Resilience in the Face of Crisis: Why the Future will be Flexible

What will a post-crash, truly 21st-century world look like? For people 
thinking about global systems (economic, environmental, and social) 
one idea stands out: resilience.


Resilience means the capacity of an entity—such as a person, an 
institution, or a system—to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks, 
and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards. 
Resilience implies both strength and flexibility; a resilient 
structure would bend, but would be hard to break. The term was once 
found largely in psychology textbooks and material science research, but the systems design crowd has, 
over the past few years, enthusiastically adopted the concept.


Designing for resilience takes on particular relevance as we think 
about what happens after the current economic crisis passes. It’s 
easy, in the midst of a chaotic situation, to focus solely on 
immediate issues, but periods in which everyone else is grappling with 
the present are precisely when it’s the most critical to think about 
tomorrow. And while we can’t predict exactly what will happen in the 
future, we can get a pretty good sense of what kinds of drivers will 
shape it—and how we might influence those drivers.


What would a more resilient world look like? There’s no universal 
“resilience theory” just yet, but some of the principles employed by ecologists and designers thinking about 
resilient systems give us a hint.


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