Resilience

Rebekkah Smith Aldrich

• Publisher: ALA Neal-Schuman
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780838916346
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838917534
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCE

We live in uncertain times.

Uncertainty on many fronts—political, economic, technological, environmental—confronts our everyday lives and our planning for the future. With increased access to data, news, and opinion, the variations on the themes of our day are complicated, often obscuring our path forward as communities. As a community leader, cultivating a clear vision for the future must take into account the need for increased resiliency.

Resilience, by definition, is a capacity that enables people, places, and systems to survive, adapt, and thrive.1 Resilience is multifaceted: it can refer to infrastructure, individuals, environmental or economic systems, and organizations.

Resilience can be naturally built in (as in healthy ecosystems) or be deliberately developed (as in sustainable building designs). In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, we are in the race of our lives to plan further and further ahead as the severity and frequency of environmental, social, and economic disruptions continue to intensify.

It is easy to have blinders on. It is easy to focus on immediate issues of concern, such as the price of e-books, the challenges of managing new staff who are from a different generation than yours, the difficulties associated with being managed by someone from a different generation than yours, or the fact that the air conditioning on the second floor of the library doesn’t ever seem to work right. It is challenging to keep our eyes focused on what is going on around us, outside the library, and to synthesize the implications of changes in our world for our library and community.

But that is part of the work: situational awareness.

In the military, officers will ask their soldiers for a “sitrep,” a report on the current situation in a particular area. Officers then collate that data from various areas to course-correct their plans to ensure that they have the latest intel to base decisions on. To provide a sitrep, soldiers have to be constantly vigilant, and to maintain that vigilance, they cultivate a high level of situational awareness.

Situational awareness today reveals amplified disruption on just about every front—political, economic, technological, environmental, and societal.

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

Situational awareness is the ability to identify, process, and comprehend the critical information about what is happening with regard to the mission. More simply, it’s knowing what is going on around you. (“Team Coordination Training Student Guide,” United States Coast Guard)

I use the phrase amplified disruption deliberately. There has always been, and always will be, disruption. However, disruption in the modern world is amplified by a 24/7 news cycle and the content- and engagement-hungry social media landscape. Reaction time is on a fast cycle, causing people to say, do, and think things in ways they did not when they got their serving of the day’s news from one of three television channels or two newspapers thirty years ago.

The media’s influence on our experience today exacerbates the challenges we face. Media outlets are growing increasingly desperate to hold on to our attention. They stoop to new lows, amplifying what has always been a profitable tactic: keeping us scared. The media manipulate our worldview to better profit from sensationalistic political disagreements, criminal altercations, and international incidents. This strategy creates a vicious cycle that deepens the divide between segments of our society, decreasing the likelihood that we will work together to address the challenges and opportunities that we are all faced with.

DISRUPTION IN OUR WORLD

Political disruption can be felt locally and internationally. Outrageous displays between world leaders who bait each other to push the button, rollbacks of decades-old environmental and tax policies that destabilize our future, partisan politicians who cannot work across the aisle for the betterment of those they serve—all these disrupt the work that needs to be done on behalf of ourselves. We suffer through the hackneyed national political sphere—amplified in the age of cable news, niche online publications, Twitter, and discussion boards—where various players jockey for position, pander to the camera, and search for the sound bite or the retweetable burn that will launch them into, or keep them in, the spotlight. We watch, internationally, as governments are overthrown, and in some cases, marginalized, creating chaos and uncertainty, and we wonder what will happen next.

Economic disruption is happening at a faster and faster pace, for better or for worse. From recession, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the antitax movement to the sharing economy on the Internet, cryptocurrencies, emerging markets, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution—change is happening, and it is happening fast. Our current economy is a delicate thing, changing some industries seemingly overnight, leaving larger and larger swaths of people out of the arena of economic security and leveraging others’ failure for gain. It is a rapidly moving, twisting, changing “thing” that can make some people fabulously wealthy while the vast majority are left fighting for scraps.

Technological disruption is a favorite topic of libraries and the public. Today it is the impact of livecasting your interaction with a police officer, and of artificially intelligent video editing that allows anyone to put words in your mouth if you’ve been videotaped.2 Tomorrow? Who knows! Tech can disrupt—for better or for worse—a variety of sectors: the economy, society, politics. Paying attention to these disruptions is essential for understanding the modern world and participating in it. Basic needs are affected by technology when governments work to harness the power of tech to deliver services that impact health care, housing, and food. Basic needs are impacted by technology when hackers use programs such as ransomware to hold hostage our personal information or when supposedly secure systems are hacked, releasing sensitive information that can change the landscape overnight. It’s not enough for the technological elite to follow the changes shaped by tech; this is a topic that impacts us all.

Environmental disruption is perhaps the most brutal and unforgiving disruption of all. It impacts our survivability on this planet. Climate change brought on by decisions made by humans over hundreds of years is now resulting in severe weather patterns that bring on life-threatening floods, droughts, fires, depletion of natural resources, and dangerous air that we all breathe. Your views may vary on how climate change is impacting your locality, but there is no doubt that food insecurity and access to fresh air, water, and livable places are human issues, not just local issues.

Social disruption is inevitable in the face of the massive disturbances just listed, and this area of disruption exacerbates all the others: political, economic, technological, and environmental. When people are pitted against each other for access to seemingly limited resources, when lobbyists purposefully undermine actual dialogue on issues, when others gain from one group’s disagreement with another group, we are fractured as a society. Social disruption can take many forms—gun violence, orphaned seniors, racism, terrorism, opioid abuse, and protest marches. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”3

We are in societal silos, clinging to long-held beliefs, lashing out at one another, disparaging differences of opinion to such a heated degree that violence is breaking out. Are there justified grievances? Absolutely. Is there a civil dialogue that informs change and growth? Not much. When our government is close to non-functioning and civic leadership is weakened by the toxicity of the political sphere, the social fabric of our communities becomes frayed and is weakened.

Disruption can have positive impacts as well as negative impacts and resilience can play just as large a role in that construct. A good example of the balance between good and bad disruption is nowhere more evident than in the advent of the Internet. While many focus on the ills of the Internet—loss of privacy, degradation of communication skills, criminal enterprises—the Internet has empowered economic innovation, creative problem-solving, and increased access to information in ways that we could not have imagined thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago. Finding opportunity in the face of disruption is not always an evil act. It can be beautiful, inspiring, and hopeful—helping our neighbors, solving problems, and providing new paths to understanding in the analog world. The key to our success will lie in our attitude about change and disruption. A resilient mindset will require that we embrace curiosity, pragmatism, and fast-cycle threat assessment.

THE ROLES OF GOVERNMENT AND NET STATES

Resilience planning by governments at every level—national, state, county, and local—is most prominently focused on addressing natural disasters and the impacts of climate change, largely due to the acute nature of severe weather events such as Hurricane Katrina (2005), Hurricane Sandy (aka Superstorm Sandy) (2012), and Hurricane Maria (2017). The year 2017 was the most expensive severe weather year in recorded history,4 and according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2007),5 “confidence has increased that some weather events and extremes will become more frequent, more widespread or more intense during the 21st century.”

This has certainly been borne out in recent years with historic droughts, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Miguel A. Figueroa
• Understanding Resilience
• Resilience in Libraries
• From the Field
• For the Future
• Conclusion