Building Trust in Unpredictable Systems: The Case for Resilience

摘要

This paper gives an overview of new research in resilience that seems to offer important clues for building security and trust in complex, unpredictable systems. Many technologies and human processes are so complex that specific events are not predictable, engendering many surprises. Resilience strategies are defined as those that allow a system to bounce back from a surprise. Resilience is differentiated from a strategy for resistance or robustness, where the goal would be to keep out danger and avoid the surprise. Resilience is thus useful where it is not possible to build resistance. The paper includes specific recommendations for building resilience strategies useful for managing systems with high uncertainty. Many people in business and government circles are starting to talk about managing systems they cannot predict. Some people have gone so far as to declare that people who pretend to control complex systems actually make those systems more insecure. There is increasing evidence that an adaptive management strategy that acknowledges complexity and uncertainty is more effective than a rigid command-and-control strategy, particularly in organizations that must deal with unpredictable events like natural disasters and terrorism. But complex organizations and technologies also deal with uncertainty caused by many layers of interacting systems. This paper will look at the strategies developed in a variety of unpredictable environments, that is, systems subject to surprise. Some of these surprises bring new opportunities and some of them bring new dangers—some are types of surprises are knowable in advance and others are not. To the extent that any business attempts to serve individuals and organizations in unpredictable environments, it must take this reality into account.