Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge

Published by Tony Quinlan on

Firstly – thank you to Harold and apologies to others: the link to the slides that I posted on Friday didn’t work. It’s fixed now, so they’re accessible from Capturing an organisation’s narrative.pdf (3573.9K).

There’s an excellent new video up at Cognitive Edge’s website and on their YouTube channel:

Today Cognitive Edge is happy to present a short video introducing the importance of organisations making strategic moves from systems built around principles of robustness, to systems that are built on the principle of resilience.

Traditional management has tended to focus on developing robust systems which try to prevent failure. However, in light of increasing interconnectedness of events and the complexity this introduces, the ability for systems to plan for the avoidance of all foreseeable incidents has become limited.

In this video from Cognitive Edge, called Risk and Resilience, Dave Snowden highlights the strategic importance for organisations to refocus on the creation of resilient systems. Whereas robust systems try to avoid failure, and become crippled in the event of it, resilient systems accept that failure is inevitable and move from focusing on prevention to focusing on early detection of events and fast recovery from them.


This video can be found in our Videos section. You may also follow this link to all the Cognitive Edge videos on YouTube, for our previously released videos on Introducing SenseMaker®, How to Organise a Children’s Party, and the Cynefin Framework, amongst others.

Details of Dave’s regular one-day seminars entitled “Leading Through Complexity” can be found here.

[From Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge]

Resilience is a topic I’ve been thinking on recently – and there’s a blogpost due on exactly that shortly. (But there are a couple of projects that need attention first…)