Abstract
The law of entropy tells us that everything in the universe is descending into chaos, unwinding like a clock. Living things, including human beings, are engaged in a constant struggle to maintain order and structure. The essence of life is resisting entropy, or creating order out of chaos. Living things do not just react to their environment; rather, they participate in complex feedback loops that shape their environment. Mammals, fish, and insect colonies build elaborate physical structures and social networks that enable them to replicate and flourish. Likewise, business enterprises and human communities create orderly structures and networks that enable them to grow and flourish. Here’s the problem, though: The extraordinary success of humans may come at the expense of natural systems, ironically undermining our own resilience.
Resilience thinking is structured around the acceptance of disturbance, even the generation of disturbance, to give a system a wide operating space.
Brian Walker and David Salt
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Notes
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© 2015 Joseph Fiksel
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Fiksel, J. (2015). The Resilient Enterprise. In: Resilient by Design. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-588-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-588-5_4
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