ArticlePDF Available

Building social resilience in socio-technical systems through a participatory and formative resilience assessment approach

December 2018

December 2018

Authors:

Liza S.E. van der Merwe

Eskom

Reinette Biggs

Stellenbosch University

Rika Preiser

Stellenbosch University

Practical approaches are required to operationalize resilience building principles within complex adaptive systems. Resilience can enhance the capacity of complex socio-technical systems that deliver essential services to maintain service delivery amidst disruption. A formative resilience assessment process was designed and tested within an essential service organization to build general social resilience to improve levels of resilience. Participative assessments were conducted with agents in the system to assess current resilience capacities against defined resilience capabilities. Participants drew inspiration from resilience building principles to collectively design next steps for collective action to deliver future resilience outcomes. An appreciative inquiry approach was employed in the workshops that enabled rapid participative assessments for building general resilience and introduced participants who knew nothing about essential service resilience. This process can be used on a continual basis to stimulate general resilience within the social fabric of essential service organisations.

Domains of resilience identified in a framework for conceptualizing and assessing the resilience of essential services produced by socio-technical systems (Van der Merwe, Biggs, & Preiser, 2018).

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Photo showing the distribution of stories relative to Eskom's resilience capabilities, as well as the outcome of the group votes.

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Group and individual votes on the extent to which the five resilience capabilities defined by Eskom are realized. The length of the bars reflects number of votes, the column on the left shows the majority rule group votes on whether the organisation has that capability in place (positive in green), or not (negative in red). The groups were unanimous that the organisation always operates well under stress, but it does not learn lessons from incidents in order to deliberately evolve to higher levels of resilience. The column on the right shows the outcome of the individual votes where participants felt the organization is already doing well applying the resilience building principles against those capabilities, versus where Eskom should invest more to develop resilience. The number of individual stories told to illustrate the various resilience capabilities appear on the right of the diagram (one story straddled capability 2 and 3, hence the halves).

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Illustrations of the resilience building principles in practice either depicted examples where the principles were present (green) or absent (red), and length of bar reflects number of illustrations. Participants mostly described the application of these principles in their context in positive terms, except for P3, manage slow variables and feedbacks. The general consensus is that the organisation is not applying the insights from P3.

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Systemic Change Journal

An innovative, peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary, open access journal

Volume 1, Issue 1, 2018

Suggested citation: Van der Merwe, S., Biggs, R., & Preiser, R. (2018). Building social resilience in socio-

technical systems through a participatory and formative resilience assessment approach. Systemic Change

Journal, 1 (1), 1-34. DOI forthcoming.

Received 18 December, 2018

Published online 31 December, 2018

Building social resilience in socio-

technical systems through a

participatory and formative

resilience assessment approach

Susara E (Liza) van der Merwe1,2, Reinette Biggs1,3, Rika Preiser1

1Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

2Enterprise Risk & Resilience Department, Eskom Holdings, Johannesburg, South Africa

3Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden

Abstract: Practical approaches are required to operationalize resilience building

principles within complex adaptive systems. Resilience can enhance the capacity of

complex socio-technical systems that deliver essential services to maintain service

delivery amidst disruption. A formative resilience assessment process was designed

and tested within an essential service organization to build general social resilience

to improve levels of resilience. Participative assessments were conducted with

agents in the system to assess current resilience capacities against defined resilience

capabilities. Participants drew inspiration from resilience building principles to

collectively design next steps for collective action to deliver future resilience

outcomes. An appreciative inquiry approach was employed in the workshops that

enabled rapid participative assessments for building general resilience and

introduced participants who knew nothing about essential service resilience. This

process can be used on a continual basis to stimulate general resilience within the

social fabric of essential service organisations.

Keywords: formative resilience assessment; resilience building principles;

appreciative inquiry

INTRODUCTION

A world characterised by systemic change and disruption increasingly requires

systemic resilience. Resilience is the capacity to sustain core system functions

amidst contextual uncertainty and deep disruption (Ton and Wang, 2015; Folke,

2016; NAS, 2017). Essential services are produced and delivered by coupled socio-

technical systems; and, both social and technical components are critical for

maintaining the delivery of essential services. Interruptions of essential services

delivery, like that of water or electricity, is not about whether they will happen, but

when, which highlights the need to foster resilience within these socio-technical

systems. A key conceptual distinction can be drawn between specified and general

system resilience (The Resilience Alliance, 2010; Walker, Abel, Anderies, & Ryan,

2009). On the one hand, specified resilience ensures that specified parts of a system,

such as business processes or physical assets, have the capacity to withstand

predefined threats, for example, disaster or climate impacts. On the other hand,

general resilience provides an adaptive capacity to deal with unknown and

unpredictable disruption. While both types of resilience are crucial, the increasing

operations volatility faced by essential service organisations highlights the

importance for an intrinsic adaptive capacity for resilience (Auerswald, Branscomb,

La Porte, & Michel-Kerjan, 2006; Hollnagel, 2012). It may be seen as a duty of care

for essential service organisations to intentionally cultivate resilience (Abbott, 2018;

Deloitte, 2016).

Investing in capacities that strengthen social resilience is particularly important.

Technical infrastructure is likely to fail if conditions cross the threshold of safe

operations. However, when people are exposed to circumstances or challenged

beyond what they perceive as being manageable, their individual and collective

adaptive capacities may still enable them to survive, or even thrive (Brown &

Westaway, 2011). The notion of general social resilience has been defined in terms

of integrated coping, adaptation and transformation capacities in the face of

uncertainty (Folke, Biggs, Norström, Reyers, & Rockström, 2016; Keck &

Sakdapolrak, 2013; Van der Merwe, Biggs, & Preiser, 2018). Contributions have

been made to the understanding of general social resilience (Adger, 2000; Hall &

Lamont, 2013; Keck & Sakdapolrak, 2013); yet, the topic remains largely neglected

(Xu, Marinova, & Guo, 2015). In a framework that distinguishes different domains,

in which resilience needs to be considered within essential service providers, the top

right quadrant of Figure 1 below refers to general social resilience (Van der Merwe

et al., 2018). Since social resilience is dynamic, relational and political, the process

to assess and build it should explicitly consider issues of power and participation

(Keck & Sakdapolrak, 2013).

Figure 1. Domains of resilience identified in a framework for conceptualizing and assessing the

resilience of essential services produced by socio-technical systems (Van der Merwe, Biggs, &

Preiser, 2018).

This paper reports on an exploratory study that participatorily evaluated general

social resilience capabilities within an essential service organisation using a

formative resilience assessment approach. In the study, formative resilience

assessments of a particular system consisted of an ongoing participatory process,

which aimed to collectively evaluate current levels of resilience, to garner

agreement regarding resilience outcomes, and to promote commitment to resilience

goals (Van der Merwe et al., 2018). The authors used the seven general resilience

building principles proposed by Biggs et al. (2015) as a catalyst for identifying

opportunities to enhance resilience in Eskom, the national electrical utility in South

Africa. This article describes the process design and the execution of participatory

workshops for formative resilience assessments with the following objectives:

1. Collective evaluation of current realisation of resilience capabilities in the

organisation;

2. Identification of areas for resilience enhancement;

3. Fostering of a shared understanding of resilience in the organisation.

CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

Assessing and building general social resilience

General social resilience can be described as a set of intrinsic enabling conditions,

which endows a group of people (community, organisation, or nation) with an

intangible, emergent and adaptive capacity to maintain functional continuity and

systems-level flexibility (Fleetwood, 2011; Van der Merwe et al., 2018). General

social resilience can be developed through investments into people and their social

arrangements. However, social resilience outcomes can be either enabled or

hindered by the prevailing institutional framework (Carpenter et al., 2012; Renschler

et al., 2010). Approaches to enhance social resilience include an emphasis on

individual agency, collective goal-orientation, and subjective perceptions of the

group’s ability to cope, adapt and transform (Béné et al., 2016; Bohle, Etzold, &

Keck, 2009; Feldt, Kinnunen, & Mauno, 2000). The effectiveness of individual and

collective sense-making determines the range of available response options that can

be detected and enacted in a crisis (Doyle, Paton, & Johnston, 2015; Nofi, 2000).

The quality of response is strengthened through strong social networks, which

increase levels of trust and foster collective action (Adger, 2003; Ledogar &

Fleming, 2008; Moore & Westley, 2011; O’ Brien et al., 2012). A shared goal and

commitment towards a purposeful or meaningful contribution significantly

contribute to resilience (Harrop, Addis, Elliott, & Williams, 2006; Lindström &

Eriksson, 2006).

The social-ecological resilience literature proposes seven interwoven resilience

building principles (Biggs, Schlüter, et al., 2015) (Figure 2 & Table 1). Folke (2016)

describes the principles as mechanisms that create the space for spontaneous

exploration and the building of trust and social capital to resolve collective action

challenges amidst multiple trade-offs in complex systems. The principles are

embedded in the Resilience, Adaptation Pathways and Transformation Assessment

(RAPTA) Framework (O’Connell et al., 2016) and applied in the resilience

assessments of Quinlan et al. (2015). Cosens and Fremier (2014), Selberg et al.

(2017) and Sterk, van de Leemput & Peeters (2017) suggest that the principles

provide guidance for operationalising resilience. The authors of this article argue

that these resilience building principles also apply to socio-technical systems that

qualify as being complex adaptive systems.

Figure 2. Among the 7 generic resilience building principles, the first 3 refer to components in the

system, the last 3 to governance of the system, while the middle principle is central, as it informs how

the system should be understood and managed.

Table 1

The 7 generic resilience building principles (Biggs, Schlüter and Schoon, 2015;

GRAID, 2016)

P11

Maintain diversity and

redundancy

A diversity of components in a system, like species and actors,

landscapes, livelihood strategies, knowledge systems and

institutions provide response diversity and functional redundancy

to change, or dealing with uncertainty and surprise.

Manage connectivity

Connectivity among habitats, species and people provides links

across networks for species, resources, information, or social

cohesion to flow, disperse, migrate, or interact.

Manage slow variables

and feedbacks

Understanding and monitoring of slow systems variables,

feedbacks, and their thresholds, particularly of regulating

services, to establish effective governance structures, and avoid

regime shifts.

Foster an understanding

of complex adaptive

systems

Understanding that unintended consequences, disruption and

uncertainty is to be expected due to emergence, multi-variate,

multi-level and multi-scalar interdependence, and unpredictable

dynamics in systems.

Encourage learning and

experimentation

Continuously learning and adaptive experimentation, since

knowledge of systems is always partial and incomplete.

Broaden participation

Engaged multiple stakeholders with an active interest to be

involved in management and governance process, as this builds

trust and a shared understanding that incorporates multiple

perspectives.

Promote polycentric

governance systems

A governance system with: multiple interacting governing bodies

at different scales; disciplinary focus; forms of organization and

sources of authority to act from, thus improving connectivity and

learning across scales and cultures and addressing of problems at

the right level by the right people at the right time.

A distinction can be made between formative assessments for resilience and

summative assessments of resilience. The former explicitly aims to develop

resilience as an outcome, while the Participatory approaches are essential to

achieving the objectives of formative resilience assessments. Broadening

participation (P6) involves the active engagement of diverse stakeholders in

management and governance processes at multiple levels and scales across the

system (Leitch, Cundill, Schultz, & Meek, 2015). Participative management

practices enable reflection and sharing. Moreover, they build relationships of trust,

facilitate social learning, support institutional change, and encourage collective

action (Biggs et al., 2012). Resilience thinking using participatory processes fosters

a better understanding of, and engagement with, the system being governed

(Audouin et al., 2013; Sellberg, Borgström, Norström, & Peterson, 2017). The

application of the principles of encouraging learning (P5) and broadening

participation (P6) will, in turn, strengthen social connections (P2) and enhance

1 In this paper, we will use a short-hand notation to refer to individual principles, by a capital P

followed by its number, e.g. P5 is Encourage learning.

polycentric governance owing to the synergistic interaction among the principles

(P7)—which highlights the mutual interdependence between the principles

(Schlüter, Biggs, Schoon, Robards, & Anderies, 2015). The optimal balance among

the principles are contextual and vary across time and space (Biggs, Schlüter, et al.,

2015).

In this article, the authors use an appreciative inquiry (AI) approach to design the

facilitation process used to introduce the seven principles for building resilience into

the formative assessments. AI is a facilitation process that supports diverse groups

in addressing complex social problems, specifically aimed at systems level

transformation. Social innovation approaches like AI foster collective action, and

are particularly useful for facilitating formative and participatory processes

(Holman, 2010). AI can be used to stimulate the emergence of beneficial patterns in

complex social systems (Holman, 2010) and has been used as a strategy to enhance

social resilience (Cojocaru, 2014). AI is used in facilitation processes that help to

appraise and examine the social potential of an organisation. Guided by principles of

collaboration and appreciation (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987), AI creatively

engages people; and, through its generative capacity to foster dialogue, it can

stimulate possibilities for informing collective social action (Cooperrider &

Srivastva, 1987; Holman, 2010). The appreciative mode of inquiry assumes a

possibility-centric approach for designing organisational change processes and gives

meaning to the members of an organisation through the “interpretive schemes” used

to guide dialogue, decisions and actions (Bushe, 2011; Cooperrider & Srivastva,

1987, p. 131).

PARTICIPATIVE PROCESS DESIGN

Case study: Eskom and its Enterprise Resilience Programme

The organisational context for this case study is the Enterprise Resilience

Programme in Eskom Holdings, a national, vertically integrated electric utility

wholly owned by the South African government. The utility employs 48,000

employees, produces 95% of the electricity consumed in the country, and holds 73%

of the generation capacity among 12 member countries in the Southern African

Development Community (Eskom, 2018; SAPP, 2018). This degree of connectivity

illustrates the interdependence between the organisation, the socio-technical systems

that deliver electricity and the region. However, the organisation is facing a

confluence of challenges, not expanded on here (de Villiers, 2018; Eberhard &

Godinho, 2017; Gibbs, 2018). The health and resilience of the national economy is

so intertwined with that of the utility that investment bank Goldman Sachs described

Eskom as the biggest risk to the South African economy (Bonorchis & Burkhardt,

2017).

More recently, between June and August 2018, industrial action by unions resulted

in the withdrawal of labour and in critical infrastructure damage, allegedly caused

by sabotage, leading to national rotational load shedding, further impacting the

economy (CBN, 2018; Hlatshaneni, 2018; News24Wire, 2018; Paton, 2018). Load

shedding is a risk control mechanism to prevent a much bigger disaster – a national

blackout – a sudden unexpected interruption of supply to the whole country (SABS,

2010). While load shedding is experienced by customers as service interruptions, it

is a strategy that deploys rotational load reduction, executed by the System Operator

to safeguard the national power system from collapse (SABS, 2010). South Africa

first experienced load shedding in 2008 due Eskom’s inability to maintain the

supply-demand balance required for power system stability (Chettiar, Lakmeeharan,

& Koch, 2009). A national code for emergency load reduction (NRS048-9) was

established after the load shedding events in 2008 (SABS, 2010). This code

establishes a specified resilience capability—to both prevent and recover from a

national blackout. Nonetheless, such systemic interruptions of electricity supply

across the nation have a significant economic, social, and political impact on the

country (IRMSA, 2016; NERSA, 2015).

Triggered by the national rotational load shedding in 2008, Eskom initiated a formal

resilience building programme (the Enterprise Resilience Programme) that focused

on the integrated power system, extending focus to the entire enterprise by 2013.

The programme identified five general social resilience capabilities that should be

developed in the organisation: (1) the ability to anticipate, identify, and adapt

rapidly to threats, vulnerabilities and opportunities arising from changes in the

internal and external environment; (2) the ability to operate at elevated levels of

stress without failure for extended periods of time; (3) the ability to respond rapidly

to a shock to contain the impact of a threat; (4) the ability to recover rapidly in a

coordinated manner; and (5) the ability to deliberately evolve to a higher state of

resilience in response to changes by implementing learning from near misses and

incidents (Koch et al. 2013) (Figure 3). This contextual and systems-based

understanding of resilience capabilities can be seen as a timeline: (1) prior to

disruption the organisation needs to proactively anticipate and adapt; (2) if

disruptions occur, members of the organisation need to effectively respond and

recover; and (3) retrospectively, the organisation needs to reflect on lessons learned

in order to deliberately evolve to a higher state of resilience.

Figure 3. Eskom has identified five general social resilience capabilities that they aim to develop

across the organisation. The ability to anticipate and adapt to change and deliberately evolve to

higher state of resilience should be done continuously, while operating under stress. Responding and

recovering are associated with specific incidents or events, both planned and unplanned, expected or

unexpected. The arrow at the bottom points to the ideal to sufficiently and pre-emptively anticipate,

adapt and evolve to avoid disruption at the organisational level.

The Eskom Resilience Programme constitutes an ongoing, organisation-based

commitment to build and assess resilience. While the programme typically employs

summative assessments against specified resilience objectives, a need was identified

to extend awareness of resilience thinking and commitment towards resilience more

widely across the social fabric of the organisation. The explorative study described

in this article was devised for this identified purpose. Resilience building workshops

were designed as a particular type of intervention to formatively assess general

social resilience, and thus played a specific part in the wider programme.

Participatory workshops

Six workshops were conducted over four months in three locations between mid-

January and early May 2018, in the Gauteng province of South Africa, where

participants collaboratively engaged in formative resilience assessments. Ninety

employees participated on an anonymous and voluntary consent basis, and 60

written feedback forms were handed in after the workshops. The workshops were

scheduled to last 3 hours, and time was tightly managed. Although participants were

invited from across the business, the researchers used a convenience sample based

on employees involved in the resilience programme who were willing to commit

time from their schedule. This was followed up with snowball sampling, which

involved asking participants to nominate colleagues to be invited to future events.

This was to be included in their written feedback at the conclusion of the

workshops. The snowball sampling approach, thus, contributed to participants being

from diverse business areas, which was reflected in the feedback as a valuable

source of learning.

Workshop design

The approach used to design the resilience building workshops integrated formative

resilience assessment goals with the appreciative inquiry process. Moreover,

concepts from Eoyang & Holladay’s (2013) adaptive action framework were

incorporated in the last step of the workshop process. A bottom-up, or collaborative

approach was used for the diagnosis of current levels of resilience. Moreover, this

approach led to agreement regarding where resilience needs to be strengthened and

collective action towards those goals. The process design followed five distinct steps

based on a facilitation approach informed by AI principles.

The AI process has been described as an approach that fosters knowledge exploration

across four domains: theoretical discovery; metaphysical dream; normative design,

and a destiny to deploy (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). These areas were initially

known as the AI 4-D cycle, but since topic selection is a strategic consideration for

successful AI, this was later suggested as an important first step in an extended cycle

that constitutes 5 steps in total (Bushe, 2011; Cooperrider, Whitney, & Stavros,

2008). The extended 5-D AI cycle consists of the following steps: (1) define the

appreciative topic; (2) discover the best of what is; (3) dream about what next; (4)

design what should be; and (5) deploy a pragmatic destiny to create what will be

(Bushe, 2011; Cooperrider et al., 2008). While these steps describe what to do, AI

has a growing number of guiding principles, which explains why the approach works

in a particular way (Table 2) (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2001, 2005; Schroeder, 2013;

Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2003). Figure 4 illustrates the 5 steps and shows where

the 7 resilience building principles were inserted into the process. AI principles

considered in the workshop design are outlined in Table 2.

Figure 4. The extended 5-D AI cycle, which can be used as an ongoing process, was used to conduct

the resilience building workshops, while the 7 general resilience building principles were infused as

inspiration for the vision logic when participants defined future resilience ideals.

Table 2

Appreciative Inquiry principles that inform steps in the cycle (Cooperrider &

Whitney, 2001)

Poetic Principle

We all co-author the organization’s story; therefore, carefully consider the

topic of inquiry, as it determines what is focused on

Anticipatory

Principle

Images of the future inspire action and guide current behaviour; therefore,

positive images of the future can be powerful mobilizing agents in the

present

Positive Principle

Positive questions catalytically lead to lasting and successful change

Simultaneity

Principle

Inquiry is intervention as inquiry and change take place simultaneously;

therefore, the questions we ask set the stage for what we find

Constructionist

Principle

Reality is subjective and socially created through dialogue and discourse;

thus, how an organization knows its knowledge is interwoven with its

destiny

Step 1: Define an affirmative topic of inquiry

The specific question selected to define the topic of inquiry is important, as the AI

approach is based on the assumption that the process of inquiry is inextricably

linked with change narratives and processes: The process of inquiring shifts

perception, and thus changes our view of the world (Faure, Rosenzweig, & Van

Tiem, 2010). The topic of inquiry was set by the workshop agenda and focused on

building resilience in the organisation’s ability to deliver an essential service.

Participants were introduced to the resilience capabilities as identified by Eskom

(Figure 3) as the basis of the continued conversation.

Through the workshops, we looked to glean an understanding of generic resilience

building principles shown to enhance the resilience of ecosystem services produced

by social-ecological systems. The insights gathered were applied to reflecting on

ways to enhance the resilience of essential services produced by socio-technical

systems. In accordance with the poetic principle (Table 2), setting this objective

allowed the joint conversation to define a shared interpretation of resilience as being

possible, innovative, and worthwhile.

Step 2: Discover the best of what is

The objective of the discovery phase of the workshops was to understand the

system’s currents levels of resilience through seeking interpretive knowledge. The

process of discovery consisted of two parts. The first was based on the five defined

organisational resilience capabilities of Eskom; and, the second was based on the

seven resilience building principles. To tune into the “appreciative eye” and

leverage the transformative power of stories, as described by Schroeder (2013),

participants were asked to share a quick personal account about resilience. To set the

scene, they were told they were in an airport departure lounge waiting for their

flight, when a good friend from long ago waved them down, clearly in a hurry, but

also interested to quickly ask a burning question: “I heard you guys are building

resilience in Eskom. Please tell me what you are doing that works?” Participants

were asked to choose a single resilience capability, place a coloured sticker on the

poster to mark the one their story was about, and quickly tell their friend a personal

account, based on one of the following:

•A time when… we did well.

•What do you value about… what is in place?

•What we tried that works (… even if just a little bit).

•What you like best about what we have / do.

In the first part of the discovery process, participants shared 66 first-hand accounts

of a time they found resilience was evident in the organisation, and also identified

which particular aspect of organisational resilience it related to. Using coloured

stickers, participants marked the organisational resilience capability their story

pertained to, leading to a visual distribution of narratives in the room (Figure 5).

Afterwards, groups voted to determine, according to majority rule, whether they felt

Eskom overall exhibited resilience in those areas.

Figure 5. Photo showing the distribution of stories relative to Eskom’s resilience capabilities, as well

as the outcome of the group votes.

For the second part of the discovery phase, the resilience building principles were

introduced and examples of its application in social-ecological systems were

illustrated using multimedia. Participants were then asked for examples of the

application of the resilience building principles in the organisation. These were

noted on a flipchart and served as a visual reminder of the principles for the rest of

the workshop.

Step 3: Dream of what might be

In order to create positive images of future possibilities, the objective of the dream

phase of the workshops was to explore where participants saw opportunities to

enhance resilience. Against the background of the shared understanding that had

emerged in the room regarding the desired resilience capabilities and the generic

resilience building principles from Step 2, participants were asked to vote on a large

poster depicting a matrix of the capabilities and principles. Each participant was

given seven blue and seven red colour voting stickers. They were asked to place

blue colour stickers on the poster to show where the organisation was already doing

applying the principles towards Eskom’s required resilience capabilities. Red

stickers were placed on the poster to show where the participants saw possibilities

for building resilience, identifying where the organisation could and should focus

time and energy (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Photo of the voting outcome from one of the groups. The areas with the highest red dots

were selected to collectively work on further.

The voting process served as a logical break halfway through the workshop, when

people could grab refreshments and chat while everyone finished casting their votes.

Across the six workshops, a total of 295 votes were cast indicating where the

organisation is already applying the seven principles to Eskom’s resilience

capabilities. This was relative to 342 votes that identified intriguing possibilities to

focus on improving resilience through the application of the principles.

Once all participants had voted, the facilitator counted the number of votes of each

colour in each intersecting block to identify the clear winners. A total of 16 areas

were identified to explore ways of improving the selected resilience capabilities

through the application of the resilience principles, forming the basis for Step 4.

While there was diversity in the areas selected by different groups, some areas were

selected more than once (Table 3).

Table 3

Areas selected to collectively identify resilience goals and next steps for actions

through AI’s dream, design and destiny steps.

Anticipate

& adapt

Operate

under

stress

Respond Recover Evolve

1. Maintain diversity and

redundancy

2 1 1

2. Manage connectivity

3. Manage slow variables

and feedbacks

2 1 1

4. Foster an understanding

of complex adaptive

systems

5. Encourage learning and

experimentation

7 1 2 1 3

6. Broaden participation

7. Promote polycentric

governance systems 3 2 1

Step 4: Design what should be

The objective of the design phase was for the participants to establish where the

system needs to go to improve attainment of resilience outcomes through

collaborative dialogue. In the context of AI, Schroeder (2013) highlighted that

people commit to and enact desired change if they have free choice over their level

of contribution. The top three areas for potential improvement were identified based

on the number of votes. Participants were asked to divide themselves into those

three topics to join the conversation that most resonated with them. Each group

discussed what could be possible in that area if they applied the selected resilience

building principle to it.

Each group had to then create a bold statement of ideal possibilities that described

the desired future as if it has already happened. Afterwards, each group shared their

possibility statements with the larger group. The areas selected were based on votes

that indicated where the group saw compelling opportunities to build resilience.

These areas were applicable to the socially construed opportunity recognised in the

room, while the possibility statements were provocative and connected to

Cooperrider and Srivastva’s (1987) generative AI principles (see Table 2).

Step 5: Destiny of what will be

Through seeking agreement on collective action, the objective of the destiny phase

was to agree how best to reach the resilient futures that the participants had defined

in the previous step. The destiny phase can also be called delivery (Cooperrider et

al., 2008). Based on the possibility statements that the groups had defined, they were

asked to discuss where they saw new options for action from the conversations. To

leverage uncertainties in complex adaptive systems, Eoyang & Holladay (2013)

propose asking three very simple questions in an ongoing adaptive action cycle: (i)

What? (ii) So what? (iii) Now what? The last question is to have a plan for taking

action. To this end, groups had to discuss and agree on the technical or social

enhancement of resilience.

Just as the AI process is meant to be repeated, so the adaptive action cycle, proposed

by Eoyang & Holladay (2013), is meant as an ongoing process that enables

innovative and responsive ways to respond to change, opportunity and disruption.

Participants were, therefore, encouraged to ask themselves the same question again

and again.

INSIGHTS EMERGING FROM THE WORKSHOPS

In this section, we discuss the insights that emerged from the workshops in terms of

the objectives of the assessment:

Collective evaluation of current resilience capabilities in the organisation

The evaluation of current resilience capacities consisted of participants sharing

personal accounts of resilience, which were used to map narrative patterns.

Thereafter, group consensus was used to reveal whether the organisation exhibited

the respective capabilities. Based on a contextualised understanding of resilience

building principles, individual votes provided more nuanced insight into current

capabilities. The evaluation process of the defined resilience capabilities fostered a

sense of shared learning among participants of what resilience entails, and why it

matters. Participants saw an emerging picture unfold of the evidence of resilience in

the organisation through hearing individual narratives and seeing the voting

outcome. In this way, the process contributed to social learning, which builds

resilience (Cundill, Leitch, Schultz, Armitage, & Peterson, 2015).

Participants indicated that the ability to anticipate and adapt (29%), followed by the

ability to operate under stress (28%) were central to their personal experience of

resilience in the organisation. Participants involved in the resilience programme

shared accounts of where resilience capacities made a difference in practice. They

also reflected on the amount of work done to date towards the deliverables of the

Enterprise Resilience Programme. The opportunity to share experiences and

privately held perceptions created the space for shared reflection. In fact, one of the

participants expressed her appreciation for the opportunity to meaningfully

contribute to the objectives of the Enterprise Resilience Programme. Even

participants who were not directly involved in the Programme did not hesitate to

share examples from their own experience that were applicable to the defined

resilience capabilities. This illustrates how participants intuitively connected with

the organisational resilience objectives and were able to relate their own accounts

without difficulty. When reflecting on the process, a participant noted that s/he

found it beneficial “that we as the candidates were able to give our own opinions

and ideas of how we see, or view, resilience within the organisation.”

The voting outcome reflected views on current resilience capabilities in the

organisation at group consensus and individual level (Figure 7). After the

participants were provided with a brief illustration of each of the social-ecological

systems principles, they gave their own examples of its application in their

workplace context. Interesting results emerged when participants illustrated the

principles by using either beneficial or detrimental examples, which were based on

the application or absence of the principle (Figure 8 & Table 4). Furthermore, most

illustrations were in a social context, with one or two examples of technical,

material and financial resources.

Figure 7. Group and individual votes on the extent to which the five resilience capabilities defined by

Eskom are realized. The length of the bars reflects number of votes, the column on the left shows the

majority rule group votes on whether the organisation has that capability in place (positive in green),

or not (negative in red). The groups were unanimous that the organisation always operates well under

stress, but it does not learn lessons from incidents in order to deliberately evolve to higher levels of

resilience. The column on the right shows the outcome of the individual votes where participants felt

the organization is already doing well applying the resilience building principles against those

capabilities, versus where Eskom should invest more to develop resilience. The number of individual

stories told to illustrate the various resilience capabilities appear on the right of the diagram (one

story straddled capability 2 and 3, hence the halves).

Figure 8. Illustrations of the resilience building principles in practice either depicted examples where

the principles were present (green) or absent (red), and length of bar reflects number of illustrations.

Participants mostly described the application of these principles in their context in positive terms,

except for P3, manage slow variables and feedbacks. The general consensus is that the organisation is

not applying the insights from P3.

Table 4

Examples participants shared of the practical applications of the resilience building

principles in their contexts. Positive applications of the principle are listed as

beneficial; while negative consequences due to non-adherence to the principles are

listed as detrimental.

Beneficial

Detrimental

1. Maintain

diversity and

redundancy

Diversify the power mix through

renewables; Keep strategic spares;

sports teams have people sitting on

the bench

Load shedding drove industry players

off grid and eroded the customer base

that were paying bills and now rather

help themselves than rely on

interruptible supply

2. Manage

connectivity

Physical networks for electricity

distribution; Communication and

information flow happens through

relationships, enable resources and

ideas to flow

The Ebola outbreak and the spread of

HIV happened along network

connections; functional silos result in

a disjointed organisation

3. Manage slow

variables and

feedbacks

A reduction in cost of solar power

and energy storage is slowly eroding

the need for utilities; monitor the

health dashboard for operational

sustainability

Poor succession planning lead to an

aging workforce; failures in financial

governance and poor contract

negotiations led to wasteful

expenditure on capital expansions

4. Foster an

understanding

of complex

adaptive systems

If you found an effective way of

engaging teenagers, use that same

wisdom with employees. You

cannot control people, but you can

attempt to influence them.

Managers look for global recipes of

success, then try to implement its

wisdom locally, but it doesn't work to

transplant solutions into another

context

5. Encourage

learning and

experimentation

Encourage job shadowing; play

simulation games like Pandemic that

require strategic cooperation; enable

flow from research to pilot

implementation, to adapt and evolve

Information Technology’s decision to

switch off Google Earth is stopping

employees from accessing map

information, and no access to

YouTube inhibits online learning

opportunities

6. Broaden

participation

Employee engagement; involve

customers & community in research;

like a relay race; find financial

solutions from non-financial people;

empower end users with self-service

analytics

Human Resources is facing a

dilemma with needing to reduce staff,

keep employees engaged, and retain

core skills, but are trying to do it

without consultation

7. Promote

polycentric

governance

systems

Integrated structures: Provincial

Resilience Teams, cross functional

disaster management working

groups, and multi-disciplinary

sustainable development advisory

committees

A safety net anchored at only a few

points; can’t catch someone jumping

from a burning building by holding

the blanket on only three corners

Table 5 highlights areas where participants felt that the organisation was already

applying the different resilience principles in realising resilience capabilities at

Eskom. Although the results of the survey were subjective and contextual, they

reflected the perceptions of the participants of how they collectively made sense of

their reality. Both group and individual votes were unanimous in two areas: (i) the

organisation could operate under stress for extended periods of time; and (ii) the

organisation did not learn from experience to deliberately evolve to higher levels of

resilience.

These results confirmed Auerswald et al.’s (2006) recognition that infrastructure

systems face unprecedented stress and Hollnagel’s (2012) prescription that resilient

systems need to deal with continuous stress. Participants felt that levels of stress in

the organisation are countered through high levels of connectivity (Table 5).

However, this result did not necessarily imply that the organisation was resilient

while operating under stress. The work of Hannah, Uhl-Bien, Avolio & Cavarretta

(2009) on leadership in extreme contexts suggests that effective leadership may

attenuate levels of stress in the organisation.

Table 5

Vote tallies reflecting where participants felt the organisation is doing well

regarding the application of the seven resilience principles to achieving Eskom’s

resilience capabilities. Font size is scaled by the numbers of votes.

Votes Anticipate

& adapt

Operate

under

stress

Respond Recover Evolve

We are doing well 295 67 79 66 51 32

1. Maintain diversity and redundancy 42 3

11 111

2. Manage connectivity 57 14

842

3. Manage slow variables and feedbacks 34 5

4. Foster an understanding of complex

adaptive systems 24 4 4 952

5. Encourage learning and

experimentation 46

3412 10

6. Broaden participation 44

7. Promote polycentric governance

systems 48 11 511

The weakest organisational resilience capability turned out to be the ability to

evolve to higher levels of resilience through learning. The groups unanimously

identified it as absent and contributed a mere 11% of the individual votes (Figure 7

& Table 5). This is not uncommon in organisations; hence, there is a substantial

body of literature arguing that organisations need to recognise learning as a

capability that needs to be built (Elliot, 1998; Kaliner, 2013; McNaughton, Wills, &

Lallemant, 2015). The results suggest that Eskom needs to become more intentional

about fostering processes that allow learning and change to be more easily embraced

and built into the organisational fabric.

Identification of areas to enhance resilience

Participants had the opportunity to collectively identify areas where resilience

needed to be enhanced in Eskom based on the seven general resilience principles

proposed by Biggs, Schlüter, et al. (2015). A nuanced matrix pattern emerged from

the individual votes to reflect where participants saw the possibility of applying each

principle to the respective resilience capabilities (Table 6). Most opportunities were

recognised in the areas of the first and last resilience capabilities, which are

associated with being proactive and retrospectively reflective. The principle that

participants regarded as having the greatest potential opportunity for improving

Eskom’s resilience capabilities was P5, to encourage learning and experimentation;

followed by P3 and P7. A similar high-level pattern emerged (P5, followed by P7)

for the areas identified to focus resilience investment from the AI processes of

dream, design and destiny (Table 3).

Table 6

Areas where participants recognised intriguing possibility and felt the organisation

can and should focus to improve resilience. The font size is scaled by the number of

votes.

Votes Anticipate

& adapt

Operate

under

stress

Respond Recover Evolve

We see opportunity to improve 342 102 49 46 35 110

1. Maintain diversity and redundancy 46

529

2. Manage connectivity

32.5

3. Manage slow variables and

feedbacks 56.5

610 317

4. Foster an understanding of complex

adaptive systems

39 11 6 6 6 10

5. Encourage learning and

experimentation 65 11 17 87

6. Broaden participation 48.5

465

7. Promote polycentric governance

systems 54.5

962

Participants collectively expressed the need to enhance resilience governance, as

three out of every four votes were cast against the P5-P7 cluster, which describes

attributes of the governance system, (Table 3). The utility resilience literature often

focuses on the ability to deal with disruption (respond and recover) and engineering

specifications to enhance technical infrastructure (P1 & P2). In contrast, the bottom-

up, participatory process highlighted the need to focus on aspects of resilience

governance (P5-P7) and, specifically, to focus on proactive processes prior to, and

reflective learning processes following, disruption (anticipate and evolve).

This choice places emphasis on the need to enhance social capacity for resilience.

These findings reflect and underscore a need to focus on resilience as the

transformative capacity described by Keck & Sakdapolrak (2013) in terms of the

ability to participate in governance processes and to transform societal structures

themselves.

Owing to the abstract nature of P7, it came as a surprise how many times group

votes gravitated to focus on it. The social processes that create the conditions for

effective polycentric governance structures to emerge include the following:

building trust and social capital; strong leadership; ability to bridge scales;

coordination across scale and governance units; and negotiating trade-offs among

users at different scales (Schoon, Robards, Meek, & Galaz, 2015). Eskom’s

organisational hierarchy does not operate in a polycentric fashion; but, the cross-

scale integration this form of governance can bring has the potential to enhance

resilience.

The conversation about the practical implications of P3 was heated and emotive.

Participants expressed frustration about the apparent lack of awareness or focus in

the organisation on monitoring slow variables, but also alluded to the fact that these

would be difficult to evaluate. This awareness confirms the point made by Biggs et

al. (2015) that it is difficult to manage slow variables in practice.

A few groups raised the concern that the organisation seemed to focus on the wrong

targets through a relentless push on short term performance indicators that drive

incentives, yet did not support long-term organisational sustainability. Thus, short-

term-ism is prevalent in the performance management systems of private and public

sectors that work on slow variables and tipping points. Biggs, Gordon, Raudsepp‐

Hearne, Maja & Walker (2015) suggest that the resilience of essential service

delivery may rely on keeping slow variables in the socio-technical system below

critical thresholds. Therefore, it seems prudent to identify key slow variables and

feedbacks across the system. Moreover, thresholds in these variables, which may

trigger large systemic changes, should also be identified (Plummer & Armitage,

2007; Walker, Carpenter, Rockstrom, & Peterson, 2012).

Some principles not selected by participants to focus on is worth mentioning. P3,

which received the second highest number of individual votes, was described by

every group in the form of negative examples (Figure 8). Moreover, it was only

selected twice to identify resilience goals and next steps for actions (Table 6). This

may be due to the request for the workshop participants to focus on what could, and

should, be done at the time of the study. Furthermore, while P4 was not rated as a

principle that the organisation is doing well in, it was also not identified as a

principle to invest energy in. It would appear that this short intervention did not do

justice in explaining the complexity thinking paradigm. To operationalise the

resilience building principles, basic explanations are required in order to succinctly

convey the power of the complexity paradigm, to clarify the difference between

complicated versus complex approaches, and to make a compelling case for

complex adaptive systems thinking.

Fostering of a shared understanding of resilience

Based on the outcomes of the workshops, it seems that the process used to assess the

resilience capabilities required by the Eskom Resilience Programme resulted in a

shared understanding of social resilience and stimulated greater commitment

towards general resilience. Participation among diverse stakeholders builds trust and

relationships, promotes an understanding of system dynamics and facilitates the

collective action required to be resilient (Leitch et al., 2015). A common theme of

participant feedback was that the diversity of voices and views enriched the

conversation. Moreover, a shared understanding of the organisation and its

resilience capabilities emerged. Many alluded to the group work as the most

significant part of the workshop as a result of participating with different colleagues

from across the business (See the dream, design, destiny steps in Figure 4).

Participants also mentioned how much they learned from one another, for example:

“It’s very empowering to learn from colleagues who were part of the group;”

“thinking outside the box around resilience within our organisation, and interaction

across all divisions that was mind blowing on lessons learnt,” and “I have learned so

much from the theory and peers.” A study of the written feedback revealed that

participants developed a deeper understanding of collective resilience, came up with

promising options for resilience enhancements, and were comfortable that they

would be able to recognize a resilience outcome based on their learning from the

workshops.

Above all, participants described a transformed social reality as the resilient future

they dream of and for which they designed bold statements (Table 7). These results

suggest recognition that enhancing general resilience requires alternative ways of

thinking about and seeing the world. Of the 16 focus groups, 13 described new ways

of thinking, 12 referred to new ways of doing, 10 mentioned new business realities,

and only 2 spoke about new technology tools. The new social

realities described by the participants suggest social transformations, which often

include redefining social values, institutions and practices (Flood & Romm, 2018;

O’ Brien et al., 2012; Westley & Antadze, 2010). While a focus on resilience in

utilities often refers to the ability of an organisation to maintain its essential service

delivery amidst disruption, the participants in this study found the insights gained

from the discussions useful for contributing to change management processes in

their particular organisation. This suggests that reflection on the application of

resilience building principles may enhance the capacity to deal with change.

Table 7

Summary of areas identified to enhance resilience in Eskom and the focus of the

enhancement

Anticipate & adapt Operate under

stress

Respo

nd Recover Evolve

66 2 0 2 6

1. Maintain

diversity and

redundancy

Social: transformation in

strategic leadership and

thinking

Social:

efficiency

through

skills

developme

2. Manage

connectivity 0

3. Manage slow

variables and

feedbacks

Technical: situational

awareness and models for

prediction and patterns

through analytics

Social: credible &

reputable

organisation,

energized and

responsive workforce

4. Fost er CAS

understanding 0

5. Encourage

learning and

experimentation

Social: innovative

organisation that

encourages workforce to

embrace change

Social: emp ower

workforce, listen

to every voice,

people- centred

solutions

Financial:

sustainability

through good

governance

Social:

Workforce

valued,

involved &

produce

innovation,

operate

efficiently,

recover

cost and

world class

Social: share more

narratives and tell

more compelling

stories

Social: creative and

innovative workforce,

agile and responsive

organisation

Social: setting the

benchmark through

effective learning and

research opportunities

6. Broaden

participation 2

Social: engage employee

ideas and perspective, led

and driven by employees,

not government or politics

Social: inclusive

approach, embrace

diversity, value

opinions and

knowledge, recognize

staff as interested

parties

7. Promote

polycentric

governance

systems

Social: healthy

accountability, enough

trust to share success,

disentangle negligence

from corruption (just

culture), purpose (why we

do what we do)

Technical: Predictive

sensing and alert system,

to enable distributed

awareness, collaboration

and action

Social: collaborative

decision making:

consulting and

involving diverse

perspectives from

multiple interested

parties to improve

bird’s eye view,

insight and foresight

REFLECTIONS

Social resilience is a key characteristic of successful societies (Hall & Lamont,

2013). An underlying objective of formative resilience assessments is to contribute

to the collective awareness and understanding of resilience among the agents in a

system. In the study described in this article, a formative outcome was adopted as

the main objective of the resilience assessment. The assessment involved the design

of a participatory process (P6) to contribute to learning processes (P5) that

stimulates understanding of the overall complex adaptive system (P4) and allows

participants to design their own cross-functional resilience building interventions

(P7). It would appear that formative resilience assessment processes can directly

contribute to enhancing resilience across the system through the application of the

very principles themselves. This article described the development and

implementation of a novel approach to formatively assess general social resilience

based on Biggs et al. (2014) and Van der Merwe et al. (2018). Using this approach,

the authors were able to evaluate the realisation of resilience capabilities in the

organisation at the time of the study. Furthermore, the approach enabled us to

collaboratively identify areas where resilience needed to be enhanced, and foster a

shared understanding of resilience across the system. The practical implications of

the study described in this article point to a process that can be easily replicated and

utilised by practitioners to operationalise resilience building principles in other

contexts.

This article has demonstrated how a practical application of the principles could be

used and applied towards conducting a formative resilience assessment. Not only

was this assessment conducted for a resilience outcome, it also served as learning

for participants involved. For participants involved in the formal resilience

programme, the workshops triggered awareness of the notion of resilience and

reflection on this phenomenon. A participant involved in the official organisational

resilience programme commented how the workshop brought home the realisation

that resilience is much more than the formal response plans and structures being

developed in the Eskom Resilience Programme. Even though more than half the

participants were not familiar with the particular resilience programme before

exposure to the workshop, the process contributed to a shared understanding of

resilience and how it can be built. This study suggests that resilience assessments

can use narratives to establish awareness of current resilience in the system. In

addition, participatory dialogue can co-create visions of desirable resilient futures.

The authors found the AI approach suitable for facilitating formative resilience

assessments. Appreciative inquiry is an approach to social innovation that stimulates

normative dialogue. In addition, it engages people through collaboration and

appreciation, to jointly design desirable futures and presents “provocative new

possibilities for social action” (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987, p. 359). These

characteristics directly contributed to a participatory process to diagnose: (i) where

the system was at in its current levels of resilience; (ii) where resilience needed to be

strengthened; and (iii) how to attain these shared resilience goals through collective

action. While the AI approach focusses on what works and what is good in a system,

the approach we utilised interjected reality checks during the collective group vote

whether aspects of resilience were not yet adequate, as well as when participants

raised examples of the absence of principles detrimental to overall resilience. These

discussions reflected contextual reality, but did not spiral groups into negative

discussions. Bushe (2011) demonstrates that if the AI approach is used with agents

involved in a system, they tend to take the needs and interests of the system into

account and may be willing to sacrifice personal interests to increase the

competence and capacity of the system. One participant commented, “It provided a

broader illustration of what resilience is, and that we can contribute as junior

employees in the industry.” And, another wrote, “The voting session was very

interesting, since it made me think about what I can do to assist in problem solving.”

We suggest the AI approach is a useful practice that can be added to the repertoire

of resilience assessors committed to a journey of participative and formative

assessments.

In essence, the formative assessments of the study involved an ongoing process to

assess and adaptively build resilience based on the outcome of the assessment. The

formative assessment approach reported in this study was deliberately designed as a

rapid, small-group intervention with a view to more widely influence thinking and

extend the conversation across the organisation. Typically, resilience assessments

seek to understand resilience within complex adaptive systems and require long-

term commitment from a dedicated team. However, the intent of these short sessions

was to enable wide-spread participation and to contribute to slow, but systematic,

penetration of resilience thinking across the social network. These rapid formative

assessments, thus, constituted one type of intervention as part of a wider on-going

programme to build and assess resilience.

In stark contrast to the outcome of the workshops that apparently fostered

understanding and appreciation for resilience, merely a month elapsed before the

industrial action incidents that led to load shedding between June and August 2018.

The strikes mostly hampered operations at the power stations in Mpumalanga, while

the workshops were conducted in the province of Gauteng. Yet it would be naïve to

suggest a wider penetration of these workshops could have prevented these

incidents. We are confronted with the necessity for essential service resilience,

along with a simultaneous realisation that there are no silver bullets.

While South Africa’s resilience is critically linked to the resilience of the socio-

technical system that produces electricity, the challenges experienced by the South

African utility are not in isolation. Berst (2013) summarised an energy industry

report by Citibank (Channell et al., 2013) and argued that utilities are dinosaurs

waiting to die. The anticipated global energy transition is switching to a renewable

energy economy (Buchsbaum, Olszewski, & Joubert, 2018), which brings

uncertainty and potential social instability among the very people who have been

keeping the lights on. In a free market, essential service companies may come and

go, but in countries that exert control over their state-owned companies and regulate

essential services, organizational failure is not an option. The social dimension of

such organisations could be the weakest link and the strongest resource to ensure

resilience of essential services. Further research is required for effective approaches

to build essential service resilience and navigate global energy transitions while

keeping the lights on.

CONCLUSION

We are now in an era of transformation, in which management structures of

essential services must build and maintain socio-technical resilience as well as the

social flexibility needed to cope, innovate, and adapt. The study described in this

article applied the resilience building principles outlined by Biggs et al. (2015) to a

formative resilience assessment to instill and cultivate general social resilience

within the social fabric of an essential service organisation. The process enabled

shared learning and creatively engaged people to foster dialogue for the collective

assessment of resilience. Moreover, it stimulated provocative possibilities to

enhance resilience through collective action (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987;

Holman, 2010). The study developed a principle-based formative resilience

assessment approach that is suggested where innovative social resilience building

interventions are sought. Transformability is a fundamental part of resilience

formulation (Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004), which is indispensable

for essential service delivery. Resilience involves being able to adapt to change and

navigate the white waters of transition without disrupting the essential services

modern society depends on. Amidst systemic change and disruption, approaches to

cultivate systemic resilience are crucial.

Funding

The authors are supported by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the

Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation of South Africa

(Grant No 98766), the Guidance for Resilience in the Anthropocene: Investments for

Development (GRAID) project funded by the Swedish International Development Agency

(SIDA), and a Young Researcher grant (No 621-2014-5137) funded by Vetenskaprådet in

Sweden.

Author Biographies

Susara E (Liza) van der Merwe is a big picture thinker who loves challenges and working

with concepts. She is a creative and innovative thought leader, good at conceptualizing and

designing solutions to problems, while balancing environmental and sociotechnical

considerations. She is a part-time PhD candidate at the Centre for Complex Systems in

Transition, Stellenbosch University. However, she also works full time as the Enterprise

Resilience Assessment Manager at Eskom, the South African national electricity utility. In

this capacity, she has established an enterprise resilience assessment framework for Eskom

and conducts ongoing assessments of resilience across Eskom's divisions and value chain.

She aims to identify opportunities and shortcomings in company-wide resilience posture

and to compile strategies to enhance resilience across the organisation. She has been

involved in a number of SenseMaker projects to assess resilience and other intractable

problem areas within the organisation.

Reinette Biggs holds the South African Research Chair in Social-Ecological Systems and

Resilience, based at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at Stellenbosch

University, South Africa (www.sun.ac.za/cst). She holds a joint appointment at the

Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, Sweden

(www.stockholmresilience.org), where she co-leads the research theme on social-ecological

transformations to sustainability. Reinette’s research focuses on three main areas: 1)

advancing social-ecological systems theory and methods, focusing specifically on concepts

and tools for understanding and assessing resilience; 2) regime shifts or tipping points in

social-ecological systems and their implications for ecosystem services and human

wellbeing; and 3) transformations to sustainability, focusing specifically on novel scenario

development tools for exploring how small-scale innovations can contribute to larger

systemic change.

Reinette also plays an active role in building regional and global communities of practice

around social-ecological systems and resilience research for sustainability. She initiated and

leads the Southern African Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (SAPECS,

www.sapecs.org), and co-chairs the international Program on Ecosystem Change and

Society (PECS, www.pecs-science.org). She also serves on the Board of Directors for the

Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics (http://www.beijer.kva.se/) and the South African

Global Change Science Committee.

Rika Preiser is a senior researcher at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at the

School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Her research explores

the conceptual development of complexity and how the study of the features and dynamics

of Complex Adaptive Systems inform novel ways for thinking about and anticipating more

equitable social-ecological transformation processes toward resilient Anthropocene futures.

Rika holds a Master’s degree in Journalism (2004) and a Master’s degree in Social

Anthropology (2008). In 2012 she completed her PhD entitled “The problem of complexity:

Rediscovering the role of critique” at Stellenbosch University. Rika teaches complex

adaptive systems thinking to students from the fields of medicine, business management,

sustainability studies and agricultural sciences.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send

a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Suggested citation: Van der Merwe, S., Biggs, R., & Preiser, R. (2018). Building social resilience in

socio-technical systems through a participatory and formative resilience assessment approach.

Systemic Change Journal, 1 (1), 1-34. DOI forthcoming.

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Factors necessary for effective corporate waqf management for Malaysian public healthcare

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2021

Purpose This research paper aims to determine the factors needed to propose a platform where waqf (Islamic endowment) organizations can collaborate with government public hospitals to develop corporate waqf hospitals. Consequently, the elements of governance and sustainability are included in the management of corporate waqf hospitals thereby leading to the corporatization of public hospitals. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts the qualitative research methodology and undertakes content analysis of data collected from journal articles, magazines and official websites. Data analysis involves open coding with NVivo 12. Findings General findings from the literature review have shown that architectural and engineering fundamentals were essential factors in the success of past waqf hospitals of the era between 8th and 14th centuries. In that era, the decentralized waqf-based hospitals employed the mutawalli (the trustee/manager of the waqf assets) to govern the administration of the hospitals. Present corporate waqf hospitals can exploit the elements identified from past waqf-based hospitals and additionally adopt the private-public partnership model in the form of a muḍārabah (profit-sharing contract) agreement to design a sustainable waqf governance model for Malaysian public healthcare services. Research limitations/implications The proposed platform is designed for a corporate waqf model developed in collaboration between Malaysian waqf institutions and public healthcare services. It abides by both the Malaysian fatwa (Islamic rulings) on waqf and the laws of the Malaysian Government. Practical implications There is potential for developing the Malaysian corporate waqf-governance healthcare model which will enable the hospital to provide better quality healthcare to more patients through upgrading the quality of equipment used in hospitals and/or better facilities at equal or lower costs. Consequently, this will not only improve waqf management and distribution but also result in reduction of government expenditure. Social implications This research promotes the concept of a corporate waqf hospital which will provide innumerable beneficial healthcare services in terms of improved healthcare quality at affordable costs to the general public and at no cost to the poor and the underprivileged. Originality/value Although waqf has played an important role as a vehicle for Islamic financing in the society for centuries, a model of collaboration or partnership of waqf with public healthcare services has yet to be explored and developed. With proper corporate governance and well-managed sustainability in a corporate waqf model, this newly developed partnership between waqf institutions and public healthcare providers can be a first step in many more interesting collaborative arrangements that can be established between waqf institutions and public services in the future.

Child Psychological Adjustment to War and Displacement: A Discriminant Analysis of Resilience and Trauma in Syrian Refugee Children

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2021
J Child Fam Stud

The ongoing war in Syria has led to the displacement of 12 million people since 2011, with minors representing 40% of all refugees. Syrian children living in refugee camps are at risk of developing a wide range of mental health problems, given their previous and ongoing exposure to episodes of violence, disruption of family ties, and discontinuous access to education. In this study, we drew on the salutogenic paradigm to investigate whether, and to what extent, high/low levels of resilience were associated with other indicators of mental health and post-traumatic response in Syrian children living in refugee camps. The sample was composed of 311 Syrian children living in Jordanian refugee camps as a consequence of the war in Syria. We administered quantitative self-report measures to assess participants' exposure to trauma, individual levels of resilience, and mental health, performing discriminant analysis to examine the association between resilience and trauma/ mental health. Syrian children living in Jordanian refugee camps reported intense exposure to traumatic events. The linear discriminant equation supported adoption of the function [Wilk's Lambda (Λ = 0.827)]: lower levels of resilience were associated with trauma symptoms (re-experiencing, avoidance, and hyperarousal) and emotional problems, while higher levels of resilience were associated with pro-social behaviours. The findings of the present study suggest that resilience acts as a protective factor buffering children from the consequences of trauma and challenging life conditions. We discuss the implications for interventions designed to promote the wellbeing and mental health of children living in refugee camps.

An Overview & Synthesis of Disaster Resilience Indices from a Complexity Perspective

Article

Mar 2021

Identifying Disaster resilience indices (DRI) for cities and communities remains a commonapproach for assessing their structural ability and inherent capacity to cope with, recover from, and adapt to disasters. Particularly popular are composite DRI methodologies that are quantitative, top-down, and geographically mappable. DRI have become more comprehensive as the complexity of urban systems is increasingly acknowledged. However, DRI remain criticized as static, reductive, and inadequate when viewed under a complexity paradigm, which views urban systems as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), where observed properties (like resilience) emerge from many interactions among heterogenous agents in a network. Literature reviews have covered the state and trends for DRI development. Our objective is to synthesize literature at the nexus of these reviews, CAS, and Socio-ecological Systems (SES) to determine the extent to which commonly adopted indicators relate to widely accepted tenets of CAS. Findings show that DRI indicators usually relate more closely to temporal snapshots of vulnerability, and alternative framings of current indicators along with interdisciplinary approaches could better capture CAS aspects of urban resilience. Research and development should strive to develop DRI based on underlying principles of CAS and SES, and consider adapting top-down quantitative approaches with thick data, network models, and mixed-method triangulations. Explicitly associating complexity theory with DRI can (i) help researchers in socio-technical and socio-ecological domains develop improved resilience indicators and assessment methods that are clearly differentiated from vulnerability metrics, and (ii) guide policy and decision-makers, amid future uncertainty, to better identify, implement and track capacity-enhancing measures.

Developing the ART of Resilience in an electric utility

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Nov 2020

The Enterprise Resilience team in Eskom, South Africa's national electricity utility follows top-down and bottom-up approaches to enhance resilience in their system. This system is a complex adaptive socio-technical organisation, situated within the context of an electricity sector in transition, as well as deep turmoil in the associated socioeconomic , socio-ecological, and socio-political systems in the country. The heuristic used by the team is of developing the "ART of resilience", which relates to the ability to "anticipate and adapt, respond and recover, and to transform". The metaphor of art intentionally references the complex adaptive processes involved in the production of art-which are seldom about the application of rules and more often about working with the affordance of the context in the moment. The intent is create conditions for beneficial emergence across various kinds of human networks internal and external to the organisation, namely formal (day-today) structures, emergency response structures, and informal networks.

Elaborating a systems methodology for cascading climate change impacts and implications

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2020

New research is drawing attention to the potential for climate change to generate cascading impacts and implications across linked human-environment systems, requiring closer accounting of these interactions to anticipate the emergence of surprises and feedbacks. However, there is little practical guidance for those interested in characterising, identifying or assessing cascades, and few empirical examples. In this paper, we elaborate a systems-based methodology to identify and evaluate cascading climate change impacts and implications. We illustrate its application using the case of a participatory process with urban infrastructure managers, facing the legacy effects of damaging earthquakes and the prospect of future climate change. The results show the proposed approach and visualisation of cascades as causal diagrams provides a robust and flexible analytical framework. The use of systems thinking, visual aids, interactive discussion and expert elicitation generated valuable information about potential cascades, their interactions across domains of interest, and the implications for management. The process can provide a basis for further empirical application and advance methodological and conceptual development. Specifically, the systems methodology: •Identifies interdependencies and interconnections which may serve as transmission pathways for climate-related impacts; •Enhanced stakeholders’ understanding of multiple causes and effects of climate change; and •Produced a useful visual aid for stakeholders to explore cascading impacts and implications, and opportunities for intervention.

The ontology of resilience: The impossible trinities

Article

Jan 2020

To address many societal challenges it is important to improve the resilience of the food system. Research is needed to quantify and analyse the resilience of food systems in different contexts. Is it possible to have a standardised description of resilience of a food system with a measurable set of indicators? To address this question we started by developing an ontology of resilience for food systems based on literature study and using insights from semantic technologies. Our exploration identifies a number of impossible trinities in resilience research on which choices must be made in the definition and measurement of resilience. Our findings are relevant to policy decisions in choosing the proper ‘type’ of resilience and researchers to identify the relevant research problem.

SES Handbook copy Chapter 10 Futures Analysis

Chapter

Full-text available

Jun 2021

Scenarios and participatory scenario planning, futures wheels, three horizons framework, design/experiential futures, horizon scanning, Delphi, trend impact analysis, emerging issues analysis, causal layered analysis, appreciative inquiry, gaming (also known as ‘gamification’ or serious gaming), future workshops, visioning, back-casting, road-mapping

Proceedings of the Joint International Resilience Conference, JIRC2020

Conference Paper

Dec 2020

T. Comes

CST Toolkit on a formative resilience assessment approach that uses resilience-building principles

Method

Full-text available

Oct 2019

A bottom-up participative approach for conducting formative resilience assessments in a socio-technical system which stimulate general resilience in the social fabric

A framework for conceptualizing and assessing the resilience of essential services produced by socio-technical systems

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2018
ECOL SOC

Essential services such as electricity are critical to human well-being and the functioning of modern society. These services are produced by complex adaptive socio-technical systems and emerge from the interplay of technical infrastructure with people and governing institutions. Ongoing global changes such as urbanization and increasing prevalence of extreme weather events are generating much interest in strategies for building the resilience of essential services. However, much of the emphasis has been on reliable and resilient technical infrastructure. This focus is insufficient; resilience also needs to be built into the human and institutional processes within which these technical systems are embedded. Here, we propose a conceptual framework, based on a complex adaptive systems perspective, that identifies four key domains that require investment to build the resilience of essential services. This framework addresses both the technical and social components of the socio-technical systems that underlie essential services and incorporates specified and general resilience considerations. The framework can be used to guide resilience assessments and to identify strategies for building resilience across different organizational levels.

A systemic approach to processes of power in learning organizations: Part I – literature, theory, and methodology of triple loop learning

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2018
Learn Organ

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to introduce a systemic approach to organizational learning “triple loop learning” (TLL) that addresses processes of power. Three equally important foci in our TLL are processes of design, processes of debate and processes of power. The focus on power aims to shift “power over” (power as domination) to “power to” enact empowering designs, “power to” co-develop responsible decision-making and “power to” transform our relations with each other and with life on Earth. Design/methodology/approach The organizational learning literature is reviewed in the context of power dynamics and its shortcomings are highlighted. The authors introduce their understanding of TLL, and how it engages with power dynamics in organizations. Findings Peter Senge’s conceptualization of systems thinking is unable to recognize processes of power in organizations and offers limited support to transformative learning. Conceptualizations of TLL aim to enhance learning in organizations but none satisfactorily address the processes of power. The learning organization literature as a whole does not satisfactorily address processes of power or reflect our way of envisaging “looping between loops of learning” in TLL to better design, better debate and better develop relationality in the social fabric of organizations. Originality/value The authors introduce an original approach to TLL that directly addresses the processes of power in organizations. It offers researchers, learning facilitators and practitioners of the learning organization a way to engage with the processes of power without neglecting other important organizational and environmental issues.

Improving participatory resilience assessment by cross-fertilizing the Resilience Alliance and Transition Movement approaches

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2017
ECOL SOC

The concept of resilience is currently being widely promoted and applied by environmental and development organizations. However, their application of resilience often lacks theoretical backing and evaluation. This paper presents a novel cross-fertilization of two commonly used approaches for applying resilience thinking: the grassroots movement of Transition Towns, and the Resilience Alliance's Resilience Assessment. We compared these approaches through a text analysis of their key handbooks, and combined them in a series of participatory workshops with a local partner active in the Transition Movement. Our results demonstrate that despite sharing a number of key features, these two approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Strengths of the Transition Movement include its motivating overarching narrative of the need to transform in response to global sustainability challenges, as well as practical tools promoting learning and participation. The Resilience Assessment's conceptual framework and structured process generated context-specific understanding of resilience, but provided little guidance on navigating transformation processes. Combining the Resilience Assessment's theory on complex systems with the Transition Movement's methods for learning also generated synergies in fostering complexity thinking. Based on these findings, we believe that integrating strengths from both approaches could be widely useful for practitioners seeking to apply resilience for sustainable development. Our study also highlights that methods for assessing resilience can be improved by combining insights from science and practice.

Social-ecological resilience and biosphere-based sustainability science

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2016
ECOL SOC

Humanity has emerged as a major force in the operation of the biosphere. The focus is shifting from the environment as externality to the biosphere as precondition for social justice, economic development, and sustainability. In this article, we exemplify the intertwined nature of social-ecological systems and emphasize that they operate within, and as embedded parts of the biosphere and as such coevolve with and depend on it. We regard social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems and use a social-ecological resilience approach as a lens to address and understand their dynamics. We raise the challenge of stewardship of development in concert with the biosphere for people in diverse contexts and places as critical for long-term sustainability and dignity in human relations. Biosphere stewardship is essential, in the globalized world of interactions with the Earth system, to sustain and enhance our life-supporting environment for human well-being and future human development on Earth, hence, the need to reconnect development to the biosphere foundation and the need for a biosphere-based sustainability science.

DESIGNING PROJECTS IN A RAPIDLY CHANGING WORLD Guidelines for embedding resilience, adaptation and transformation into sustainable development projects

Technical Report

Full-text available

Jan 2016

RAPTA is a unique tool to help project designers and planners build the ideas of resilience, adaptation and transformation into their projects from the start, to ensure outcomes that are practicable, valuable and sustainable through time and change. This report offers practical advice to planners, project managers, policy makers, donors, farmers, researchers and other stakeholders on how to do this. This version of the guidelines was developed especially for meeting challenges around the future security of agriculture but applies equally well to planning for climate change adaptation, urban development, disaster management, biodiversity conservation and other vital fields. RAPTA offers a fresh dimension to the familiar task of project planning and development – one which allows for rapid social, physical and environmental change in an uncertain world – leading to projects which deliver better results, more durably, reliably and consistently. It seeks to accommodate the rate, magnitude and novelty of the changes we face and the fact that, for these challenges, there are no “off the shelf” solutions. It promotes a structured approach to learning that enables constant improvement and adaptation to change.

Appreciative inquiry: Theory and critique

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2011

Gervase Bushe

Is resilience socially constructed? Empirical evidence from Fiji, Ghana, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2016

The objective of this paper is to better understand the various individual and household factors that influence resilience, that is, people’s ability to respond adequately to shocks and stressors. One of our hypotheses is that resilience does not simply reflect the expected effects of quantifiable factors such as level of assets, or even less quantifiable social processes such as people’s experience, but is also determined by more subjective dimensions related to people’s perceptions of their ability to cope, adapt or transform in the face of adverse events. Data collected over two years in Fiji, Ghana, Sri Lanka and Vietnam confirms the importance of wealth in the recovery process of households affected by shocks and stressors. However our results challenge the idea that within communities, assets are a systematic differentiator in people’s response to adverse events. The findings regarding social capital are mixed and call for more research: social capital had a strong positive influence on resilience at the community level, yet our analysis failed to demonstrate any tangible positive correlation at the household level. Finally, the data confirm that, like vulnerability, resilience is at least in part socially constructed, endogenous to individual and groups, and hence contingent on knowledge, attitudes to risk, culture and subjectivity.

Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organization

Book

Jan 2013

Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace

Book

Feb 2010

The Handbook stands alone as a rigorous, evidence-based Body of Knowledge under the banner of the International Society for Performance Improvement's "performance landscape," and for the first time provides a unified and authoritative compendium of standard principles and best practices for improving productivity and performance in the workplace. Featuring best-in-field researchers, thinkers, and practitioners across several disciplines and geographic boundaries, each volume provides a current review of all information presently available for the three core areas of improving performance in the workplace: Instructional Design and Training Delivery; Intervention Selection and Implementation; and Measurement and Evaluation. © 2010 by International Society for Performance Improvement. All rights reserved.

An introduction to the resilience approach and principles to sustain ecosystem services in social–ecological systems

Chapter

Mar 2015

As both the societies and the world in which we live face increasingly rapid and turbulent changes, the concept of resilience has become an active and important research area. Reflecting the very latest research, this book provides a critical review of the ways in which resilience of social-ecological systems, and the ecosystem services they provide, can be enhanced. With contributions from leaders in the field, the chapters are structured around seven key principles for building resilience: maintain diversity and redundancy; manage connectivity; manage slow variables and feedbacks; foster complex adaptive systems thinking; encourage learning; broaden participation; and promote polycentric governance. The authors assess the evidence in support of these principles, discussing their practical application and outlining further research needs. Intended for researchers, practitioners and graduate students, this is an ideal resource for anyone working in resilience science and for those in the broader fields of sustainability science, environmental management and governance.

Building social resilience in socio-technical systems through a participatory and formative resilience assessment approach

Abstract and Figures

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