Heroes Not Zombies

The Resilience Alliance give this description of resilience, using forests as an example of a complex adaptive system which exhibit resilience.

Natural systems are inherently resilient but just as their capacity to cope with disturbance can be degraded, so can it be enhanced. The key to resilience in social-ecological systems is diversity. Biodiversity plays a crucial role by providing functional redundancy. For example, in a grassland ecosystem, several different species will commonly perform nitrogen fixation, but each species may respond differently to climatic events, thus ensuring that even though some species may be lost, the process of nitrogen fixation within the grassland ecosystem will continue. Similarly, when the management of a resource is shared by a diverse group of stakeholders (e.g., local resource users, research scientists, community members with traditional knowledge, government representatives, etc.), decision-making is better informed and more options exist for testing policies.Active adaptive management whereby management actions are designed as experiments encourages learning and novelty, thus increasing resilience in social-ecological systems.

The main point made here is the importance of diversity. They mention “socio-ecological” systems, but in fact organisations can also be considered as complex systems. This is one of the ways we are going wrong with the way we deliver health are these days. Due to the vast diversity of human beings, and the reality that large organisations behave as complex systems, we need diversity in our organisations and in our practices.

There just is no one size fits all when it comes to health care and a health service managed by protocols, rules and tight controls, will ultimately fail.