2, § “A System’s Mind Space.” ↩︎

  3. Ibid., ch. 1, § “Key Points on Resilience Thinking.” ↩︎

  4. Ibid., ch. 1, § “Embracing Change—The Heart of Resilience.” ↩︎