Resilience and Complexity: Conjoining the Discourses of Two Contested Concepts

• Main Author: Rasmus Dahlberg
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Linköping University Electronic Press 2015-10-01
• Series: Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research
• Subjects: Resilience; robustness; complexity; emergency management; Cynefin Framework.
• Online Access: https://journal.ep.liu.se/test3212/index.php/CU/article/view/2174

This paper explores two key concepts: resilience and complexity. The first is understood as an emergent property of the latter, and their inter-relatedness is discussed using a three tier approach. First, by exploring the discourse of each concept, next, by analyzing underlying relationships and, finally, by presenting the Cynefin Framework for Sense-Making as a tool of explicatory potential that has already shown its usefulness in several contexts. I further emphasize linking the two concepts into a common and, hopefully, useful concept. Furthermore, I argue that a resilient system is not merely robust. Robustness is a property of simple or complicated systems characterized by predictable behavior, enabling the system to bounce back to its normal state following a perturbation. Resilience, however, is an emergent property of complex adaptive systems. It is suggested that this distinction is important when designing and managing socio-technological and socio-economic systems with the ability to recover from sudden impact.