Resilience
Resilience is the ability to survive with continuity of identity over time.
Concept
Resilience is a well-studied concept across numerous disciplines. This is not the space to go into any extensive literature review, but some common catch phrases tend to be around "bouncing back" or implying some kind of static same-ness during times of change and transformation.
Whereas such ideas might feel fairly tempting when dealing with some of the less orderly elements of existence, the Cynefin definition of resilience takes a different tack. In complex adaptive sytems - where change and unpredictability are inherent - resilience becomes about the capacity of the system to sustain identity, coherence, and function under stress, especially when the future is uncertain.
To paraphrase from the EU Fieldguide: “Resilience is not the ability to withstand shock and return to the previous state, but the ability to adapt and evolve into a better one.” As with many concepts in complexity, a seeming paradox ensues in the use of language. How might we retain coherence whilst also evolving and adapting? The answer is of course more fluid. Identity is itself an absrract concept, one that can be difficult to pinpoint or explain more explicitly, yet also can be seen as an emergent property of systems: as individuals, collectives and broader systemic patterns interact and form patterns of coherence over time.
In Cynefin-speak, and complex adaptive systems theory, resilience emerges from the interactions and interdependencies in a system, not from top-down control.
Cynefin domains
Defining and working with ideas around resilience necessitates an honest understanding of where we are, before we can think about where we want to be. To give a crude example, we might ask an organisation or individual to be "more resilient" during times of stress, offering resilience training exercises or mindfulness activities. However there are likely a multitude of modulating factors at play in our environments and experiences that impact our relative capacities to affect and be affected by our broader worlds.
When tackling resilience in system/s or organisations, a Cynefin Three Points mapping exercise might be a good place to start.
- In the complicated domain, the task might be to build robustness through expertise and technical planning. For example, a complicated engineering system might have back-up systems in place should something go wrong, or different experts on hand with a clear process around risk assessment.
- In chaotic situations, resilience best starts with action followed by a monitoring of responses. For example, the NZ president during Covid shut everything down early, in order to prevent internal infections and give her more options moving forward.
- In the complex domain, resilience is best cultivated by diversifying response capacities, increasing connectivity across silos, and enabling distributed decision-making.
Resilience & risk
In recent years, both corporations and governments have begun shifting their strategic focus from robustness—preventing failure at all costs—to resilience, which emphasises early detection, rapid recovery, and the capacity to exploit unexpected opportunities. Traditional risk models have relied on Gaussian distributions (bell curves), where most events fall within predictable ranges, and outliers—so-called “black swan” events—are considered extremely rare. However, Snowden points out that many real-world phenomena follow Pareto (power law) distributions, where so-called rare events actually occur more frequently than assumed. This “fat tail” dynamic challenges conventional planning, demanding a new strategy: rather than attempting to prevent all failures, we must accept failure as inevitable and learn to recover quickly and adapt.
This shift has major implications for how we approach uncertainty and decision-making. In domains governed by Gaussian distributions, traditional methods like probability assessments, scenario planning, and hypothesis-based research are effective. But as systems grow more complex and unpredictable—moving from probable to possible to plausible domains—those approaches break down. In these more volatile environments, inductive and deductive reasoning no longer suffice. Instead, we must rely on abductive reasoning, or the ability to make sense of incomplete data by identifying emerging patterns and connections. This requires heightened awareness and the capacity to perceive meaningful anomalies, much like Fleming’s serendipitous discovery of penicillin, which hinged on being attuned to something unexpected.
To thrive in such a world, organisations must foster anticipatory awareness and decentralised sense-making, often through participatory tools and technologies that capture signals from across whole populations. Snowden introduces the idea of “fitness landscapes” as a way to visualise complex systems, where valleys indicate stable zones and peaks represent emergent threats or opportunities. The future, he argues, lies not in designing systems to avoid failure altogether, but in cultivating the conditions for safe-to-fail experimentation, distributed cognition, and evolutionary potential. This means designing strategies that can adapt dynamically to shifts in context, enabling resilience through continuous sensing, real-time feedback, and an openness to emergence.
Scaffolding & enabling constraints
Resilience can be designed for by creating modular structures that can flex and adapt, rather than brittle hierarchies that collapse under stress. The metaphorical association that Dave often makes to elucidate this point is the difference between a sea wall and a salt marsh.
"I use this a lot to talk about the difference between robust and resilient constraints. The sea wall is robust, distinct, defined and is pretty absolute in nature; it contains in a predictable and reliable way. The salt marsh on the other hand is a lot more messy. It’s boundaries are far from clear and its nature is constantly shifting. But it is resilient, it can take a lot of water and doesn’t break although it may finally get saturated, but it still carries on. The sea-wall on the other hand when it breaks it breaks; the shift from high utility, predictability and security to catastrophic failure is sudden and calamitous in nature."
When working in the complex domain, scaffolding is one way of creating enabling constraints that allow resilience to emerge rather than attempting to control outcomes. Resilience isn’t about preventing failure or controlling every variable—it's about building systems that can detect weak signals early, respond quickly, and learn from disruption. To enable this, "scaffolding" is one way of creating temporary, lightweight structures that enable emergent behaviours without prescribing rigid outcomes.
These scaffolds serve to amplify desirable patterns and dampen undesirable ones. Rather than engineering a specific solution, scaffolding enables safe-to-fail experimentation, letting small initiatives or interventions run in parallel so the system can adapt based on feedback. When something works, it can be scaled; when it fails, it can be absorbed without catastrophic consequences.
For more on this, see the pages on the Estuarine mapping framework and method.
Methods
Some specific resilience-enhancing practices include:
- Entangled trios: Encouraging distributed decision-making and knowledge-sharing
- Citizen journaling & narrative capture: Harnessing lived experience and human-sensor-networks to inform strategy.
- Managing for affordances: Creating spaces where people can act based on what is possible in their context.
- Micro-scenarios: Developing small-scale, diverse futures rather than grand predictive planning.
Types of resilience
- ...
- Antifragility
Related
Principles
- reference related principles here...
Frameworks
- PAGODA...
Concepts and metaphors
Methods
References
Articles and books
- Dave Snowden, Creating a More Resilient Ecology to Manage Unimagined (and Potentially Unimaginable) Future Situations, in On Building a Better Future, Nexxworks (2022) [1]
- Dave Snowden, Alessanfro Rancati, Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis, A field guide for decision makers inspired by the Cynefin framework, European Commission and Cynefin Centre[2]
- van der Merwe, S. E., Biggs, R., & Preiser, R. (2020). Sensemaking as an approach for resilience assessment in an Essential Service Organization. Environment Systems and Decisions, 40(1), 84-106.