Resilience

While the ranchers and political leaders were natural objects of class indignation, they were not, this time at least, the principal culprits. Indeed, the protestors could scarcely have guessed the truth: The slowly burning fuse that had ignited the explosion in corn prices had been lit several years before and a thousand miles away by a seemingly disconnected event—Hurricane Katrina.

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Amid the euphoria of this ethanol investment bubble, almost no one considered potential impacts on Mexico’s peasant

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followed Katrina, with increasing amounts of the United States’ domestic supply being diverted to ethanol, the price of corn became inextricably coupled to the price of oil—not only because ethanol and oil are comparable fuels, but also because it takes an enormous

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to nearly $140, the now-linked price of corn also skyrocketed, provoking what may become an archetypal experience of the twenty-first century: a food riot.

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natural disasters, a fact that insurance companies tie unambiguously to climate change. Volatility of all sorts has become the new normal, and it’s here to stay.

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While the details are always different, certain features of these disruptions are remarkably consistent, whether we’re discussing the recent global financial crisis, the geopolitical outcomes of the war in Iraq, or the surprising consequences of a natural disaster. One hallmark of such events is that they reveal the dependencies between spheres that are more often studied and discussed in isolation from one another.

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to be triggered by seemingly harmless events, arrive with little warning, and reveal hidden, almost absurd…

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Like pulling on an errant string in a garment, which unravels the whole even as it reveals how the elements were previously woven together, we make…

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Even with a deep understanding of the individual systems involved, we usually find it difficult to untangle the chain of causation at work. And for all of the contributions of the much-ballyhooed Information…

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all, if we could actually see each of the individual packets of data pulsing through the Internet, or the complex chemical interactions affecting our climate, could we make sense of them? Could we predict in detail over the long term where those systems are headed or what strange consequences might be unleashed along the way? Even with perfect knowledge,…

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So what to do? If we cannot control the volatile tides of change, we can learn to build better boats. We can design—and redesign—organizations, institutions, and systems to better absorb disruption, operate under a wider variety of conditions, and shift more fluidly from one circumstance to…

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scientists, policymakers, technologists, corporate leaders, and activists alike are asking the same basic questions: What causes one system to break and another to rebound? How much change can a system absorb and still retain its integrity and purpose? What characteristics make a system adaptive to change? In an age of constant disruption, how do we build in better…

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insights for building social, economic, technical, and business systems that anticipate disruption, heal themselves when breached, and have the ability to reorganize themselves to maintain their core…

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With this in mind, consider how the Mexicans might have been spared their difficulties. Larger stockpiled reserves of corn, more diversified food crops, better real-time data, and better modeling of the impacts of U.S. corn crop diversion might obviously have helped; so too might a mechanism to rapidly secure alternative suppliers in a crisis, or restructuring the market to dampen the monopolies’ power, or investments in social programs for the poor to mitigate the effects of the price spike. Or one might just as readily have intervened in…

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The strategies implied in each of these interventions—ensuring that there are sufficient reserves available to any given system; or diversifying its inputs; or collecting better, real-time data about its operations and performance; or enabling greater autonomy for its constituent parts; or designing firebreaks so that a disturbance in one part does not disrupt the whole—are, at their core, strategies of resilience. As we’ll see, they can be…

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to which a structure like a bridge or a building can return to a baseline state after being disturbed. In emergency response, it suggests the speed with which critical systems can be restored after an earthquake or a flood. In ecology, it connotes an ecosystem’s ability to keep from being irrevocably degraded. In psychology, it signifies the capacity of an individual to deal effectively with trauma. In business it’s often used to mean putting in place backups (of data and resources) to ensure continuous operation in the face of natural or man-made disaster. Though…

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Throughout this book, we will explore resilience in both systems and people. Accordingly, we frame resilience in terms borrowed from both ecology and sociology as the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose…

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To improve your resilience is to enhance your ability to resist being pushed from your preferred valley, while expanding the range of alternatives that you can embrace if you need to. This is what resilience researchers call preserving adaptive capacity—the ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling one’s core purpose—and it’s an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility.

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There are, of course, many ways to expand your range of habitable niches. You could reduce your material needs in order to subsist in more resource-poor settings; you could learn to use a wider array of resources, so you could survive, MacGyver-like, on whatever might be locally available; you could invent a new technology, liberating yourself from a traditional constraint; you could modify tools designed for one niche to suit another; or you could learn to collaborate with the local denizens so that you don’t have to go it alone.

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the Stockholm Resilience Centre) are thresholds that keep the entire biosphere from flipping, suddenly and potentially catastrophically, into a new state: They include factors like the acidification of the oceans, the loss of biodiversity, human transformation of the land, and the availability of clean water. Of the nine thresholds Rockström’s team has identified, three are currently exceeded; another four are approaching their limit. Like Russian nesting dolls, these planetary boundaries set the limits and context for all human activities, from settlement and migration to conflict and commerce, and spur the development of new forms of technology and exchange.

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Enhancing the resilience of an ecosystem, an economy, or a community can be achieved in two ways: by improving its ability to resist being pushed past these kinds of critical, sometimes permanently damaging thresholds, and by preserving and expanding the range of niches to which a system can healthily adapt if it is pushed past such thresholds. In principle, there are as

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PATTERNS OF RESILIENCE

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From economies to ecosystems, virtually all resilient systems employ tight feedback mechanisms to determine when an abrupt change or critical threshold is nearing. As we’ll see in the next chapter, in an ecosystem like a coral reef, certain species’ behavior can change to prevent a system from flipping into a degraded state. In a human context it’s much the same, though when people do it, we’re often supported by an array of tools and technologies that provide us with a greater sense of situational awareness.

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For example, the venerable check engine light on your car’s dashboard, if attended to, can be thought of as maintaining the resilience of the engine (and hopefully, the driver) by helping you understand that something is wrong under the hood and encouraging you to quickly get to a mechanic. In a much more sophisticated but analogous way, we’re now in the midst of a massive real-time instrumentalization of many human systems, from health care to business

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When such sensors suggest a critical threshold is nearing or breached, a truly resilient system is able to ensure continuity by dynamically reorganizing both the way in which it serves its purpose and the scale at which it operates. Many resilient systems achieve this with embedded countermechanisms, which lie dormant until a crisis occurs. When that happens, they are dispatched, like antibodies in the bloodstream, to restore the system to health. Another way to bolster a system’s resilience is to de-intensify or decouple the system from its underlying material requirements or to diversify the resources that can be used to accomplish a given task. Under duress, some resilient systems may even detach themselves entirely from their larger context, localizing their operations and reducing their normal dependencies.

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industry. Sustainability experts at Nike recently calculated that it takes a whopping 700 gallons of water to produce a single organic cotton T-shirt. (Think about that the next time you stand in front of a wall of three-dollar tees at Walmart.) It’s little wonder that they, and others in their industry, are now aggressively pursuing efforts to develop less water-intensive approaches to production and manufacture—for example, by using less water to grow cotton and dye textiles. They’re trying to decouple water from apparel, to the greatest degree possible.

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While these systems may appear outwardly complex, they often have a simpler internal modular structure with components that plug into one another, much like Lego blocks, and—just as important—can unplug from one another when necessary. This modularity allows a system to be reconfigured on the fly when disruption strikes, prevents failures in one part of the system from cascading…

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scientist, demonstrated the importance of this kind of modularity with a famous parable about two watchmakers, Hora and Tempus. Both craftsmen built watches of equal complexity and beauty, comprising hundreds of parts. Yet…

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The reason? Hora built his watches modularly, fitting individual components into hierarchical assemblies that could be snapped together to complete the whole. Tempus, on the other hand, simply built…

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In Simon’s parable, the watchmakers are occasionally interrupted by a phone call with more orders for watches. When that happens, they must restart the task they were doing prior to the interruption. As such, Tempus must begin each watch over and over again, while much of Hora’s prior work is preserved. And boy, does it make a difference: If both watchmakers are interrupted just 1 percent of the time, Hora will complete 9…

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To encourage this beneficial modularity, many resilient systems are diverse at their edges…

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These specialized languages encode a vast menagerie of inputs and outputs, yet as protocols, they remain utterly basic, evolving slowly, if at all. The electrical grid, for example, in effect translates power generated from a number of sources—from nuclear power plants to windmills—into countless useful forms of work. At the center of this vast machine is an unchanging language of currents, voltages, and electrons. The resilience of the overall power system is improved as we expand the diversity of sources that feed it and improve the efficiency of the tasks that we use the resulting electricity for, yet the underlying core protocol of the system remains…

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This modularity, simplicity, and interoperability enable the components of many resilient systems to flock or swarm like starlings when the time is right and to break into islands when under duress. These are the very features that make things like cloud computing possible—in which groups of linked, redundant…

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Similarly coordinated approaches to resilience are found in realms as seemingly disparate as…

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Yet this kind of modular distributed structure is only part of the story. Paradoxically, resilience is often also enhanced by the right kind of clustering—bringing resources into close proximity with one another. But it’s a special kind of clustering, one whose hallmark is density and diversity—of talent, resources, tools, models, and ideas. It’s this kind of clustered diversity…

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These principles—tight feedback loops, dynamic reorganization, built-in countermechanisms, decoupling, diversity, modularity, simplicity, swarming, and clustering—form a significant…

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Understanding these principles also suggests resilience’s distinction from, and relationship to, some important related ideas. For example, though the words are often used interchangeably, resilience is not robustness, which is typically achieved by hardening the assets of a system. The Pyramids of Egypt, for example, are remarkably robust structures; they will persist for…

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Also, as we’ll see again and again, establishing a “warm zone” of diversity plays an enormous role in resilience and is one of its most important correlates. Whether it’s the biodiversity of a coral reef or, in the social context, the cognitive diversity of a group, increasing the diversity of a system’s constituent parts ensures the widest palette of latent, ready responses to disruption. The trick is to balance such diversity with mechanisms that ensure that these diverse actors can still cooperate

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In our travels, wherever we found strong social resilience, we also found strong communities. And here we don’t mean wealthy. Resilience is not solely a function of the community’s resources (though of course those help) nor defined solely by the strength of their formal institutions (ditto). Instead, we found resilient communities frequently relied as much on informal networks, rooted in deep trust, to contend with and heal disruption. Efforts undertaken to impose resilience from above often fail, but when those same efforts are embedded authentically in the relationships that mediate people’s everyday lives, resilience

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perspectives, knowledge systems, and agendas into a coherent whole. In the process, these leaders promote adaptive governance—the ability of a constellation of formal institutions and informal networks to collaborate in response to a crisis.

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These elements—beliefs, values, and habits of mind; trust and cooperation; cognitive diversity; strong communities, translational leadership, and adaptive governance—make up the rich soil in which social resilience grows. Taken together, they suggest new ways to bolster the resilience of communities and organizations, and the people who live within them.

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The deeper lesson is that to improve resilience we often need to work in more than one mode, one domain, and one scale at a time—we have to think about the aspects of a system that move both more slowly and more quickly than the one we are interested in, or examine aspects that are, at once, more granular and more

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But in order to do any of that, we must first understand where fragilities come from. So that is where we will turn first.

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But before we can understand how things knit themselves back together, we have to understand why they fall apart in the first place.

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It is at this moment in our thought experiment that you have painfully discovered that, in systems terms, your tree farm design is robust-yet-fragile (or RYF), a term coined by California Institute of Technology research scientist John Doyle to describe complex systems that are resilient in the face of anticipated dangers (in this case forest fires) but highly susceptible to unanticipated threats (in this case exotic beetles).

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On any given day, our news media is filled with real-world versions of this story. Many of the world’s most critical systems—from coral reefs and communities to businesses and financial markets—have similar robust-yet-fragile dynamics; they’re able to deal capably with a range of normal disruptions but fail spectacularly in the face of rare, unanticipated ones.

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No RYF design can therefore ever be “perfect,” because each robustness strategy pursued creates a mirror-image (albeit rare) fragility. In an RYF system, the possibility of “black swans”—low-probability but high-impact events—is engineered

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to ensure the continuity of communications in the face of disaster.

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So they asked the Internet’s original engineers to design a system that could sense and automatically divert traffic around the inevitable equipment failures that would accompany any such attack.

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Doyle points out a dynamic quite similar to this one at work in the human immune system. “Think of the illnesses that plague contemporary human beings: obesity, diabetes, cancer, and autoimmune diseases. These illnesses are malignant expressions of critical control processes of the human body—things like fat accumulation, modulation of our insulin resistance, tissue regeneration, and inflammation that are so basic that most of the time we don’t even think about them. These control processes evolved to serve our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who had to store energy between long periods without eating and had to maintain their glucose levels in their brain while fueling their muscles. Such biological processes conferred great robustness on them, but in today’s era of high-calorie, junk-food-saturated diets, these very same essential systems are hijacked to promote illness and decay.”

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Worse, like all RYF systems, over time the complexity of these compensatory systems—antivirus software, firewalls—swell until they become a source of potential fragility themselves, as anyone who’s ever had an important email accidentally caught in a spam filter knows all too well.

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The very fact that the system continues to perform in this way conveys a sense of safety. The Internet, for example, continues to function in the face of inevitable equipment failures; our bodies metabolize yet another fast-food meal without going into insulin shock; businesses deal with intermittent booms and busts; the global economy handles shocks of various kinds. And then the critical threshold is breached, often by a stimulus that is itself rather modest, and all hell breaks

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safety auditor cuts one of his targets a break and looks the other way; a politician pressures a regulator on behalf of a constituent for the reduction of a fine; a manager looks to bolster her output by pushing her team to work a couple of extra shifts; a corporate leader decides to put off necessary investments for the future to make the quarterly numbers.

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The system as a whole edges silently closer to possible catastrophe, displaying what systems scientists refer to as “self-organized criticality”—moving closer to a critical threshold.

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Coming after the long and slow decline of the other native plant-eating fish species from overfishing, the loss of the urchins proved catastrophic to Jamaica’s reefs. With no urchins—or other species—to keep it in check, algae quickly came to dominate every corner of the reef system, eventually covering 92 percent of its surface area and killing the corals underneath. With the loss of the corals went the remaining fish—reefs that supported hundreds of species for thousands of years were transformed into vacant algal wastelands seemingly overnight.

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On a healthy reef, a new pathogen decimating a single species (like the urchin) might not have had catastrophic consequences, because an essential reef function—like keeping algae in check—could be performed by more than one species. On the highly compromised Jamaican reef, however, the continued flourishing of the ecosystem as a whole became entirely dependent on a single species continuing to do that job. The loss of the urchins, an otherwise modest trigger, caused the reef to collapse virtually overnight.

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Similar questions confront us whenever we try to manage a complex system with highly interdependent parts. Whether we’re dealing with fish stocks or financial stocks, to improve the resilience of the system as a whole, we first need measurement tools that take the health of whole systems into account, not just their pieces. At least if we want to keep eating seafood.

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Sugihara found that California’s industrialized fishing operations had become so efficient at catching adult sardines that they had significantly changed the age structure of the entire stock. Bereft of adults in 1949 and 1950, the substantially more juvenile sardine population had failed to spawn, and when it encountered additional stressors from the natural world, it flipped into collapse.

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Managing entire classes of interacting species in this way simplifies what are otherwise very complex and nonlinear dependencies. By focusing on the relationships among categories of species, and not their absolute numbers, a portfolio approach can more easily accommodate complex factors like environmental fluctuations and advances in fishing technologies, even as it makes potential risks to the system much more explicit. And a multispecies portfolio can also be recalibrated according to the changing conditions of the local ecosystem, much like a financial adviser might arrange a portfolio one way for a young, risk-tolerant active investor and very differently when that investor becomes a risk-averse retiree.

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The sample used for the study involved approximately 700,000 transfers, and more than five thousand banks, taken from a typical day. The picture that emerges is startling: While most banks had a small number of connections, a few hubs had thousands. At the core of the network, just sixty-six banks accounted for 75 percent of the daily value of transfers. Even more telling, the network topology revealed that twenty-five of the biggest banks were completely connected—so intertwined that a failure among any strongly suggested a failure for all, the very definition of “too big to fail.”

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The market’s densely connected configuration, much like the Internet’s, ensured that randomly shutting down one of the innumerable banks in the global system would not be likely to cause systemic problems, because, statistically, the vast majority of banks in the network are at the end of spokes connected to a very limited number of hubs. But flip one of those central hubs (a rare and dangerous occurrence), and you might not only take down the thousands of banks directly connected to it, but the other hubs as well, along with thousands of institutions connected to them. Like a game of Jenga, pull a random plank and almost certainly nothing will happen. Pull the wrong one, and the entire robust-yet-fragile edifice comes crashing down.

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didn’t just take the normal form of funds flowing between banks to cover daily activities. They were anchored by new, sophisticated debt and insurance derivatives: collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were the securities that allowed banks to cut up, repackage, and then sell one another the debt from risky U.S. home mortgages; credit default swaps (CDSs) were the insurance contracts that tied these banks to one another in massive webs of financial interdependence. Together, they were the financial equivalent of nitric acid and glycerin—in small amounts they keep your heart pumping; in large amounts: boom.

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A CDO is a financial instrument that can best be understood by imagining a set of wineglasses stacked in a pyramid. When champagne is poured over the pyramid, the glass at the top is filled first, the glasses in the middle are filled next, and those at the bottom are filled last. A CDO was an equivalent financial instrument, but instead of disbursing wine into wineglasses, it poured the monies from mortgage payments into a set of specialized bonds.

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To create a CDO, a bank would bundle together a group of mortgages, held by regular U.S. homeowners. Each month, as these homeowners wrote their monthly mortgage checks, the banks would pool these payments together and make payouts to a series of bonds called tranches that were stacked up just like the wineglasses. The tranche at the top of the chain, like the glass at the top of the pyramid, got paid first, then the one following it, and so on, until either the tranche at the bottom was paid or the pool of funds was exhausted. By definition, the top tranche, at the front of the line to be repaid, was the least risky, so it earned both the best rating (AAA) from ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s and also the lowest rate of return, perhaps 2 percent. The bottom tranche, on the other hand, was the most risky:…

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So far, so good. But from there, CDO engineering quickly entered into the twilight zone. A bank might, for example, take the lowest-rated tranche (BB) of a particular CDO (let’s call it Lucifer) and turn it into its own CDO (let’s call this bottom tranche Damien). Even though it was comprised of junk, Damien, through the magic of financial engineering, was divided into its own set of tranches, the top one of which was awarded its own triple-A rating. This absurdity masked the fact that the underlying asset upon which it was based—Lucifer’s bottom-most BB tranche—was toxic, high-risk junk. It was like saying “here is the safest house that you can build with this toxic waste” and conveniently forgetting to say…

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CDSs had several crucial differences from traditional insurance, however. First, a CDS contract could be traded from investor to investor with no oversight or even regulations ensuring that the insurer had the ability to cover the losses when and if it needed to. By calling the contract a swap, and not insurance, the investors in CDSs were able to avoid the capital reserve requirements and regulatory oversight of the traditional insurance industry. (This was presumably the “innovation” at CDSs’ core.)

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Second, CDSs allow firms not only to insure against the possible default of their own investments, but to insure against the possible default of another company’s assets—akin to taking out an insurance policy on your neighbor’s Ferrari. Firms could use swaps as a tool for speculation—to bet a company would fail. This practice was made illegal in traditional insurance markets as far back as the 1700s, before which it was legal for individuals to buy insurance on British ships that they didn’t own, creating—quelle surprise—a rash of perfectly seaworthy ships mysteriously sinking to the bottom of the Thames. In its place, Parliament codified the notion of “insurable interest,” the requirement that you have an actual economic interest in the asset being insured. It was a concept that reigned unchallenged for two and half centuries—until the rise of the CDS. Finally, CDS contracts were sold and traded privately, or “over the counter.” While they added enormously to the risk profile of the institution doing the insuring, they didn’t show up on the traditional balance sheet. When the crisis came, nobody knew who owed what to whom and what it meant for anyone’s bottom line. In theory, CDOs and CDSs were originally designed to allow the market to do two things that are quite beneficial: first, to distribute risks to those who were most capable and willing to take them, and second, to allow banks to diversify their portfolios by mixing and matching some

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But, in allowing debt, credit, and risk to be sliced into tranches, packaged, bought, repackaged, sold, and resold, these instruments also made the dependencies between institutions mind-bogglingly complicated. The chain of custody for the underlying assets lengthened to the point of incomprehensibility.

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Thus, when the crisis hit, none of the banks could be quite sure if the other institutions with which they had contracts might also be enmeshed in other contracts that left those institutions on the hook in some potentially catastrophic way. This is known as the problem of counterparty risk—not the risk that you’ll become a deadbeat, or the risk that your partners will become deadbeats, but the risk that some of your partners’ partners will become deadbeats.

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When the crash came, a sense of transparency disappeared overnight, and with it went the most important variable in the system, trust—a theme we will revisit later in this book.

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themselves were mind-bogglingly complicated. The simplest of these ran some two hundred pages—the most advanced varieties required reading in excess of one billion pages. (Reading one page a minute, it would take you slightly more than 1,900 years to read a single contract for one of these products.) Firms had foregone the due diligence and just swallowed the contracts whole. After the crash, figuring out who owed what to whom wasn’t just hard, it was impossible. It’s unsurprising that the institutions that vaporized amid the destruction—Lehman, Bear Stearns, and AIG Financial Products—had among the largest counterparty exposure. They were attached to an anchor of unknowable size.

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there are telltale warning signs of a critical transition, or system flip, and they were visible in the run-up to the financial crisis. One is a phenomenon called critical slowing—the tendency of a system to become unstable near its threshold point. “When a system is under stress, it can be thrown out of equilibrium more easily, and it is slower to recover. Without sufficient recovery time, small perturbations can be amplified until the system is oscillating wildly out of control—even squealing from one stable state to another—like a car being oversteered on an icy patch.”

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Just before such destabilization occurs, a system paradoxically may experience synchrony, as agents within it briefly behave in lockstep just before being thrown into chaos. Synchrony can be seen in the brain cells of epileptics, for example, minutes before the onset of a seizure, and it was evident in the financial markets prior to the crash. By the height of the credit boom, from 2004 to 2007, performance across sectors of the financial system was correlated by more than 90 percent, a reflection of the self-similarity of the various market participants. “This was clearly an early indicator of impending danger,” says Sugihara.

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“Synchrony is evident when incentives or pressures lead individual actors to fall into step and make similar choices,” adds Levin. “In unsynchronized populations, some individuals thrive while others are in decline; in synchronized populations, a collapse in one place translates into a collapse in all places.”

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slowly eroded, the actions of the market players became synchronized, and the dependencies between them became unknowable. Then, as with the collapse of Jamaica’s sea urchins, the collapse of Lehman introduced a virus of unprecedented lethality and speed that decimated the financial system’s most critical resource: trust. When that happened, the system’s shock absorbers were hijacked and turned into shock amplifiers—spreading the contagion of uncertainty rather than the perception of safety.

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In response, the bankers did what seemed rational in such an uncertain situation: They hoarded cash and desperately tried to sell the depressed assets they had on their books. Yet most of the banks had followed similar business strategies before the crash, and so their most rational responses to it were also almost identical. In a densely connected network filled with clones, both responses, taken en masse, made the situation worse for everyone. Hoarding cash caused a liquidity crisis that made it harder for all banks—including the hoarders—to meet day-to-day obligations. The mass sell-off of depressed assets further accelerated the decline in value of the remaining assets on everyone’s books, harming the balance sheets of healthier banks and pulling more institutions into the vortex. In this light, it’s easy to see why, even with hundreds of billions in bailouts from the U.S. Treasury, banks were so reluctant to start lending again.

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problems with the precrash financial order to the complexity of the system—the hornet’s nest of interconnections between institutions—and the homogeneity of those institutions’ business strategies. And his recipe for improving the resilience of the financial network bears striking resemblance to ecologists’ prescriptions for ecosystems. “We need more complete, holistic measures of the health of the financial system and the dependencies between various institutions within it; we need to improve communications about it with the public at large in times of impending crisis or system flip, and we need to take steps to improve the financial system’s biodiversity.”

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To clear the air, regulators and governments need to be able to see the full number, size, and type of connections, flows, and dependencies between various institutions and markets at a glance. They need financial observatories to continuously replicate the Fedwire study, but on a much larger, more comprehensive, more timely, and more international scale.

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Doing so will require building distributed sensor networks for the global financial system and bringing many more transactions into the light of day. This is already starting to happen. In the United States, for example, the package of financial reforms signed into law after the 2008 crash requires that derivatives like credit default swaps be cleared through mechanisms designed to mitigate the problem of counterparty risk. They call these mechanisms centralized counterparty clearinghouses, or CCPs.

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In theory, this achieves several things at once. First, it makes mapping the complicated web of relationships between financial parties much easier, as the clearinghouse sees every relationship between every buyer and every seller in its domain. “Clearinghouses compress the highly dimensional web of financial obligations to a sequence of bilateral relationships with the central counterparty—a simple hub and spoke network. The lengthy chain of relationships is condensed to a single link,” says Haldane. Thus, in a crisis, a bank would not have to worry whom its business partners might also have dealings with—it would have dealings only with the clearinghouse. “Provided that link is secure—the hub’s resilience is beyond question—counterparty

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Centralized counterparty clearinghouses also provide a mechanism to ensure that each party can actually pay out its contracts, because the clearinghouse requires each party to set aside sufficient capital to fulfill the contract as if it had to be settled each day—commonly known as marked-to-market accounting. Additionally, clearinghouses make it far less likely that any particular firm will become dangerously overexposed—as AIG and Lehman did—without anyone being able to tell, since the clearinghouse is in a position to see such buildups as they occur.

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Nor is interposing a central counterparty clearinghouse in derivatives trading a panacea—it does not entirely eliminate the fragility in the financial network, but rather relocates it to the risk-management strategies of the central clearinghouses themselves. If managed well, a CCP can effectively mitigate the risk for a whole market; if not, its very centralized position could give it the starring role the next crisis. But a centralized counterparty clearinghouse does enable the collection of vastly more information and greater transparency about the activities of the market. This data can be combined with many other sources to inform sophisticated, system-wide measurement tools that, much like EBFM, reveal the connectivity of institutions, not just their size and behavior.

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informal social network mapping to identify and then inoculate super spreaders, those most at risk for initiating or propagating a contagion. So too in finance. “In early 2007, it’s doubtful whether many of the world’s largest financial institutions were more than two or three degrees of separation from AIG,” says Haldane. “And in 1998, it’s unlikely that many of the world’s largest banks were more than one or two degrees of separation from Long-Term Capital Management, originators of the last major crisis. Mapping the links in the financial network might have identified these financial black holes before they swallowed too many

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health and risk exposure—and in the first round of testing, regulators discovered that more than half of the banks tested required additional capital. But even this limited stress testing is only a once-a-year affair, like an audit, and doesn’t analyze how the system as a whole might be impacted if any of its subjects were to collapse. Such tests and simulations are regular occurrences for other network systems like electrical utilities, the military, and the air transportation system—and will need to become a regular feature of the financial system. And not just in a few market hubs, but everywhere.

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James Cook University in Australia, focusing for more than twenty years on what is now his formal area of expertise and informal object of obsession: the parrotfish.

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It’s easy to see why Bellwood would fixate on this beautiful colored fish. The parrotfish is one of the mainstays of the coral reef system, and it can do some genuinely interesting things: Not only can it change gender—female parrotfish can transform themselves into males when their dominant male leader dies—but certain species of parrotfish have developed the ability to envelop themselves in a transparent cocoon, made from a viscous substance that comes out of an organ in their heads. This homemade sleeping bag disguises the scent of the parrotfish at night, leaving it safely hidden from nocturnal predators.

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were stunned for two reasons. To begin with, batfish aren’t supposed to eat algae. They are an invertebrate feeder, not an herbivore. Secondly, we could never catch them doing it. As soon as we got in the water, they would swim away. It was like the Far Side cartoon where the cows are having a conversation and then the car comes and they all suddenly go back to eating the grass.” Bellwood’s research suggests that while the parrotfish act as lawnmowers for the reef, they can do so only when the reef is in the healthy, coral-dominated state. When the system has flipped and algae have taken over, they’re no longer able to provide this function. And that’s when the batfish—which normally doesn’t eat algae—is “deployed” on the reef to correct the imbalance. One prevents a flip, the other reverses it.

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“sleeping functional group,” a species or group of species capable of performing a particular functional role—but which do so only under exceptional circumstances.

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What might it look like for the financial system to have such sleeper functional groups of its own—countercyclical strategies lying dormant within the financial network, stirring only when the system flips, as it did in 2008? Finance may just have found its batfish in tiny Switzerland, in the form of a unique alternative currency called the WIR.

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Their result, the WIR, is a mutual credit system. A debt in WIR is either reimbursed by bartering in sales with someone else in the network or paid in full in the national currency. Over time, this network expanded to include one-quarter of all the businesses in the country. Today it is a thriving barter network that makes up a well-recognized complementary currency in Switzerland.

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analysis of more than sixty years’ worth of data on the WIR by macroeconomist James Stodder has shown that whenever there has been a recession, the volume of business in this unofficial currency has expanded significantly, cushioning the negative impact of lost sales and increased unemployment. Whenever there has been a boom, business in national currency has boomed, and activity in the unofficial currency has dropped proportionally again. In the past, people have attributed the success of the Swiss economy to a national character of pragmatism and thrift. Stodder’s study offered unexpected proof that the secret behind the country’s legendary stability and economic resilience is the spontaneous countercyclical behavior of this small alternative currency

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WIR functions precisely like Bellwood’s batfish—a latent, just-in-case contingency system that is activated when the economy is at or near a phase shift. Lietaer is an advocate for more complementary currencies that function like the WIR—business to business—in the European Union and the United States. “The substance that circulates in our global economic network—money—is maintained as a monopoly of a single type of currency (bank-debt money, created with interest). Imagine a planetary ecosystem where only one single type of plant or animal is tolerated and officially maintained and…

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The batfish and the WIR illustrate, in very different ways, an essential strategy of many resilient systems: They are embedded countercyclical structures that can respond proportionally, and in the same time signature, to disruptions as they emerge. These structures are part of an essential inventory of diverse tools often found in resilient systems: The batfish is an example of biodiversity, the WIR, of economic diversity. Like all inventory, this diversity imposes a carrying cost. And because such structures are latent in a system—they are only called upon when a crisis emerges—it can be difficult to place a value on them when…

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complexity, concentration, and homogeneity of a system can amplify its fragility; the right kinds of simplicity, localism, and diversity can amplify its resilience. The lens of resilience suggests, for example, that what’s needed is a smaller, simpler, more accountable, and more decouplable financial system, with genuinely diverse participants, that is more closely aligned with its original purpose—providing liquidity to…

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But resilience takes more than just the right structure—it takes the right kinds of processes and practices: measuring the whole health of the system, like EBFM; modeling and stress-testing the system, like the Fedwire study; scanning for emerging disruptions and mobilizing the right, inclusive responses when they strike, like the proposed financial observatories; building in feedback and compensatory systems, like the batfish and the WIR, that help keep the system in check. Most of all, it…

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“metabolism” up and down—reducing their operations to near dormancy for long periods, then, when they sense the time is right, scaling up to attack in highly coordinated swarms. Applied in very different circumstances, these sensing, scaling, and swarming tactics hold promise for improving the resilience of systems on which civilization more positively depends.

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point of the plot, however. As the issue of Inspire goes to lengths to explain, Operation Hemorrhage had two central aims: one strategic and one economic. First, the bombs would act as a sensor: They would pass through the latest air cargo security equipment, providing AQAP with good intelligence regarding the West’s explosives detection capabilities. Second, the bombs would be a provocation: The ensuing security fears would force the West to invest billions of dollars in new security procedures:   From the start our objective was economic… . The air freight is a multi-billion dollar industry… . For the trade between North America and Europe air cargo is indispensable and to be able to force the West to install stringent security measures sufficient enough to stop our explosive devices would add a heavy economic burden to an already faltering economy.

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Leverage: In the logic of post-9/11 terrorism, it’s priceless. AQAP didn’t even have to blow up a plane to achieve its aims—all it needed to do was provoke a costly response.

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Rooted in its networked structure, its ability to modulate its operational metabolism, and its ability to swarm, al-Qaeda’s success holds powerful lessons for designing positive forms of systemic resilience in domains far beyond terrorism. For several

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their management structures come to echo those processes. The 1950s-era corporate management hierarchy and the military’s current command-and-control model are both mirrors of their institutions’ basic operations.

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networked, and self-specializing dynamic is replicated inside terrorist networks and other asymmetric fighting forces as well as between them. In such arrangements, small groups are not bound together via traditionally strong command-and-control structures, but by ad-hoc, redundant, and informal social connections—less like the Marines and more like a pickup game of basketball. The small scale of the groups within such networks helps them remain agile, while the many-to-many ties in the larger network ensure that even if 10 percent or 20 percent of its membership is eliminated, the network as a whole will continue to function. “How many times have we killed number three in al-Qaeda? In a network, everyone is number three,” notes Arquilla, dryly.

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This was a central dynamic in the 2006 Lebanon War, when somewhere between one and two thousand Hezbollah fighters held their own against more than a hundred thousand Israeli troops and a relentless air campaign. Notes Arquilla: “On the first day of the war, Hezbollah launched two hundred rockets; on the last day of the war they launched two hundred rockets. Most Israelis and most people around the world feel that Hezbollah won the war, just by hanging in to the end. And how did they win it? By dividing up into several hundred little firing teams of three to four individuals, marching about, firing off hidden Katyushas, and melting back into the scenery. We call this strategy ‘shoot and scoot.’ And it’s the defining structure of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq—increasingly, everywhere.”

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When not fighting, very little can distinguish unconventional fighters or terrorists from local civilians—particularly where they share strong local, cultural, religious, and even family ties—making them incredibly challenging to detect and eliminate. This ability to scale down rapidly has other benefits as well: It reduces the group’s support requirements, it preserves their future fighting capacity, and it increases the likelihood that their more traditionally organized opposing force might accidentally kill or otherwise offend innocent civilians—mistakes that can be disastrous to the larger effort to frame the narrative of the conflict.

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they do undertake, terror networks have increasingly adopted a new offensive technique that Arquilla calls “swarming.” In this model, small highly distributed teams simultaneously attack nonmilitary targets, overwhelming defenses—if there are any—originally designed to deter a single large aggressor. “In the 2008 Mumbai bombing, just ten attackers in five two-man teams struck at the same time—five different places in one city. They completely overwhelmed a very wealthy and pretty well militarized country—India—and held a major world city hostage for two days, killed two hundred people, and caused untold disruption upon that society. That’s the template of what’s to

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At a cellular level, however, something truly remarkable is happening. When the TB bacteria arrive in the lung, they are met by macrophages (literally “big eaters”), the white blood cells at the front lines of the human immune system that are normally responsible for consuming and destroying invading pathogens. In certain cases, macrophages find this task difficult to do, so in a last, kamikaze-like move, they will engulf an unknown invader, coat it in the cellular equivalent of Saran Wrap, and then, on cue, promptly die, taking the pathogen with them. However, in TB, occasionally just the opposite occurs: TB takes over some macrophages, preventing them from dying, and turns them into zombie-like incubators for producing more TB bacteria, which slowly replicate inside until they burst their cellular hosts open and spread to others.

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This process isn’t perfect—many TB bacteria are eliminated by untainted macrophages, which sense the distorted chemical signature of their TB-infected counterparts and can turn on them. In more than 90 percent of infected people, the hosts’ immune response is just effective enough to control, but not entirely eliminate, the TB infection, and the disease enters a long period of latency, which can last for years. “This long latency period is part of the reason TB is so insidious,” says microbiologist Sarah Fortune, a TB researcher at Harvard. “In its latent state, TB doesn’t do very much, which is why our traditional tools against it, antibiotics, are not terribly effective. After all, antibiotics target metabolism, and with latent TB, there isn’t much being metabolized.”

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things that make it so deadly. It allows TB’s human hosts to grow up and reproduce, creating a new generation of people for the disease to spread to. “TB is like a symbiont that occasionally kills you,” says Fortune. “In contrast, illnesses like Ebola are far rarer, precisely because they become deadly so quickly. In a matter of weeks, all the human hosts are gone, and they take the outbreak with them.”

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While the precise biomolecular mechanics are still not perfectly understood, the current model of TB’s pathology suggests that during the latent phase of the disease, TB bacteria constantly probe the immune system for weaknesses, much like the AQAP terror cell probing the global security system. “Our reasoned assumption is that during the latent phase, some TB is active, much is inert, and then, some critical threshold is passed, often in an immune system compromised by other illness such as HIV, alcoholism, or diabetes, and the illness enters its active phase,” says Fortune.

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amid clusters of now-dead immune cell tissues. Eventually, such granulomas (called “caseous” because of the cottage cheese–like consistency of their dead centers) can grow to be the size of a tennis ball inside the lung. And as they grow, the necrotic material at their core begins to liquefy, forming the perfect environment for TB bacteria to multiply. And the TB does just that: A modest 2-centimeter granuloma alone can contain 100 million active bacteria. As the granuloma grows, it irritates the lining of the lungs, eventually bursting and spraying the inside of the lungs with the bacteriological equivalent of a swarm attack, hitting many targets at once. “TB depends for its survival on inducing this tactical error on the part of the immune system,” says Fortune. “The effort to contain the infection serves only to concentrate and then amplify it.”

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Both TB and terror networks maintain their resilience amid sustained attack by moderating their metabolism, scaling down to near dormancy for long periods of time, and scaling up to strike when the time is right. Both depend on mechanisms for probing their target’s responsiveness and dynamically reorganizing at the right moment. Both spread by provoking an overreaction from their host targets. And both succeed by swarming in coordinated, simultaneous attacks. These similarities are starting to suggest new, biologically inspired metaphors for tackling terror networks.

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of terror groups is to absorb and mimic their tactics: to meet the network with a network. “The War on Terror is actually the first great war in which we’re seeing nations at war with networks. The United States and its allies initially approached things in very traditional ways: massive deployments, overwhelming force, and shock and awe.” Like an incomplete course of broad-spectrum antibiotics, these approaches were sufficient for clearing the battlefield but not for holding it. And as they failed to do so, they have slowly, painfully, been replaced with lighter, more agile, targeted and networked approaches.

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American corollary to Hezbollah’s shoot and scoot model, Arquilla describes what finally came to work in the U.S. military’s campaign against networks in Iraq, a strategy he calls “outpost and outreach”: “Several years into the war, over much resistance, we moved our soldiers from huge bases to hundreds of small outposts thirty to fifty soldiers apiece, dramatically expanding the number of nodes in our physical network.” This quickened response times, allowing U.S. troops to respond speedily, flexibly, and proportionally to a threat or problem, within minutes instead of hours. It also encouraged real relationships with local residents, creating connections that generated huge amounts of actionable intelligence.

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Supported by the success of outpost and outreach, U.S. military forces have also started to embrace swarm tactics of their own, aimed at excising local terror groups whole. Like the slow, persistent efforts used to take down narcotics and Mafia networks, these counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations are predicated on long wait-and-watch intelligence-gathering efforts, which gradually illuminate latent ties in the terrorist’s social network. Then, when as much of the network has been revealed as possible, agile

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TB, the timing, speed, simultaneity, and precision of these strikes is important. Because many-to-many networks are naturally resilient, normal military kill or capture strategies are too slow to ever be effective—the loss of individual members is simply routed around by those remaining, like packets

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“This presents a huge and as yet unfinished cultural change for military forces, which have an inherent doctrinal preference for rapid destruction,” says Arquilla. “We’re slowly realizing that to win, you have to preserve as much information as possible, for as long as possible, before striking. And that means not blowing things up, at least until the last possible minute.” In netwar, as in immunology, the timing of force is often more important than its scope.

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retrofit of existing military practices. What would it look like for U.S. forces to embrace fully the self-organizing dynamics of its networked adversaries? Arquilla suggests the military may one day adopt the market-driven dynamics of companies like eBay: Instead of issuing pages and pages of operational orders, a commanding general could post tactical objectives to a website and assign points values to them: 100 points for this bridge; 500 for the capture of this town or that enemy combatant. “The general’s various units would log on, see what’s listed, and bid for whatever is there. If there was something the general wanted done that wasn’t getting done, he could raise the point values. Or lower them. And, at the end of the day, if there was something that still wasn’t done, he might have to give an actual order to someone. He could still do that. But I believe we’d see self-synchronizing campaigns that are faster, more adaptive, and more effective.”

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wages such campaigns? Arquilla envisions an army of swarmers. “I would rest easy if twenty years from now, instead of ten army divisions, we had a hundred clustered small units,” he says. Like its enemies, this military would structure itself to scale up and down more quickly. “We have more than two million people right now; I think we could take it down to under four hundred thousand in the active force and have a larger reserve, but just that: a reserve. We could achieve all of this at about half the cost that we’re paying today, if we take networks seriously. It’s not rocket science. It’s network science.”

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If there is a traffic jam on one transmission line, electricity is rerouted to its final destination in ways that can be surprisingly circuitous. When the lights are turned on for dinner in Portland, Oregon, for example, some of the electricity often whizzes from Los Angeles and then takes a detour through Utah before lighting the bulbs up north. When the TV is powered up for Sunday Night Football on the East Coast, the electricity might travel, at the speed of light, from Canada and down through Ohio and even Virginia before linking

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August 14, 2003, however, was not an average day. In addition to the shorted power lines, the alarm software that would have typically notified the local operator of the problem also failed. Unaware of the damage, all of the other operators wheeling power across the regional grid continued to route electricity through the damaged area, forcing the transmission lines to bear an untenable amount of current. Stressed well beyond their capacity, within two hours of the initial short circuit all of the power lines in Ohio cut out entirely.

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described earlier, the power outage in Ohio spread from a small triggering event to a systemwide collapse, tripping circuit breakers and sending more and more plants and lines offline. The grid operators were caught completely by surprise and, equipped with outdated and incompatible monitoring equipment, were unable even to see what was happening. Within eight minutes, the blackout affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states. Bigger than 1965, much bigger than 1977, the blackout of 2003 was the largest power outage in North American history. As day turned to night, air and train travel on the East Coast ground to a halt. Cleveland declared a curfew on all persons under the age of eighteen. In some affected urban areas, the Milky Way became visible for the first time in decades. All this, triggered by a tree branch and some by-now-familiar factors: systemic complexity, lack of transparency, and a lack of interoperability.

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room—would simulate the impact of disturbances to the grid. By the 1960s, however, the new digital computers allowed for a more sophisticated system. Most power plants and transmission lines switched over to something called SCADA, an acronym that stands for “supervisory control and data acquisition.” These systems collect data from various sensors at a plant or in the lines and then send it off to a central computer that manages and controls it. Like many protocols, the interconnectedness that came from using such a standard initially resulted in greater efficiency. But over time, as the physical grid and its associated technologies grew in sophistication, SCADA systems proved incapable of capturing the fuller state of the grid and had the effect of slowly eroding, not supporting, its resilience.

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between human operators prove useless because neighboring utilities can use incompatible control protocols. A collection of transcripts gathered on the day of the 2003 blackout illustrates the lack of interoperability and real-time information between the system managers, as in this example, between operators of the Pennsylvania–New Jersey–Maryland and Midwest Independent System Operator regional

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The operators were reduced to managing the “greatest engineering triumph of the 20th century” using technology invented in the nineteenth—the landline telephone. Their situational awareness was incomplete, murky, and based on old information.

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the (thankfully simulated) grid in a matter of minutes. A modified version of this approach has now been confirmed in the wild: On November 8, 2011, hackers are suspected of remotely gaining access to a water pump’s controller connected to the Springfield, Illinois, municipal water supply. By sending commands to rapidly turn the pump on and off,

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three by-now familiar design principles of this grid of the future. The first is real-time monitoring and reaction. In much the same way as economists like Andy Haldane call for the collection of better real-time data about the performance of the global economic network, the grid needs vastly more sensors deployed at every level of its organization, from the core to the periphery. The second principle is anticipation. Current SCADA systems assess isolated bits of information with a thirty-second delay, analogous to driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror. Better monitoring and anticipation would create what Amin refers to, only half jokingly, as “self-consciousness” in the system: Advanced controllers would perform like a master chess player, modeling supply and demand several steps ahead in a chained link of events. The third design principle is isolation, or decoupling. At the first sign of failure, the grid would break itself down into islands, or isolated entities. Each island would be vulnerable to complete failure, certainly, but the systemwide cascading failures that ultimately led to the blackout of 2003 could be avoided.

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For many of us, mastering such a simple task will take a few tries, but we eventually get there—but how? Although we get vital information about our bodies in relationship to space from our sense of sight, we also have a sense of our body’s positioning—where our legs and arms are, for example, at any given moment—even without looking. Special receptors, called proprioceptors or stretch receptors, are located throughout our bodies and continually relay positional information back to our brains. Our brains, in turn, take stock of the incoming data, reconcile it with what our eyes and other sensory organs tell us, and create a composite, internal sensation of our own body’s orientation in relation to the space around us, even if we can’t physically see our limbs and torso at the moment.

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resilience of systems like the electrical grid is highly sensitive to the design of the information protocols at their core. Protocols are the lingua franca of systems—they define how information is exchanged among their constituent parts. If the underlying protocol is inflexible, or tied too closely to a particular set of hardware and software, it can quickly become obsolete, as the underlying technology ages and is replaced. That’s exactly what’s happened with SCADA systems; they embody command-and-control principles from the mainframe

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In this way, TCP/IP is like the alphabet—a series of basic forms that can be used to give expression to and make connections between a countless number of ideas, but which itself changes only glacially. When the protocol’s authors first invented TCP/IP, most could scarcely imagine a world of iPads and Facebook profiles, but the genius of their system is that they didn’t have to—they simply had to ensure that whatever was invented could speak the universal language, and that the universal language could, in turn, transmit whatever they might like to say to one another. (A SCADA system, by analogy, fixes the relationships between the letters, enabling a more limited palette of information and ideas to be exchanged.)

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A less variable load on the grid requires more variability among consumers—by getting some of them to use electricity countercyclically. The combination of both financial incentives and penalties designed to encourage this, combined with the real-time nature of the system, have made some early customers of smart meters feel like they’re being constantly watched by Big Brother and charged for making incorrect decisions.

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Is all this density a good thing or a bad thing? Is denser better? Or does it heighten fragility? New research is uncovering the answers and revealing the important role such clustering plays in growth, collapse, and resilience—not only of cities, but of many different kinds of organizations and organisms. It’s an unconventional investigation, being led by an unconventional kind of scientist: an urban physicist.

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institutions, number of AIDS cases. Again, the researchers found universal scaling laws—but with a crucial difference from their biological cousins. In the biological world, scale made organisms slower; in the realm of cities, it made them faster. The bigger the city, the higher the wages were for the residents, the more patents produced there but also the greater the number of violent crimes, the more traffic, etc.

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with his characteristic dry humor. “I suppose that’s another way of saying cities have lots of cognitive diversity. Some of them are the dregs but some are not. They provide a landscape that allows the spectrum of ideas to blossom. As the city grows, this makes it more and more multidimensional. Cities seem to open up: the spectrum of functionalities, job opportunities, connections, etc. That is key to the vitality and the buzz of successful cities.”

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“Nature is able to recover from almost anything because of its biodiversity: the structural biodiversity and the species biodiversity,” Smits says. “This is the underlying basis of resilience in systems. We must find a way to replicate that if we have any chance of survival.”

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don’t want the corporate social responsibility model anymore: Make a lot of money and just a little goes back to the local people and everyone has to get down on their knees to say thank you. I don’t want to work that way. Our model guarantees that a real income for local people is built into the model.”

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across Borneo and he knows there is little time left. The car, to return to an analogy from the Introduction, is tottering on the edge of the proverbial cliff. But if Samboja Lestari can be made to work, Smits believes, it could provide the “air bags” for the system, in the form of renewable energy systems and initiatives for forest regrowth, all the while widening the basin of possibilities for the Dayak people and getting the orangutan’s “parachutes” open.

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in a single species, block by block. That is the big mistake that modern agriculture and forestry are making. They are always chasing the biggest profit and looking for the quickest exit strategy. Well guess what? There is nowhere new to go anymore. Exit to where? We only have what we have. We need to work with it, for everyone’s sake.” •     •     •

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Our journey in the chapters to come is organized along increasing levels of scale. We’ll begin with the underpinnings of personal resilience—how might we enhance individuals’ capacity to bounce back psychologically in the face of potential trauma? Then we’ll examine the contours of group collaboration in the face of disruption—how do we get people to work together when it counts? We’ll also explore how to enhance the cognitive diversity of such groups—how do we ensure we consider the widest array

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Garmezy’s protégé, described:   The great surprise of resilience research is the ordinariness of the phenomena. Resilience appears to be a common phenomenon that results in most cases from the operation of basic human adaptational systems.   Masten went on to argue that if these basic human adaptational systems are protected and in good working order, most children will meet their developmental milestones, even in the face of great adversity.

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Throughout most of the twentieth century, the grieving process was filtered through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud referred to grief as the “work of mourning,” a term he introduced in a piece titled “Mourning and Melancholia,” written at the height of the First World War. The “work of mourning” described the exhaustive process by which the libido detaches from the now nonexistent object of grief. In simplified terms, Freud theorized that if one didn’t process each and every memory involving the deceased and then create some psychic distance from them, the mind would inevitably break down and one would begin to exhibit neurotic behavior.

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As with so much of Freud’s work, it’s important to remember the context within which his ideas developed. His theories were rooted in intimate, individual observation, not statistical analyses of populations, and though they obviously reflected his own thinking, they also reflected a cultural backdrop of mass trauma and loss during the First World War. These ideas exploring grief

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Once these tenets of grief work took hold, various stage models started to appear, the most famous of which is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and an ultimate acceptance. While these stages are popularly understood to apply to all types of grief, in actuality, Kübler-Ross developed them based on her work with terminally ill cancer patients who were working to accept their own mortality, not that of another. She had never once tested the model with subjects grieving the loss of another person or experiencing other forms of trauma.

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the Detroit area over the course of a decade. Bonanno wanted to identify the participants who exhibited psychological resilience after the loss of a spouse. This is not to say that he was looking for people who were completely unaffected by the death of a loved one or incapable of feeling sadness. Rather, Bonanno wanted to ascertain how many people actually experienced the delayed grief, denial, or theoretical stages of mourning that made up the bulk of our cultural understanding of bereavement.

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immediately after the loss and several years later. The depressed-improved group experienced depression before the loss but reported a positive affect after the loss. The recovery from grief group experienced feelings of grief like yearning, shock, and anxiety that eventually subsided. And, last but not least, the resilient group experienced no significant trauma either immediately or several years after experiencing the loss.

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defining resilience as a lack of feeling or absence of sadness. He used the term “resilient” to identify people capable of functioning with a sense of core purpose, meaning, and forward momentum in the face of trauma (echoing our own definition: “the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.”) By all accounts, the resilient cohort felt great sadness after their loss, and they were seriously challenged by the navigation of a major life change. But they described moving on—adapting and even growing from the loss—without experiencing the stages of grief or the consequences predicted by failing to do Freudian grief work.

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events like natural disasters and terrorist attacks. After the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, Bonanno and his research team did large-scale surveys with various groups of New Yorkers. The cohort that experienced the greatest difficulty, perhaps unsurprisingly, comprised those who had both witnessed the attacks firsthand and lost a loved one. Bonanno found that the incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was higher in this cohort than in his randomly sampled groups—approximately 30 percent—but still didn’t exceed a third of the group.

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child or spouse—Bonanno’s longitudinal studies on loss and trauma revealed the exact same pattern at the population level. No matter how bad the trauma, rates of PTSD never exceeded one-third, and rates of resilience were always found in at least one-third and never more than two-thirds of the population.

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“This pattern of response is so ubiquitous, and so consistent, it begs the question: Why are we, as a species, designed this way?” asks Bonanno. One possible answer is that the design ensures that there is always at least a sizable minority, or even a majority, to take care of those deeply affected by a trauma.

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Bella and Jack at Lingfield orphanage: According to Moskovitz’s study, they were able to charm the adults and function with self-agency at the orphanage, creating a positive feedback loop with the staff and their families that resulted in better and better care. This ego-resiliency—defined as the capacity to overcome, steer through, or bounce back from adversity—was first noted by developmental psychologists Jack and Jeanne Block in 1968, in a highly regarded longitudinal study documenting the lives of one hundred young adults over more than thirty years. In addition to ego-resiliency, the Block study measured a characteristic they called ego-control, or the degree to which an individual has the ability to delay gratification in service of future goals. Subjects exhibiting the combination of ego-resiliency and ego-control were better able to adapt flexibly to different circumstances and succeed in the midst of challenges.

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proverbial lemons into lemonade. Social psychologists refer to this as hardiness, a system of thought based, broadly, on three main tenets: (1) the belief that one can find a meaningful purpose in life, (2) the belief that one can influence one’s surroundings and the outcome of events, and (3) the belief that positive and negative experiences will lead to learning and growth. Considering…

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Psychologist Kenneth Pargament has spent the lion’s share of his academic career investigating the links between religion and resilience. In addition to offering all of the benefits of a community—including support groups and coping methods for people financially or socially disenfranchised—Pargament attributes the power of religion to its invocation of the sacred. His work specifically distinguishes between secular coping mechanisms and sacred ones, those that work in direct collaboration with a god by either creating a partnership or relying on the utter relinquishment of control. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in his seminal essay “Religion as a Cultural System”:   The strange opacity of certain empirical events, the dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain, and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity all raise the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man’s life in the world, has no genuine order at all—no empirical regularity, no emotional form, no moral coherence. And the religious response to this suspicion is in each case the same: the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for, and even…

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and Smith concluded that social factors—such as the support of an adult role model in the community—buffered the effect of adversity and appeared to predict positive outcomes in anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of their high-risk population. In 2000, researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, showed that access to social resources like a supportive relationship with a teacher and a variety of well-organized extracurricular activities correlated with high academic achievement. Conversely, their studies suggested that children’s exposure to violence—primarily intrafamily and neighborhood—had significant negative effects on their mathematics and reading performance on a standardized exam. Social resources are the oil that greases the wheels of well-functioning social networks. And a flurry of new research suggests that these networks can even have a physiological impact. Psychologists Sarah Pressman and Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon found that college freshmen with larger social networks had a stronger immunological response to getting a flu shot, while Alexis Stranahan, David Khalil, and Elizabeth Gould from Princeton University found the converse: that social isolation can reduce the physical benefits of exercise. Socially isolated rats sprouted fewer new neurons and neural connections as a result of wheel running than rats living in groups. Social isolation is not just bad for our psychological well-being. It appears to leave its trace at the cellular level.

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Geneticists call this theory stress diathesis or genetic vulnerability—the idea that certain gene variants can increase a person’s propensity toward depression, anxiety, and any number of other pathologies like antisocial and sociopath behavior, if—and scientists make a point of emphasizing this if—the subject encounters potentially traumatic or stressful life events. Caspi and Moffitt’s study emphatically did not prove the existence of a depression gene. Rather, the study used empirical analysis to show how GxE might create depression vulnerability.

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Current research in neuroscience is revealing the effectiveness of one tool in particular that can complement other forms of intervention: This tool is portable, teachable, free, and it’s been on the market for more than two thousand years. It’s called mindfulness meditation.

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Researchers who study mindfulness and attention often conceive of our emotions differently. In their view, emotions are not things that happen to us. Rather, they exist—metaphorically, of course—as a kind of psychic currency, held in reserve. When we waste this reserve—giving over our attention to every single distraction from the outside environment—it dwindles down into an empty account, and we are left feeling fatigued or, worse, in a downward spiral of negative affect like anger or despondency. With practice, on the other hand, we can train ourselves to spend deliberately and judiciously, keeping us from draining our own emotional coffers.

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maintains attention on a specific object of concentration; when thoughts and sensations arise, the mind allows them to pass without clinging to them and then brings itself back to focus on the chosen object. This process—what we will refer to later as “detachment”—cultivates the presence of an internal witness observer, capable of stepping back and disassociating from the environment, focusing instead on the chosen object. In open monitoring, on the other hand, the object of focus recedes and a sustained awareness of all sensory experience is cultivated. Open monitoring—what we will later refer to as “attending”—is characterized by an open, present, and nonjudgmental

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There is a third type of meditation that will play the pivotal role in our story of personal resilience. It is often referred to as “loving-kindness,” or a practice of compassionate meditation. This is the technique of cultivating greater empathy through meditation, beginning first by focusing on loved ones and then expanding the focus of compassion toward all beings. Such practices, performed by meditation masters, produce significant activity in the insula—a region near the frontal portion of the brain that plays a key role in bodily representations of emotion—as well as the temporoparietal junction, an important part of the brain for processing empathy. One man in particular has been fundamental to bringing more attention to this, as well as other practices, casting his scientific lens on the contemplative arts so that researchers might appreciate meditation’s

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twenty-three pairs of chromosomes; one set each from your mother and father. These chromosomes package your genes—the long-form instructions, written in the language of DNA, for making you. A cooking metaphor is incomplete but instructive: You can think of each base pair of DNA molecules as a single line in a recipe for a specific dish; each gene is equivalent to the completed recipe; each chromosome is akin to a cookbook of such recipes; and all the chromosomes together like a complete library of French cooking.

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Epel’s team studied women aged twenty to fifty who had experienced the lasting stress of taking care of a child with a severe chronic illness, such as autism or cerebral palsy. They also studied a control group of women whose children were healthy. The research team found that the longer a woman had been caring for an ill child, the shorter her telomeres and the lower her level of telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the length of telomeres. In addition, the greater each subject’s perception of her stress, the worse she scored, across the board. Women with the highest perceived stress had the telomeres of a woman a full decade older. (This might be why so many U.S. presidents, for example, leave the office looking like they’ve taken an accelerated aging

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In 2010, a group led by UC Davis researchers Tonya Jacobs and Clifford Saron, and which included Elissa Epel, concluded a study that suggests a possible reverse correlation—between meditation, mind-set, and enhanced longevity. In the study, a group of thirty subjects were each given six hours of meditation a day for three months. During the training, subjects were instructed in techniques of focused attention—attending to the mind’s activities in a nonjudgmental way—and the generation of benevolent mental states, such as compassion, empathy, and equanimity.

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attending will better help soldiers maintain emotional control in the midst of a cognitively demanding set of circumstances like warfare. And, although the sight of men in army fatigues sitting in the lotus position and staring at their nostrils does not call to mind a warrior’s pose, Jha maintains that it is the very foundation for every soldier’s effectiveness on the battlefield. “I keep telling the generals, look: the things you want these guys to do—use their weapons appropriately, find the right route, etc.—are the exact same things that will require them to regulate their emotions. They can’t do these things if they’re freaking out and shooting each other. This kind of training will, we hope, bring together the two sides of the same domain: emotions on the one hand and the hard-core mission skills on the other.”

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evolving the syllabus, which relies on a mix of well-known works on creative thinking and behavioral economics; strategic in-depth analyses of current concerns like Iraq and Iran, the Middle East, terror networks, and North Korea; and lesser-known treatises on philosophy and cultural criticism. A good example text is The Propensity of Things by French sinologist François Jullien, which explores the Chinese notion of shi, a term with multiple connotations and no direct English translation, which is intrinsic to a wide array of Chinese thought, military and otherwise. Shi encompasses notions of power, relationship, and circumstance, though Jullien translates it as “propensity,” or a tendency that, like a seed, germinates within a situation. Once the propensity of a situation is set off, it can’t be stopped until the situation comes back into equilibrium. Thus, according to Chinese thought, a great power imbalance contains within itself not merely the potential, but the propensity for a great rebalancing. If one understands and designs for the propensity of the actors on a battlefield and can shape the energetic forces that are already playing out, conflict itself may be avoided, even as the desired outcome is achieved.

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