What Is Resilience? by Brian Walker - Project Syndicate

"…the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, re-organize, and keep functioning in much the same way as before. :"
What Is Resilience? by Brian Walker - Project Syndicate

A high degree of diversity, especially response diversity (different ways of doing the same thing, often mistakenly thought of as “redundancy”).

A relatively modular structure that does not over-connect its components;.

A strong capacity to respond quickly to change.

Significant “openness,” allowing emigration and immigration of all components (closed systems remain static).

Maintenance of adequate reserves – for example, seed banks in ecosystems or memory in social systems (which speaks against just-in-time supply services).

Encouragement of innovation and creativity.

High social capital, particularly trust, leadership, and social networks.

Adaptive governance (flexible, distributive, and learning-based).

…

Of course, the need for transformation to create or maintain resilience may also affect the highest scale: If some countries and regions are to remain (or become) resilient social-ecological systems with high human well-being, it may be necessary to transform the global financial system.

Transformation requires getting past denial, creating options for change, and supporting novelty and experimentation. Financial support from higher levels (government) all too often takes the form of help not to change (bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks, for example), rather than help to change.

Resilience, in short, is largely about learning how to change in order not to be changed. Certainty is impossible. The point is to build systems that will be safe when they fail, not to try to build fail-safe systems.