Panarchy provides us a wide angle lens to look at projects. Originating from socio-ecological field studies this powerful concept lets us capture the project, the individual team members and the embedding organization in one go. Previously I discussed the ideas behind Panarchy: the adaptive cycle, multiple scales and the interaction of multiple scales. In this post, I'll explore what these aspects mean for resilience, the capacity, e.g. of a project to adapt to changes.

Photography by t3rmin4t0r.

The interactions between the different scales across a panarchy are important in respect to resilience. In terms of Panarchy, three elements are considered: the focal system (in our case "the project"), the higher scales (e.g. the company, or professional group, or society) and the lower scales (e.g. individuals or teams).

"The resilience characteristics of any focal system are in large part determined by the interactions of scales across this panarchy, from the focal system to coarser scales and from the focal system to the finer scales." [*]

Resilience is the ability to handle disturbances of the focal system in such a way that the function of the system is not influenced. Resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility.

Interconnectedness

"Finer scales can enhance resilience of the focal system when they are allowed to change so that innovation and novelty can be introduced, in a controlled way, into the focal system. They can reduce the resilience of the focal system if they are tightly linked, such that disturbances rapidly spread from one fine-scale component to the next." [*]

The ability to handle change of individual team members can enhance the resilience of the project as a whole. However, if they are a tight clique this can have a negative effect: when someone is becoming demotivated, the whole group can be affected quickly. And if this breakdown of team members happens at the same time for a majority of the team, it can send the entire project into a breakdown.

In Panarchy lingua:

"… suppressing change at small scales creates a synchrony - sometimes called hyper coherence or over connectedness - that can ultimately lead to all smaller-scale systems entering a back loop at about the same time, creating a back loop at the focal scale or higher. This is known as "revolt'. … Avoidance of a back loop at the focal scale, requires allowing back loops at smaller scales. These back loops must be a-synchronous."

Diversity

As I argued, using a different route, before, you need diversity to enhance resilience. As explained at SustainableScale:

"Diversity is believed to be a key issue in restoring resilience – both biological and social diversity are important to the extent they contribute functional redundancy (i.e. similar services can be provided by some element in the diversity). But as biological diversity is lost, or as human systems and institutions become homogeneous and rigid, then the likelihood of restoring lost resilience declines."

In the current financial crisis, what you see is that all banks were using the same kind of strategies and constructs, and they are highly connected. So when a huge disturbance hits the banking system, they infect each other by the heavy dependencies and react all the same because of identical structures, lack of diversity.

With the dependencies of scales Panarchy brings also the concept of "remembering":

"… if our focal system were to go through a back loop, we most likely expect a new adaptive cycle to replicate the old when the coarser scale is in a K phase." [*]

When your company is running business as usual in the stable state, there are a few dominating ways "to do things". Call it "best practices", "standard methods" or "policies", whatever. Consider the situation a project is experiencing a breakdown. It needs to innovate the way it is running the adapt to disturbances. It starts a new adaptive cycle. However, the influence of the coarser scale, the company, is huge, and inflicts its policies on the project (the focal system). Therefor the adaptive cycle started by the project will be a copy of the ones it did before. If the higher scale is "society" you can think about "expected behavior" as this kind of "remembering".

By using Panarchy, I can talk about three levels at once. Levels that are all needed when discussing resilience in projects. It's the interaction of multiple scales that makes situations complex. But no worries. We know what to do now:

"By trying to maximize use or control disturbances, humans can decrease the resilience of managed systems. … disturbances needn't be considered in a negative way. Some degree of disturbance is actually necessary to maintain the resilience of the system." [*]

[*] ("Assessing and managing resilience in social-ecological systems: Volume 2 supplementary notes to the practitioners workbook", can be freely downloaded from the Resilience Alliance - bottom of the page).