Systems Thinking: On Resilience (Quotes)

"The notion that the 'balance of nature' is delicately poised and easily upset is nonsense. Nature is extraordinarily tough and resilient, interlaced with checks and balances, with an astonishing capacity for recovering from disturbances in equilibrium. The formula for survival is not power; it is symbiosis." (Sir Eric Ashby, [Encounter] 1976)

"The more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems", 1996)

"This is a general characteristic of self-organizing systems: they are robust or resilient. This means that they are relatively insensitive to perturbations or errors, and have a strong capacity to restore themselves, unlike most human designed systems." (Francis Heylighen, "The Science of Self-Organization and Adaptivity", 2001)

"Most systems displaying a high degree of tolerance against failures are a common feature: Their functionality is guaranteed by a highly interconnected complex network. A cell's robustness is hidden in its intricate regulatory and metabolic network; society's resilience is rooted in the interwoven social web; the economy's stability is maintained by a delicate network of financial and regulator organizations; an ecosystem's survivability is encoded in a carefully crafted web of species interactions. It seems that nature strives to achieve robustness through interconnectivity. Such universal choice of a network architecture is perhaps more than mere coincidences." (Albert-László Barabási, "Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life", 2002)

"How is it that an ant colony can organize itself to carry out the complex tasks of food gathering and nest building and at the same time exhibit an enormous degree of resilience if disrupted and forced to adapt to changing situations? Natural systems are able not only to survive, but also to adapt and become better suited to their environment, in effect optimizing their behavior over time. They seemingly exhibit collective intelligence, or swarm intelligence as it is called, even without the existence of or the direction provided by a central authority." (Michael J North & Charles M Macal, "Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation", 2007)

"Like resilience, self-organizazion is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability." (Donella H Meadows, "Thinking in Systems: A Primer", 2008)

"[…] our mental models fail to take into account the complications of the real world - at least those ways that one can see from a systems perspective. It is a warning list. Here is where hidden snags lie. You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long-term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays. You are likely to mistreat, misdesign, or misread systems if you don’t respect their properties of resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy." (Donella H Meadows,"Thinking in Systems: A Primer", 2008)

"Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better." (Nassim N Taleb, "Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder", 2012)

"Complexity demands resilience, and that's what panarchy offers. Resilience in the face of complexity is a challenge even when you apply rigorous intelligence and integrity to develop a coherent and flexible strategy." (Robert D Steele, "The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust", 2012)

"Stability is often defined as a resilient system that keeps processing transactions, even if transient impulses (rapid shocks to the system), persistent stresses (force applied to the system over an extended period), or component failures disrupt normal processing." (Michael Hüttermann et al, "DevOps for Developers", 2013)