Systemic Potentials for Resilient Performance

Abstract

Resilience is not a unitary system quality, even though it often is treated as such. A system cannot be, and cannot have resilience, but a system can perform in a way that is resilient. Resilient performance can be understood as an ongoing condition in which problems are momentarily under control due to compensating changes. This is essential for environments where unexpected and unpredictable changes can emerge and where their consequences can propagate rapidly. To perform resiliently, a system must have the potentials to respond, to monitor, to learn, and to anticipate. The chapter describes how the four potentials can be systematically assessed and how such assessments make it possible to manage them, hence the overall resilient performance of the system.