Dealing with The New Normal: Resilience in systems that must cope with uncertainty

Part of the School's intergrative seminar series. Delivered by Professor Patricia Hirl Longstaff, James Martin Senior Visiting Fellow, Professor, Syracuse University, Research Associate, Harvard Program on Information Resources Policy. Climate change, economic globalization, and many new levels of communication have all made many human, biological and technical systems more unpredictable. This has been called The New Normal: a time of higher uncertainty, with fast and strong disruptions in many systems. This is affecting technical systems, biological systems, economic systems, and human organizations. This has increased interest in resilience, a strategy that is often seen in systems that must operate under high uncertainty. Professor Longstaff will discuss some of the attributes of resilience that is seen in many systems and how resilience can fail. She has received funding for her interdisciplinary work from the US National Science Foundation. She has applied these concepts to community planning, human/technical systems, and business organizations. She is currently writing about the role of trust and blame in human systems that must adapt to new realities in their environments.