Managing Resilience

Abstract

Given what you’ve learned about the system, given your assessment of real or suspected thresholds, the system’s general coping ability, and capacity for transformation—so what? What should you do about it, and what options are available to meet these concerns? A resilience approach to management involves the development of an adaptive management and an adaptive policy (governance) program in which the interventions are considered experiments that test the assumptions that gave rise to them. Don’t just start with one or two immediate interventions that seem most obvious. It is important to consider the full set of possible interventions and to develop them into a logical sequenced program. Some of the interventions will be about dealing with specific thresholds. Some will be about attempting to initiate necessary transformations. Others will be about changing how decisions are made and how management handles uncertainty (general resilience).