Not just surviving, but also instilling the learnings from those before us
Resilience is defined by Merriam-Webster as "an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change." So when I hear an article titled "The Age of Resilience" I can't help but think that resilience has been the focus of humans for ages, although most likely framed simply as survival--survival of the individual, the family, the community, the enterprise/organization, the nation, and perhaps at times the entire human species itself. No matter the pursuit to survive, in history even the greatest individuals, families, communities and nations have perished as opposing agents seek their own survival in the form of the former's extinction. More often than not, the lessons learned of those that have perished become buried, not to be built further upon for the good of all. As a result, ignorance ensures that the cycle is repeated.
But, if a critical mass of systems were in place to not only help retain the lessons learned of the past but absorb at the same time the lessons being learned in real time, perhaps the institutions we maintain and desire today can be regularly built and improved upon so as to ensure greater continuity (think fluidity not permanency) between entities and across future events. The momentum of such an effort could even eventually lead to an even greater predictability of those future events--and as a result, more appropriate reaction to them.
This, in a very big-picture way, is how I see an "Age of Resilience" unfolding and as distinguished from the past. As inferred above, number of entities are continually trying to instill resilience, some consciously and not so consciously. As covered recently in Esquire under the title "Age of Resilience," Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions wants to make sense out of the quest for resilience via coordinated technologies and applications that people can manage and respond to while making the world a better place.
Where supply chain solutions come into view
Decending from the stratospheric big-picture view, zooming in on the world brings global supply chains into general focus--millions of intersecting lines that traverse land, sea, air and space. At the same time, any number or combination of these supply chain lines could face destructive events that are induced by machines, humans or nature--or any combination of the three. The question is understanding the range of events possible and the corresponding action that will ensure supply chain resilience.
For the time being we can classify this pursuit generally as supply chain event management. Quite vividly, the introduction of the "Age of Resilience" article displays a diagram illustrating the resiliency mechanism for a given supply chain event. (Click Download resilience.pdf to see the diagram).
In this first diagram, the following is illustrated:
- Detection: A system of scanners pull in information from the supply chain and communicate to an automated nerve center driven by a catalogue of rule sets; these define the range of acceptable supply chain security standards.
Assessment: The automated nerve center references its rule sets to determine whether any of the information taken from the supply chain can be classified as a decision-critical event; otherwise, information is collated as within normal operations and fed to databases for regular business use.
Analysis: Decision-critical events are assessed for the appropriate response, which begins to be formed off preprogrammed, generic models; these interact with other systems, such as weather tracking to further solidify a response directive.
- Rerendering: A more event specific, response model is created with alternative scenarios, particularly worst-case, and provides the optimal solution for worst-case scenario avoidance, simultaneously notifying for deployment the assets to be involved in stopping or stalling the event.
Counterattack: Human resources previously assigned for the resolution of such an event are alerted and allocated based on current readiness, environmental conditions and, to the degree possible, other intangibles.
Security: The process above occurs, in the vision of Mr. DeAngelis, within seconds and without time-consuming meetings and shoot-from-the-hip coordination efforts. System communications are carried out via encrypted transmission ensuring protection against meddling and bad actors.
Obviously, supply chain event management is critical given that no company wants its assets deployed on a regular basis for "fire-fighting duty" where there is more reactive activity than proactive. Supply chain managers want to prevent "fires" completely, or detect far enough in advance situations and conditions that are conducive to producing problems.
UPDATE: When exploring the range of applications such a system would have for supply chains, the pictures above might lead one to focus too much on physical architectures (nodes such as ports and modes such as container ships, for example). I just want to emphasize that there are a wide-range of potential applications that could strengthen the other supply chain architectures--financial, informational, relational and innovational. In addition, supply chain concepts can be applied to both goods and services firms. Reading the resilience article, and also Thomas Barnett's recent column, many potential applications are touched on.
Also, I think the focus on physical architectures leads some to overstate the danger of centralizing hardware, such as that at the Oak Ridge Institute, to pull from a decentralized network. This is the same mistake made when making the judgment that Singapore can't possibly ever be "resilient" because it is concentrated on a small island. However, if one takes into account how the other four supply chain architectures can be leveraged to distribute entity or system "DNA," financial, informational, relational and innovational architectures can go a long way towards building resilience. In fact, these latter architectures are the most difficult to do really, really well. It is the physical architecture that can relatively be quickly reestablished to fit the still existing DNA, combining that which was great before with integrated improvements.
Bad actors tend to focus on the destruction of physical architectures, but as Tom Barnett has had to explain recently, bad actors can't build or are horrible at building non-physical architectures able to compete with those currently driving globalization. As a result, these bad actors make news by destroying physical architecture, but for the most part have to utilize globalization's non-physical architectures to operate--primarily financial networks and informational networks. Relational and innovational architectures operated by the bad guys are sophisticated only to the degree necessary to destroy physical architectures--not build deeply rooted and complex governance systems and institutions.
Critical masses from the individual level to entire nations will drive resilience's rise or fall
If you can figure out what this means for you, the individual, you can work this quest for resilience back to the bigger picture. Whether the event is the spread of a harmful disease in your area or a disruption in the delivery of a new computer, this will have a varying degree of impact on your family, which then can have impact on your community, perhaps the enterprise/organization you work for, on a larger scale perhaps the nation you live in and ultimately the globe. This impact can also work horizontally at the same time between all the above entities. For example, once an event has impacted a critical mass of communities, it could rise to impact an entire local or state government.
Of course, many event detection applications have been in place for some time. An easy example is shipment tracking provided by shipping companies online. Where is my package and when? This provides great comfort to many, and we often demand even better and more accurate information pushing technology to improve above and beyond its current capabilities. But I am sure I am not alone when I say that business' response to a particular bad event in the supply chain--mis-shipment, lost item, damaged goods--has often been lackluster in terms of customer service. In the government sector, where the worst events are on the level of natural disasters, terrorism, wars, and widespread disease--lackluster responses are even more pronounced and we are left thinking that we could do much, much better.
Final Thoughts
Although I am a relative neo-phyte in this area, I look forward to following these trends further and refine my thinking and ability to discuss these concepts. This is one of the reasons I have decided to shift my career focus to tackling supply chain operations from within an IT applications provider targeting the supply chain field. Although I will still write on operations, especially the role of people in operational environments, I am excited about exploring not only the transformation of IT serving supply chain business processes, but also how those processes transform themselves.
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