Book Notes — FutureProof: How to Build Resilience in an Uncertain World

Came across this delightful book while doing research on resilience in adjacent fields. Two ways this book is very different from canonical literature in resilience.

One, it defocuses from “disaster porn”, and systemically analyzes ‘catastrophes as an unavoidable trend’. Less narrative, more objective.

Two, borrowing from the principle of “AntiFragile”, or as it is academically referred to as ‘Hormesis’, this book passionately proposes the “Bouncing Forward” model of resilience. i.e., after each significant event, our system should not just be back to where it was, but should be significantly better than before.

Some ideas, opinions and tips I got from the book -

• During peacetime, don’t study the last war.
• Outlier events are statistically marginalized but economically oversized.
• “New Normals” cannot be derived from Normal curves.
• Two aspects of resilience engineering -

Extreme Events

Slow Burn stresses (e.g., Climate Change)

• We live in Risk society, otherwise known as Anthropocene, i.e., the age of Resilience. Our approaches to those problems are still coupled with models that assess probability, impact and “insurance premiums” (how much we should spend on it). The challenge with such problems, however, is they are not only increasingly unpredictable, but they are barely computable. i.e., we are trained to judge risk based on calculation of past patterns, but it should be made based on beliefs about an uncertain future.
• ‘Tyranny of the Present’ — future is expressed in conventional risk management (looking backwards) rather than, say, Bayesian beliefs (looking forward).
• Local disasters have increasingly more global impact. Think of Wuhan and the cascading doom.
• In the present anthropocene era, we humans run everything at planetary scale. This resulted in a world of ‘persistent uncertainty’.
• “Bouncing Forward” is essentially reaching the new normal and putting in place plans for coping with risks that cannot be accurately predicted in advance.
• ‘Risk is the schema for society when it is no longer defined by religion, tradition or superior power of nature’.
• The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was the first event where our thinking toward catastrophic events shifted from ‘acts of god’ to ‘human intervention’.
• Great civilizations essentially lived in the past and used the ideas of fate, luck and will of the gods. We substituted all that with risk. Origin of the word “fear” is from “foer” — a feeling of danger and reverence for God.
• Root of the word ‘risk’ is Italian ‘risicare’ — to dare. I.e., a choice rather than a fate.
• Risk = Consequence X Likelihood. Risk is randomness with knowable probabilities, Uncertainty is randomness with unknowable probabilities.
• Resilience comes from Latin ‘resilire’ — to leap back. Adapt and recover are resilience concepts, withstand and respond to are risk concepts.
• “Sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage in an imbalance world”.
• Resilience begins with the assumption that certain problems cannot be prevented, ring-fenced, solved or cured in conventional ways.
• In our present world, structures and systems have little redundancy and much interconnectedness. So they fail completely if one part does not perform as intended.
• “Fracture Criticality” has four characteristics -

Lack of redundancy

Interconnectedness

Efficiency, and

High Sensitivity to Stress

• Resilience is “replace such structures with designs that are less connected, less efficient”.
• Typically, hazard mitigation strategies for infrastructure have generally addressed first-order effects.
• Risk focuses on assessing individual system components for their potential to degrade the system based on past experiences. Resilience focuses increased amounts of attention on unknown and unexpected disruption in the future. Fundamentally, risk and resilience assess the future — in particular the ideas of uncertainty — differently. Low probability, high impact risks that tend to be largely ignored by conventional risk planning are food of resilience.
• Resilience seeks to offer a soft landing for the system, while risk seeks to harden a vulnerable component based upon a snapshot in time.
• Change the question from ‘Can we prevent it’ to ‘Are we prepared’
• We live in a VUCA world — volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity together bring inevitable chaos.
• Organizational Resilience 2x2 Matrix -

Defensive (stopping bad things) vs. progressive (doing good things)

Consistency (standard routines) vs. flexibility (agile adaptation)

• Resilience is thus all about encouraging building of buffers against future uncertainty.
• Resilience should not just be promoted within a single, closed system but across multiple networks, taking a ‘system of systems’ view.

‘If rebuilding in the same palace once dared lightning to strike twice, it now tempts a more certain fate’.