Perspectives on resilience

James Nachbaur, PhD

Presented March 1, 2017 at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)

Winter Energy and Environment Program Advisory and Sector Council Meetings

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“Resilience” in common usage

Think of an organization or institution that has functioned successfully for 100 years or longer.

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Coming up

Defining resilience.

Why “resilience thinking” requires “complex systems thinking.”

Systems we need to think about are complex systems made up of subsystems and involving multiple levels of components.

Development of more resilient institutions.

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Definitions

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Accommodate; don’t break down or drift towards failure

“The ability to accommodate change, conflict, disturbance, without breaking down, without catastrophic failure.”

Resilience engineering: new directions for measuring and maintaining safety in complex systems (Dekker et al.)

“Ability of a social system (society, community, organization) to react and adapt to abrupt challenges (internal or external) and/or to avoid gradually drifting along destructive slippery slopes.”

Institutional resilience and economic systems: lessons from Elinor Ostrom’s Work (Aligica and Tarko)

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Change,but don’t lose your identity

“Capacity to cope with shocks and undergo change while retaining essentially the same structure and function.”

Resilience, adaptability, and transformability in the Goulburn-Broken catchment, Australia (Walker et al.)

“A dynamic concept focusing on how to persist with change, how to evolve with change.”

Resilience (Folke)

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Handle surprises

“A system is resilient if it can adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following events (changes, disturbances, and opportunities), and thereby sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.”

Resilience engineering (Hollnagel)

“Handle disruptions and variations that fall outside of the base mechanisms/model for being adaptive as defined in that system.”

Essential characteristics of resilience (Woods)

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Different takes on “resilience”

• Potential bad things or also opportunities?– From outside or also from within? – Planned for or also surprises?

• Reactive or proactive?• Clear about something persisting unchanged?

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Different takes on “resilience”

• Stability: do we expect the system to return to a past “steady” state or reach a new configuration?–Are we worried that it could become

impossible to get the system back to a good configuration?–Are we worried about slowly drifting

into poor performance?

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Complexity

Stability is for simple systems.

Resilience relates to complex systems where stability may not be desirable or possible.

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Resilience depends on components and context

• Complex systems often contain subsystems and are parts of larger systems.– E.g. Solar panel, electric vehicle, distribution, transmission,

generation.– E.g. California ISO, California Legislature, FERC, President, Congress.– E.g. staff, mangers, CEO, board, shareholders, regulators.– E.g. business unit, utility, business association, industry, government

institutions, buyers/sellers, economy, planet.

• Mechanical and social relationships among units are messy but not random.– Actions at one level limit or enable resilience or change at other

levels.– Actions affect units “downward” and “upward.”

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Rules: at different levels

People making resilience-related choices are affected by rules at many levels. (Rules here means formal rules, norms, informal guidance, etc.)– E.g. federal, state, local, RTO/ISO, financial, etc.

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Rules: for how to change rules

May be rules for:• Doing a task. • Changing how a task is done.• Changing the rules those choices are made in.• And so on.– E.g. Congress affects FERC, FERC rules affect how

ISOs/RTOs change their rules, ISO/RTO rules affect utilities, utilities affect consumers.

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Complex systems can help

Ideally, our systems of rules (institutions) have become complex to enable society to solve more problems more effectively. Complex social systems can be an asset for resilience. • Ideally, benefits can include: independence, checks

and balances, experimentation, learning, evolution, specialization, and backstops.

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Complex behaviors can help

Resilience theorists identify levels of behavior that complex systems can have. E.g.:

1. ‘Reacting appropriately and therefore sustaining system existence.’

2. ‘Learning from what has happened to adjust both what the system looks for and what it does.’

3. ‘Managing something before it happens by analyzing developments in the world and the system preparing itself.’

4. ‘Anticipating that includes the system itself–not only in the sense of monitoring itself or learning about itself, but considering how the world responds or changes when the system makes changes, how these responses may affect the changes, and so on.’ (Hollnagel)

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But complexity can make it harder to manage complexity

Dynamics may be impossible to predict. • Threats and opportunities can emerge in surprising ways.• Impacts can be huge.

Rules in use are hard to identify and improve on. • Even the tangles of rules that make up the safety system that may

have been “designed (and has evolved) to keep the organization’s risk under control can make the functioning and malfunctioning of that organization more opaque.”

Drifting into failure: complexity theory and the management of risk (Dekker)

Rules at one level may be hard to change due to rules at a higher level. Conversely, planning may be hard if higher-level rules change too fast.

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Complex systems: not machines; behavior can’t be fully understood

“Mechanistic thinking about failures... means going down and in.

Understanding... comes from breaking open the system, diving down, finding the parts, and identifying which ones were broken...

In contrast, systems thinking about failures means going up and out.

Understanding comes from seeing how the system is configured in a larger network of other systems, of tracing the relationships with those, and how those spread out to affect, and be affected by, factors that lie far away in time and space from the moment things went wrong.” (Dekker)

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Some questions

• What external uncertainties or risks ultimately limit your resilience?

• Could you improve your resilience by changing something about an external group you interact with or an external rule you have to follow?

• Would that change be a clear win-win?

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Development of more resilient institutions

Each complex system is unique so any suggestions must be high-level.

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Cultivate abilities that enable resilience

Respond. “Knowing what to do, or being able to respond to regular and irregular changes, disturbances, and opportunities by activating prepared actions or by adjusting current mode of functioning.”

Monitor. “Knowing what to look for, or being able to monitor that which is or could seriously affect the system’s performance in the near term – positively or negatively. The monitoring must cover the system’s own performance as well as what happens in the environment.”

Learn. “Knowing what has happened, or being able to learn from experience, in particular to learn the right lessons from the right experience.”

Anticipate. “Knowing what to expect, or being able to anticipate developments further into the future, such as potential disruptions, novel demands or constraints, new opportunities, or changing operating conditions.” Resilience analysis grid (Hollnagel)

These abilities are limited.

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Approach resilience-related tradeoffs carefully

• Resilience to x versus:– Resilience to y.– Other performance measures (quality, cost, speed, etc.)

• Small fixes (fixes at one level) to small problems can reduce the pressure for big fixes (at a higher level). – Thus, if problems get big, the small fixes can prove inadequate and

the big fixes may not have been made.• Pressure to tighten slack.

– But it’s generally impossible to resiliently get faster, better, and cheaper.

• It’s important to accept these tradeoffs and other conflicts will persist. Don’t expect permanent solutions.

Increased resilience is not free.

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Some more questions to ask

Can the system be made to respond, monitor, learn, and anticipate better?

Can we adjust assumptions or worldviews that may limit change?

Can ways to address conflicts and tradeoffs be improved?

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Wrapping up

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Things I find important

• Accept provisional solutions.• Accept resilience has social aspects. • Support institutional diversity, contestation, and outside

perspectives.– Support regulators’ ability to evolve along with you.

• Look for rules that limit or enable resilience. – Consider trying to change rules set above or below you.

• Learn from successes and failures in other domains.• Beware of changes you can’t undo and of thresholds.• Check your model (vision) of how you believe you are

keeping performance resilient.

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Closing quote

“Resilience is not about reducing negatives (incidents, errors, violations).

It’s about identifying and then enhancing the positive capabilities of people and organizations that allow them to adapt effectively and safely under pressure.” (Dekker et al.)

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SourcesAligica and Tarko (2014). Institutional Resilience and Economic Systems: Lessons from Elinor Ostrom’s Work. In Comparative Economic Studies.Dekker (2013). Drifting into failure: Complexity theory and the management of risk. In Chaos and Complexity Theory for management: Nonlinear Dynamics. Dekker, Hollnagel, Woods, and Cook (2008). Resilience Engineering: New directions for measuring and maintaining safety in complex systems. Folke (2016). Resilience. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science.Hollnagel (2015). RAG – Resilience Analysis Grid. Online at http://erikhollnagel.com/onewebmedia/RAG%20Outline%20V2.pdf. Hollnagel. Resilience Engineering. Online at http://erikhollnagel.com/ideas/resilience-engineering.html. Nachbaur, Feygina, Lipkowitz, and Karwat (2017). Climate Change Resilience: Governance and Reforms. Online at http://cspo.org/research/climate-change-resilience-governance-and-reforms/. Walker, Abel, Anderies, and Ryan (2009). Resilience, adaptability, and transformability in the Goulburn-Broken Catchment, Australia. In Ecology and Society.Woods (2006). Essential Characteristics of Resilience. In Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts.