Who cares what it means? Practical reasons for using the word resilience with critical infrastructure operators
Introduction
Resilience is a highly debated term, with what seems to be an endless number of slightly varied definitions depending on the sector, domain, or researcher who is addressing the topic. At the recent Third Northern European Conference on Emergency and Disaster Studies [34] there was even an entire panel dedicated to this very issue called “a critical view of the term resilience.”1 The description from the panel states: “the ‘common’ understanding of the term is defined by most as the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” The research community at large also seems to agree on the etymology; resilience comes from the Latin word resilire, which means to bounce back. Its first scientific use dates to the 19th century when it was used in mechanics to describe the strength and ductility of steel beams. In the 1950s, the word was used in psychology to describe children who overcame oppressive environments (for example, poverty, war or abuse) to lead successful adult lives. In the 1970s, environmental scientist Holling used the word to describe an ecosystem's ability to have a dynamic equilibrium in the face of disturbance or change [23]. It has since spread to many other domains, including the domain of risk management. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) defines the phenomenon as applied to risk management as “the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions” [49].
While this is a good starting point for any definition of resilience, different academic domains use their own definitions. For example, within the engineering field, Bruneau et al. define resilience as “the ability of [a] system to reduce the chances of shock, to absorb a shock if it occurs and to recover quickly after a shock (re-establish normal performance)” [8]. This is similar to many other definitions of resilience in engineering, although the wording varies. Conversely, in organizational studies the British Standards Institute for example defines resilience as “the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, and respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper” [9]. This is clearly different to the definition of engineering resilience, introducing the concept of adapting to incremental change while omitting the idea of recovering from a shock.
To add to this complexity, the definition of resilience may often vary within a single domain. For example, when describing collaboration between emergency management organisations Jung defines organizational resilience as “the capability of an organisation that is responsible for operating critical emergency functions to take action and induce decision making” [26]. Finally, on the topic of organizational resilience ISO 28002:2011 defines resilience as “the ability of an organisation to prevent or resist being affected by an event or the ability to return to an acceptable level of performance in an acceptable period of time after being affected by an event” [25]. This final definition, it may be noted, is very similar to the definition presented above for engineering resilience.
An overview of different definitions from different fields including community resilience, ecological resilience, social resilience and economic resilience is given in a related publication [44], however one thing which can be generalized from these different definitions is that resilience is somehow reflected in the ability of a system, an organization or a community to cope, to adapt and or to transform to unforeseen or evolving circumstances or events [27], [3]. Having said all this, it is clear that alignment or agreement of definitions between different approaches is difficult if not impossible. This raises the question: does a word have to have a singular definition for it to be useful?
Despite the ongoing debate within academia on the subject, few studies have examined how or if the resilience debate is being discussed outside of this realm, for instance by critical infrastructure (CI) operators. While this paper adopts an approach to resilience that is rooted in Resilience Engineering, it aims to examine the opinion and perspective of critical infrastructure operators on this topic. Thus, it has a focus on the analysis, measurement and monitoring of resilience; as well as the improvement of an organisations’ resilience and the modelling of the effects of external and internal perturbations on the resilience of (and therefore the risk to) an organisation [24] since these are the aspects of interest to CI operators. Unsurprisingly then, this paper is specifically concerned with resilience engineering as it is applied, and as how it could be applied, to CI by operators in their own view. This application has been explored by several authors. For example:
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The application of a generic resilience analysis framework for CI to nuclear infrastructure [29]. This framework focussed on a multi-dimensional concept of resilience, incorporating Technical, Organisational and Economic resilience in internal resilience analysis, and including the Social dimension in External resilience analysis. The result of this work is a qualitative description of resilience of CI.
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Francis and Bekera [18] on the other hand, promote a framework that is based on several capacities of an infrastructure and incorporates a quantitative analysis of resilience, including some quantification of the associated uncertainties. The capacities addressed include the absorptive, recovery and adaptive capacity (in line with other researchers, e.g. Vugrin et al. [50]) as well as the capacity for retention of identity.
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Cimellaro et al. [11] define a performance loss and recovery function based on four dimensions of robustness, resourcefulness, redundancy and rapidity. As such the dimensions of resilience focus on different periods in a performance loss and recovery function as opposed to domains defined by a type of analysis. They show their framework in application to a specific hospital and to a healthcare network in a region.
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Prior and Hagmann [39] reviewed other approaches as well as discussed the nature of various definitions of resilience from a security perspective. All of the reviewed frameworks represent very mature approaches to the analysis and evaluation of CI resilience, often with application to specific sectors. However they also represent not insignificant differences in the approach to application of the concept––especially when considering the need for information sharing between interdependent CI.
However, rarely have previous authors presented the findings “straight from the horse's mouth”, i.e. directly reporting how CI operators view the resilience concept. Thus, this paper will try to address this question from the perspective of critical infrastructure operators, the people operationalising the resilience concept. While many academics have addressed the issue of definitions, the views of operators have rarely been studied before using a social sciences and humanities (SSH) approach. This is achieved by first examining definitions of critical infrastructure (CI) resilience, followed by a description of the methodology used for six workshops with infrastructure operators organized by the EU-funded H2020 IMPROVER2 project, which had the overall objective of understanding what resilience means to CI operators working in different sectors and how, as a concept, resilience can be incorporated in and enhance the work that they are doing. Then, the results from the workshops are presented as well as a list of practical reasons for speaking about resilience with CI operators, even if we're not all in agreement about what “resilience” means. By and large, the results about which or whether to use a given definition are not “new”, however the novelty in the work presented is that it reflects the collective opinion of practitioners (CI operators) and as such is presented in strong support to the growing body of literature on resilience engineering. Further, the results showcase that the work of academics on resilience definitions is mirrored by those who are in fact charged with operationalising the concept.
Section snippets
Critical infrastructure resilience
According to the definition of the European Union, CI is “an asset, system or part thereof located in Member States which is essential for the maintenance of vital societal functions, health, safety, security, economic or social wellbeing of people, and the disruption or destruction of which would have a significant impact in a Member State as a result of the failure to maintain those functions” [14]. This definition has a strong focus on infrastructure as an asset to be protected. In other
Methodology
The SSH research methodology uses critical thematic analysis, as proposed by Braun and Clarke [6], to find themes within the incremental discussions had with CI operators representing different sectors, exploring what resilience means to these operators, and how resilience can be incorporated in and enhance the work that they are doing. Critical thematic analysis is a method used to identify, analyse and report patterns (aka themes) within a set of data. Braun and Clark break it down into 6
Results
Much of the results presented below support other research findings, for example by Hollnagel et al. [24], or as summarised by Patriarca et al. [36], but are novel in that they are the views of the end-users of resilience frameworks (as CI operators), and not academics.
Despite no consensus on definition of resilience, it remains operationalisable
Resilience definitions offered up by participants in the workshops came from many different domains and varied from very academic to very practical. Despite its popularity as a concept, few participants stated using the word in everyday practice. While many researchers claim the importance of clearly defining resilience in order to operationalise it (e.g. [10]), the fact that resilience concepts are already being operationalised by CI operators, especially those who hadn't heard the term
Practical reasons for using the word resilience with operators
In this section, four practical reasons for continuing to use the word resilience with CI operators despite no common definition are laid out.
Conclusion
This paper has demonstrated that a lack of consensus on the definition of the word resilience does not stop it from being a practical tool for critical infrastructure operators. Critical infrastructure operators view resilience to include risk management activities, but to also go beyond risk management by focusing on recovery aspects, organisational issues, and how to handle unforeseen events. Furthermore, resilience better accompanies another change being faced by operators: from protecting
CRediT authorship contribution statement
L. Petersen: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing - original draft. D. Lange: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing - original draft. M. Theocharidou: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all the participants in the IMRPOVER project workshops. The IMPROVER project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 653390. This work does not reflect the official opinion of the EU. Information and views expressed therein is the responsibility of the authors.
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