Because sustainability needs resilience.
A resilient society is build on technological resilience, organizational resilience, and social resilience.
Resilience is the ability to prepare for, resist against and recover from adverse events.
Along with productivity and sustainability, resilience is the third pillar modern societies rest on.
The work of DTU’s RiskLab enables the evidence-based design of resilient systems.
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Why we do what we do
Technological Resilience
Our modern societies are build on highly complex socio-technical systems. In the past, we have gradually changed and improved those system. We learned resilience the hard way: After something failed and exploded, we fixed it.
Today, we are radically changing those systems to meet urgent sustainability and productivity goals. For the smart critical infrastructure that our lives depend on, failure is not an option. That is why today, we need to design-in resilience, not test it in.
Organizational Resilience
Traditionally, organizations strive for productivity. That becomes even more urgent, as our ambitious sustainability targets also increase the pressure to be more productive.
At the same time, long-term success for individuals, teams and organizations depends on their ability to bounce-back from failures and adapt, learn and improve rapidly. That resilient capability does not happen by accident, nor is it free. Executive managers must design it into their organizations.
Social Resilience
Making progress means making choices. As we are taking giant leaps towards sustainability, we must have giant conversations about the distribution of the pains and gains.
As a open and democratic society, we have learned how to deal with controversies - at the pace of the past. The complexity of the issues we need to discuss constructively increases with their importance. We know of some of the issues that will face us, but not all. Social resilience is the key to keep growing together and become stronger, not weaker, in the face of our current and future challenges.