Perhaps it is because the whole world feels as if it’s riding on the edge of a jagged knife that the idea of resilience is becoming a dominant theme across so many domains. Resilience in beings first developed when cells evolved a way of maintaining inner order through homeostatic (stability through constancy) mechanisms. After homeostasis was mastered, allostasis (stability through change) developed as a way of responding to a dynamic world of challenge. In economics we have the idea of Transition Towns, which emphasizes developing local economies as a way of being resilient to global failures. In agriculture we have the idea of permaculture, building a permanent agriculture by embracing diversity, sustainability, perennial systems, avoiding monocultures, and using edge thinking. There are many more examples, including psychological resilience and the legendary resilience of ecosystems.

To explore the idea of resiliency we’ll look at a few sources:

• Collapse Dynamics: Phase Transitions in Complex Social Systems by Noah Raford
• Black Swans, Fragility, and Mistakes by Nassim Taleb
• Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster  by Geoffrey West
• How Complex Systems Fail by Dr. Richard Cook

The talk by Dr. Richard Cook was given at Velocity 2012 and is by far the most practical of all the talks, as it directly relates to DevOps, but I think each of the other talks holds their own special fascination as well. I hope you’ll share my conviction that this incredibly cool stuff that has only really begun to be explored and applied.

Collapse Dynamics: Phase Transitions in Complex Social Systems