At this precise moment, it’s not efficient to make back ups of all your digital files and then figure out the syncing between your cloud-based files and your desktop, and then make sure you clean up old stuff in both places, and keep your file structure the same etc etc.
Until something goes wrong.
Then suddenly, you seem brilliant. If your laptop dies, you can still access everything in the cloud! Hurrah! All is not lost. And if the internet is down, you can keep hustling through your to-do list offline on your laptop. Genius. So smart and efficient you are.
But it’s always tempting to put off the backup system until later, because right now you need to do stuff. You’ve got a client deliverable due 30 minutes ago, and emails you need to answer, and a meeting to change on your calendar etc etc. Taking time to sync or backup your files is never efficient in the moment. It’s all about a trade-off between being efficient now, and being able to be efficient (or even functional at all) later if things go wrong.
We face the same imperative with operating in a changing climate. We’ve always faced threats from severe weather and extreme events of course - from earthquakes to cyber attacks to floods, there has always been a measure of risk management and planning that accompanies business and government activities.
But now, we’re faced with increased risk from climate extremes - in more places, more frequently, and with greater intensity.
The trade-offs are changing. Here are some strategies for building resilience that are being used in our cities and companies right now in building resilience:
Redundancy. This is the example above. Two sets of the same files in different places each of which you can get to in different circumstances. Sometimes this is time-inefficient, but a lot of times it’s cost-inefficient. If you are say, a distribution center, and you need to get products to people, you might need to build a second distribution center some distance away that can take over more of the fullfilment if your initial center goes offline, or if flooding cuts off transportation routes. This can get expensive, but perhaps less expensive than not being able to fill thousands of orders during an extreme event.
Armoring. This could involve hard infrastructure - building a levee higher so flooding is less likely, or ‘soft’ and natural infrastructure like reinforcing marshland or sand dunes to absorb coastal storm surge. Supporting a complex natural process like marshland replenishment is not efficient in the short-term and can take many years to be effective, but it’s far more efficient in the long-term than letting a hurricane wipe out the coastline.
Risk spreading or ‘hedging’. Insurance is one example of risk spreading. You can pay up front for someone to cover your losses in an unexpected event. You can also do this by diversifying a business or a farm. If you grow only one type of corn and it turns out not to be very drought tolerant, you could lose it all in a dry year. Or you could plant several types of corn - disease tolerant, drought-tolerant, and wet-tolerant varieties. Plus some potatoes, soybeans, or a winter wheat. You likely won’t ever get a maximum yield (which would be more efficient in a statistically average year), but you also aren’t likely to have significant failure.
Adjustment or Adaptation. In Hurricane Matthew (2016), over 700 drainage pipes were washed out in North Carolina, causing over 2000 roads to need repairing, including a significant section of Interstate 95. Hurricane Florence, a couple of years later, showed that this was no one-off event. I95 is now being raised in several places so that in a similar event, it will no longer flood. Cheap? No. But for a main transportation artery to be out of commission in a heavily populated area could grind commerce and social services to a halt. It’s more efficient in the long-term to reduce the likelihood of disruption.
Rapid Recovery. One of my favorite measures of a community’s resilience is the Waffle House Index. How quickly a 24/7 Waffle House can get back open, either with a limited or a full menu, can help gauge how much disruption a community is really experiencing. When an impact is impossible or very expensive to prevent, sometimes the best approach is to focus on getting back up and running quickly. For example, in order to prevent wind-related power disruptions, we’d have to bury all the cabling - very expensive. It’s less costly to divert utility crews from all over the country to an affected area so that power can be restored quickly.
Rainy Day Funds. A little cash in the bank is a useful measure of resilience for all of us, including a city or a company. Hardly anything beats being able to keep paychecks flowing while mopping up the mess in other areas. But you can also think of it this way - a strong community is one that has lower levels of inequality, higher metrics of health, low poverty, good schools, strong community institutions etc. This is also a rainy day fund - it is an existing base of ongoing strength and health. We can draw on those social and health reserves when in need.
However, in my mind there are two things that exceed all the others in building resilience:
Social cohesion, and mindset.
It’s true for our personal resilience as well as for our cities and companies. For example, if you broke your leg, who are the people you would rely on and what attitude would you have about it all? The answer to both parts of that could dramatically impact your healing.
The same is true for a town or a company: If you have a culture of collaborative support and a company mindset that doesn’t turn setbacks into catastrophes, and instead looks for innovation or opportunity to revise processes or products, then your company is likely to survive and may even thrive. Think of the way that some restaurants hopped right over to delivery or outdoor dining during Covid lockdowns. The organizations that could rethink their assumptions, and draft all their people into creating a new way of delivering value, thrived.
We all need resilience, and we need to be able to tap into it collectively, in our workplaces, and in our homes and selves.
All of these strategies are useful, but who we surround ourselves with, and whether we approach a challenge as a disaster or as an invitation, matters.
I feel strongly that our next chapter will be written most efficiently and effectively by those who are genuinely collaborative, and who believe that healing and improvement are possible, and who therefore dive into the challenge to seek new ways of delivering value.