Building Redundancy, Backups and Resilience

Extraordinary events and situations since the beginning of 2020 – happening in our family environs as well as national and international arena - made me take a pause to examine the implications of these events in an objective and unattached state of mind.

“Being Mortal”

Talking of family events, the sudden demise of Raju and Jayaraman Athimber within a period of less than 60 days, reminded me of the fickleness of our life span and the great uncertainty surrounding it.  Arun Gawande, the author of “Being Mortal” terms human system as complex system, which are susceptible to wear and tear as we age.

“When Engineers design complex systems” – factories – manufacturing plants etc., “having thousands of critical and potentially fragile components ….design these systems with multiple layers of redundancy with backup systems and backup systems for the back-up systems”

He states that ‘human systems’ are complex, and human cells have redundancies and back-ups which takes over when the original cells responsible for body functions suffer damage and need repair. When the human systems exhaust their redundancy or back up capabilities “Human beings fail the way complex systems fail; randomly and gradually”.

Covid-19 Pandemic and Lockdowns:

Almost all the Governments have imposed lock downs to contain and break the spread of the Virus.  Historians have cited past pandemic / Virus attacks and how the economies and civilisation survived, emerged bruised, but better than before.  The present Virus attack also would bring about a different world habits and living styles.

Present day individual / family  have intertwined their livelihood with interdependencies and heavy reliance on gadgets and third-party services for daily life.  Various steps are being taken by Governments.  Using buffer Food stock,  Fast tracking Vaccines and medicines, augmenting critical health care systems,  Agriculture, Manufacturing, Consumer goods, financial and monetary system – all of which lead us to ponder how much redundancies we have built for such any extreme eventuality.  The efficacy of back-up systems in the family, all enterprises and the Governments are being stressed to the full.

Resilience:

Both the family and economic conditions prevailing now eventually bring up the discussion of how soon one would return to normal lifestyle. What is the resilience capability? How to develop Resilience capacity?

Resilience is someone or something that bounces back into shape or recovers quickly.  – It is the capability of a strained body to recover its functional state and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress. Or an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. Or the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, toughness

Simple examples of Resilience are

1.     An Elastic band being stretched and returning to its normal size after being let go.

2.     A sick person rapidly getting healthy.

One should quickly get up after every fall  – “ Every failure is stepping stone to success”

Psychological resilience is the ability to mentally or emotionally cope with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly. Resilience is both an attitude and a skill.

Every Unit – be an individual person or a Family unit or an Enterprise, Administration or a Government – need to develop Resilience in the fast paced, changing environment of which every one of us is a part.