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Two days after this summer's rush-hour collapse of the I-35W bridge, I found myself standing along the southern bank of the Mississippi River, looking out on the twisted wreckage of what had been a major transportation lifeline for the Twin Cities. As a homeland security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a recent book on catastrophic disasters, I had been enlisted by CNN to visit the site to help put this tragedy into a wider context. I had made a similar visit six years before to the still smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers. Both experiences were deeply sobering, but what I found particularly painful and unsettling about the I-35W site was that it was a catastrophe of our own making.
If we continue to neglect the aging infrastructure bequeathed to us by earlier generations, tragedies of our own making will become commonplace events in the 21st Century. We also can count on a growing number of natural disasters, particularly those created by wind and water. Aided by climate change, what are now forecast to be 100-year storm events will likely become 10-year storms by 2050. (1) And no matter how badly we wish otherwise, terrorist attacks on U.S. soil will not always be prevented.
These trends suggest that we should make building technical, economic, social, and organizational resilience a top public policy priority at all levels of government. This is not happening for two straightforward reasons. First, the attention of the federal government--and the majority of the resources Washington has available for discretionary spending--have been focused on national security efforts outside our borders. Since 9/11, the war on terrorism has been the Bush administration's top priority. Because the strategy for waging that war has been built upon the premise that "the only defense is a good offense," our domestic vulnerability to man-made and natural disaster has received only sporadic attention, as the response to Hurricane Katrina highlighted. Second, the resiliency agenda requires stepped-up public investments at the state and local levels, but cash-strapped governors and mayors are predictably reluctant to take on a new set of responsibilities when they can barely pay for the ones they already have.
At the heart of the problem is that Americans and their elected leaders have been viewing the resilience imperative the wrong way Some are fatalistic about catastrophic events and dismiss as futile any serious effort to anticipate and cope with disasters. Others see preparing for adversity as a trade off between using limited resources to deal with pressing current needs, on the one hand, and buying down risk on contingencies that may never actually materialize on the other. Then there are those reflexive optimists who are averse to dedicating any time or energy contemplating what can and should be done to prepare for future bumps in the road. Their creed is "Don't Worry Be Happy."
But building a more resilient nation is not about making losing wagers against improbable risks. Instead it is about buying low-cost insurance in advance of foreseeable, inevitable, and consequential events. It is also not about surrendering to pessimism. This is because the process of constructing more resilient communities makes them more productive, more innovative, and more desirable places to live and work.
WHAT IS RESILIENCE?
Yossi Sheffi, a professor of engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, invoked the concept of resilience in his path-breaking book, The Resilient Enterprise (MIT Press, 2005). Resilience, he points out, is a concept used in the material sciences and represents "the ability of a material to recover its original shape following a deformation" Professor Sheffi posits that resilient enterprises are those that can quickly "return to their normal performance level following a high-impact/low-probability disruption. (2) He then provides a number of examples of how resilient organizations prosper while those that treat preparedness as an afterthought wither on the vine.
Sheffi's exhibit A is the tale of two Scandinavian cell phone giants, Nokia and Ericsson, which both found themselves on the receiving end of bad news from their most important silicon chip supplier. On March 17, 2006, a fire caused by a lightning strike led to the shutdown of a large semiconductor fabrication plant in New Mexico owned by Philips, the Dutch electronics conglomerate. Ericsson took the news in stride, assuming the factory would be up and running in short order. Nokia responded to the event as something that might dramatically disrupt its ability to produce four million handsets at a time when the cell phone industry was booming. It turned out that the Nokia executives were right to be worried because it took several months for Philips to get its plant online again. But in a matter of a few weeks, Nokia managed to successfully track down other chip suppliers and was able to buy virtually all the remaining global supply to keep their production lines from idling. When the dust finally cleared, Ericsson reported a loss of more than $2 billion, while Nokia saw its global share of the handset market increase from 27 to 30 percent within six months of the fire. What distinguishes the fate of the two companies is that Nokia had a company culture that was poised to confront adversity and turn it into opportunity. The managers at Ericsson on the other hand were reluctant to acknowledge they were facing a crisis until it was too late to do much about it.
Sheffi's case for the upside of investing in resilience has been substantiated by the well-respected Council on Competitiveness, a Washington-based nonprofit. A June 2007 report entitled "The Resilient Economy: Integrating Competitiveness and Security" has two key observations:
* Globalization, technological complexity, interdependence, terrorism, climate and energy volatility, and pandemic potential are increasing the level of risk that societies and organizations now face. Risks also are increasingly interrelated; disruptions in one area can cascade in multiple directions.
* The ability to manage emerging risk, anticipate interactions between different types of risk, and bounce back from disruption will be a competitive differentiator for companies and countries alike in the 21st century. (3)
According to the Council on Competitiveness, a resilient organization is one that possesses the means "to survive, adapt, evolve, and grow in the face of turbulent change. The Resilient Enterprise is risk intelligent, flexible and agile." (4) Those organizations that have this capability will see their competitive position and profitability improve both prior to and following a disaster. They perform well even before a crisis arises because a resilient enterprise is one that is capable of learning and adapting. This nimbleness positions them nicely to manage the daily rough and tumble of the global marketplace. Organizations adept at operational risk management also can help communities to rebound when disasters strike. For example, WalMart was able to bring 70 percent of its stores in the Gulf States back into operation within 48 hours of Hurricane Katrina coming ashore, providing many of the critical supplies everyday citizens, small business, and government agencies needed to get back on their feet. (5)
Beyond the interest resilience is garnering in the economic and commercial realm, it has been receiving fresh scrutiny within the engineering, science, and sociology disciplines as well. Based on their survey of the literature, Kathleen Tierney and Michel Bruneau point to two unifying threads that run through the disciplinary treatments of resilience. One is to highlight that resilience involves inherent strength; that is, the ability of a system to keep performing in the face of shocks placed upon it. Second, resilience involves the ability to be flexible and adaptable in the aftermath of a disruptive event. In other words, resilient systems both reduce the probability of failure as well as the consequences of failure. Tierney and Bruneau along with a group of researchers affiliated with the University of Buffalo's Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research have developed an "R4" framework of resilience:
* Robustness--the ability of systems, system elements, and other units of analysis to withstand disaster forces without significant degradation or loss of performance;
* Redundancy--the extent to which systems, system elements, or other units are substitutable, that is, capable of satisfying functional requirements, if significant degradation or loss of functionality occurs;
* Resourcefulness--the ability to diagnose and prioritize problems and to initiate solutions by identifying and mobilizing material, monetary, informational, technological, and human resources; and
* Rapidity--the capacity to restore functionality in a timely way, containing losses and avoiding disruptions. (6)
In short, resilience is a powerful concept that should be adopted to serve as an overarching framework for guiding public and private efforts aimed at improving homeland security, critical infrastructure protection, emergency preparedness, and business continuity. It works best when it is built or baked into the systems and processes that we most value in much the same way as organizations have benefited by investing in safety management and total quality management. It involves an ongoing and organic process that is open and inclusive. Not only will the direct benefits exceed the costs, the indirect benefit of an enterprise or community that can effectively manage risk is it will be a place where people and businesses will want to locate. Alternatively, an organization or region that is incapacitated in the face of adversity will lose customers, businesses, and residents especially should disruptive events become more frequent and consequential.
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