Black hawk down ... but not out




I've long been fascinated by the concept of 'resilience', and surprised that so many people evidently misunderstand and misrepresent it ... so please bear with me as I attempt to put the record straight by explaining my fascination.

Resilience is not simply: 

  • Being secure
  • Being strong
  • Recovering effectively, efficiently or simply recovering from incidents
  • Avoiding or mitigating incidents
  • Any specific technical approach or system
  • Any particular human response, action or intent
  • A backstop or ultimate control
  • Heroic acts
  • A construct, something we design and build
  • Something that can simply be mandated or demanded
  • Specific to particular circumstances, situations or applications
It's bigger than any of those - in fact bigger than all of them, combined. Resilience is all of those, and more ...

Resilience is:

  • A general concept, a philosophy, a belief
  • An engineering and architectural approach
  • A business and social imperative
  • An emergent property 
  • Maintaining critical (essential) activities despite potentially disruptive events 
  • Preventing critical (essential) services and processes falling below the minimum acceptable levels
  • Making the best use of whatever resources remain serviceable following incidents
  • Focus and absolute clarity of purpose, with general acceptance of the top priorities
  • Determination, grit, inner resolve, a deep-seated belief that 'we are OK' and 'we will succeed'
  • Complicated, involving many factors, and dynamic
  • Assured capabilities, sufficiently well designed, exercised and proven to be relied upon in a crisis
  • An appreciation that 'tough' challenges are not necessarily 'impossible'
  • An acceptance of necessary changes
  • Accumulating, maintaining, enhancing and protecting sufficient capabilities, reserves and support to cope with almost anything
  • Acknowledging failures, constraints and mistakes
  • Keeping a positive/optimistic frame of mind, despite everything
  • An individual, oranisational and social asset with numerous, valuable benefits between as well as during and following incidents
  • A fundamental strength that can be relied upon

In Hawkes Bay right now, there are clear signs of resilience all around us - like for instance frequent helicopter missions delivering fuel and other supplies to communities isolated by cyclone Gabrielle over a month ago. Severe flooding caused widespread damage to the infrastructure in this region - bridges washed away, roads damaged by slips, communications links broken. Homes were wrecked and lives were lost ... and yet the nation, as a whole, has proven sufficiently resilient to cope with the immediate aftermath, marshall additional resources and plan for the future. The social response is remarkable, involving individuals, teams, communities, organisations, government departments, emergency services, businesses, charities and more coming together to support those in dire need.

Collectively, we are getting through. For much of the region and many - but not all - of us, life is gradually getting back to normal, despite the remaining challenges such as clearing out silt, repairing damaged fences, roads and stock banks, reconnecting/rebuilding the munted electrical and comms infrastructures, installing temporary bridges ...  


Simply getting to and from work, school or the shops is tricky with blocked roads, diversions and traffic jams, but there are supplies and signs of recovery thanks to loads of work going on all around. For the thousands of people evacuated/rescued from flooded properties and now living in temporary accomodation, and for the farms and other businesses decimated by metres of silt, the situation must feel almost hopeless, while the nation does its best to keep those flickers of hope alive.

Thinking forward, we anticipate changes of government policy and planning laws to limit, perhaps even reverse housing and business developments on flood-prone land, and hopefully re-route or further strengthen continuity arrangements for critical infrastructure - like for instance not simply attaching critical power and comms cable to existing bridges, and dealing with the problem of forestry slash washing into the rivers. There are implications for insurance, house, business and property prices, and so on. At a still bigger level, climate change has implications in every aspect of life, globally.

In relation to information security, the desire for resilience informs and guides pretty much all that we do to identify, evaluate and treat information risks. We work hard to reduce the probability and impact of incidents (and events, breaches, crises, disasters ...), all the while knowing that we cannot be entirely certain of fully achieving that in practice, for all sorts of practical reasons and constraints - hence we plan and prepare for failures, and go the extra mile to secure the essentials, essentials such as human safety. For the past week or two exploring the information risk and security aspects of Artificial Intelligence and smart systems, I have noticed an underlying concern about the possibility of AI systems/robots becoming self-directed and acting against the interests of us humans - a longstanding theme in science fiction that is rapidly becoming reality.

Well, that's all from me for now - jobs to do, ongoing repairs to complete, firewood to chop, more thinking required. Catch you later.