Resilience in the New Age of Risk

Our increasingly complex and connected systems face continuously emerging disruptions. Resilience constitutes a fundamental departure from the philosophy of risk-management. With resilience, stakeholders adopt risk mitigation strategies aligned to the theories of complex systems.

Resilience applies to an extremely large array of systems and contexts. Moreover, the topic of resilience is surprisingly absent from most university curricula. This course fills a gap and walks you through a mode of thinking that is bound to shape the way risks and disasters are dealt with in our increasingly connected society. Hence, tomorrow's risk managers will and shall also be "resilience managers".

This course, co-organised with the leaders of the Singapore-ETH Center's Future Resilient Systems II programme, breaks down the concept of complex systems and their resilience. It introduces some of the different flavors of resilience and provides tools for building it in various socially relevant areas (social resilience, engineered systems resilience, organizational resilience...).

The course is divided in 4 parts.

• Part 1: Foundations of Resilience (2 hours)
• Part 2: Resilience Analysis: Infrastructure Systems (12 hours)
• Part 3: Organizational resilience and sensemaking (6 hours)
• Part 4: Resilience in Practice (4 hours)

Part 1 introduces the concept of resilience, and the framework in which it is applied. The distinction between resilience and risk management is highlighted, as well as how these approaches complement each other. The founding concepts of resilience are explained and illustrated: vulnerability, disruption, absorption, recovery, adaptation, etc.

Part 2 walks you through the analysis of the resilience of infrastructure systems. It introduces the useful metrics of resilience. It provides examples of building resilience into complex systems, by increasing the robustness and recoverability of systems, and reducing vulnerabilities. Finally, students will explore the optimization of infrastructure systems.

Part 3. Every system subject to potential disruptions is managed by a human organization. Sensemaking describes how humans frame the problem. It is a process whereby organizational actors attach meaning to external events to resolve the uncertainty surrounding them. Investing in mindfulness improves personal and organizational resilience and success. Finally, the management of organizational resilience is discussed.

Part 4 will provide examples of the use of resilience by practitioners, with guest speakers from the public and private sector.

After taking this course, you will be able to:

• Discuss the concept of resilience and related frameworks and concepts, and explain their relevance in different contexts (organizations, infrastructure, social groups…).
• Use and discuss key resilience metrics and use them to analyze infrastructure systems.
• Discuss the role of organizational resilience and describe methods to improve it.
• Describe how resilience is applied in practice.

This course is aimed at MSc and MAS students, but also to doctoral students, from MTEC and other departments. Ideally, students have a quantitative background and some knowledge of risk management.