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Outmaneuvering Complexity

Releasing the adaptive power of human systems

Snippets

Complexity for resilience engineering refers to networks with increasingly extensive and hidden interdependencies. (26:10)

There's always more than one perspective. (27:13)

The view from any single point of observation simultaenously reveals and obscures. (27:31)

There is a trade-off between building resilience and pursuing optimality. (1:09:02)

We're interested in understanding the rules of the adaptive universe and using those to engineer in resilience, to find ways to balance pressure to be optimal and the need to be resilient. (1:10:07)

The adaptive universe

  • emerging comprehensive account of complex adaptive systems that serve human purposes
  • technical foundations emerging
  • multi-role multi-eschleons network (tangled layer network) with
    • extensive, hidden interdependenceis
    • confront surprises that challenge boundaries

Narratives of Resilience and Complexity

Setting: Operating in a network with extensive, hidden interdependencies Antagonist: linear thinking Story: escaping & failing to escape simplifications Driver: surprises and cascades Tensions: Dramatic failures in brittle systems Dead ends: Unintended consequences Hope: where people stretch to outmaneuver complexity Forward: graceful extensibility and sustained adaptability

NASA failure history captures cumulative complexity circa 2000

Creating safety under pressure

NASA in a changing evnrionment under performance demands and resources pressures:

  • drive down the cost of launch
  • shorter, aggressive mission schedules
  • new partners & relatinoships
  • new roles
  • skill erosion
  • heightened public interest

Risk, therebfore, bcomes the "fourth dimension" of project management-treated equally as important as cost and schedule.

Fundamentals of the adaptive universe drive systems

A. Adapative capacity exists before disrupting events call upon that capacity (it is a potential for future adaptive action)

B. One assesses (observes/models/measures) adaptive capacity through its exercise in the anticipation and reaction to past disruptions.

(A) means that the resources that support the potential, prior to visible disrupting events, may not be seen at all since they are not used; or if seen, they will be seen as excess capacity since it is not in use.

Four senses of "resilience"

(This is in a paper that I've read)

  • Rebound from trautmatic event (begs the question)
  • Robust expand base adaptive capacity to handle more, well-modeled disruptions (wastes a word, "robustness"). We fold this into optimality.
  • Graceful extensibility (vs. brittleness)
  • Sustained adptability

Resilience engineering in 6 words

Adapative cycles/histories

empirical, general patterns from collecting, sharing, analyzing stories of resilience and brittleness in action

cycles of [co-]adaptive reverberations across networks and scales

Precarious Present

assess where and how system is brittle/resilient in the face of surprise risk of 3 patterns of adaptive breakdown

project how change produces unintended consequences

Resilient Future?

how to engineer in graceful extensibility and sustained adaptability given trade-offs and change?

Adapative cycles: studies of resilience in action

charting how changes reverberate through multi-role, multi-eschelon networks each response to change by some unit triggers adaptive responses across other units

stalls <-- reverb --> florescence

Reverberation across a tangled layered network of interdependent units: the degree that changes in one area tend to recruit or open up beneficial changes in many other aspects of the network; which opens new opportunities across the network, ...