So, at the last lecture, we left Mickey sort of dealing with the chaos that he had produced. And now, we can begin to measure qualities of systems where they give us an indication of how systems might respond to change, and we're going to limit it— I mean, there's many, many different properties, but we're going to focus on robustness and resilience. What do these mean? System robustness is, basically, the measure of how well a system can resist or absorb a shock while maintaining its primary functions. Okay, the best example I can think of is a wall. A wall is supposed to keep all bad things out, and it is robust. If the wall is thick enough and high enough, it is extremely robust. It can prevent anything from entering into a system. A different notion is resilience. It's no longer a system's ability to survive a shock, but to recover from that shock, and here's a couple of examples. Let's say you've got a design system that is supposed to do this. You get a shock. If you have no resilience at all, this system collapses. If you have adaptive resilience that is really, really good resilience, you come back from that shock, and actually, you're performing better, or you can have engineering or ecological resilience where it goes back but it takes a different amount of time. Some people might argue against this resilience versus robustness. Some talk that it's really about resistance. Well, if you think about it all as resistance, translate robustness into strength, okay? How strong the system is, how well the system can defend itself, and think of resilience as flexibility, okay? This might be resistance, okay? How well can the system resist? This is flexibility. How well does the system respond to these kinds of situations? And I'm hoping you can see that there are all sorts of applications from our daily life. Do we design our life to be robust, okay? Do we design our life so nothing bad happens? Or do we design our life so if something happens, we can adapt? You can think about this in terms of organizations. Does an organization make sure that it's always, always the same, or do you design an organization that depending on what happens, it can change? Okay, these are the concepts of robustness and resilience. Now resilience, there might be a negative relationship between resilience and efficiency, and let me give you a couple examples of this. One is from William Galston from the Wall Street Journal, and it says, "What if the relentless pursuit of efficiency, which has dominated American business thinking for decades, has made the global economic system more vulnerable to shocks? Efficiency comes through optimal adaptation to an existing environment, while resilience requires the capacity to adapt to disruptive changes in that environment." You can be very, very, very efficient in a particular environment, but what happens when that environment changes? Okay? What happens when that environment, in a sense, is transformed? And you may be wondering why I have this illustration here? And I'm not quite sure why I put this illustration here, but let's give it an example of resilience of—how resilient can I be in an unexpected photograph to appear in this presentation, and yet, I can continue going? Can I make up some reason by which we have this illustration of these dogs? Well, let me show you how resilient I am. We might find that you have trained your dogs perfectly to respond to a particular kind of treat, and boy, when you give them that treat, or you give them that command, they respond perfectly. But let's say the manufacturer of those treats changes the formula. Let's say the tone of your voice changes. Will those animals respond to you in the same way? Is your relationship with your animals pretty resilient? Resilience versus efficiency, and again, let's hear from Thomas Friedman. "Over the past 20 years, we have been steadily removing man-made and natural buffers, redundancies, regulations and norms that provide resilience and protection when big systems, be they ecological, geopolitical, or financial—get stressed. We've been recklessly," according to Thomas Friedman, "We have been recklessly removing these buffers out of an obsession with short-term efficiency and growth without thinking at all." And think about this. For example, wherever you might stand on protectionism or free trade, the argument for free trade, which Thomas Friedman, by the way, is very closely associated with, is that it makes the system work better. It's more efficient, et cetera. What it might ignore, okay, is the fragility that a system that is based on free trade might produce. And again, you can start thinking about this with globalization. Okay, you can start thinking about the efficiency of globalization comes along with a great deal of fragility. And we might think of efficiency as short-term optimization. Given a particular environment, how can I get the most out of this situation? Resilience is long-term optimization. That is, you think about the longer term. You think about what might happen, what might change, and is your organization or your lifestyle or whatever it might be, prepared for that change? "No matter how well suited to an environment you might be, what do you do you do if the environment changes?" And we illustrate this was very robust animals, the dinosaurs, and yet, they are incredibly powerful. In some ways, incredibly efficient for their environment. Once that environment changed, they disappeared, and that's the kind of choice that we have. Do we want to maximize efficiency in the short run or maximize efficiency in the long run? And again, the balance of those is what policy decisions are going to be all about. Let me give you another example of robustness versus efficiency. And you'll see two cars here. I see the seats are low. There's no backrest. So, this is a pre-’71, pre-’70 Volkswagen Bug, okay? And here, let's say is a 2020 Porsche with all the fancy doodads, and I say to you, which car would you want? Well, in some ways, the answer is obvious. You'd want the Porsche, okay? It's a nicer car. It's a nicer drive. You can listen to the stereo. You can set the temperature. You can do all these wonderful things. Now let's change the environment. Instead of you driving down the Autobahn in your Porsche, now I'm going to set you in whatever car you have chosen in the middle of the Sahara. At that point, you might wish you had chosen the Volkswagen Beetle, okay? Because the Volkswagen Beetle is much more resilient to changes in the environment. I've owned several Beetles in my life. I know very little about motors, but they're very easy to fix. Now they didn't have the features of a Porsche that can set the perfect climate control inside for the driver, dewpoint, humidity, you know, the amount of wind coming, et cetera. A Volkswagen had on or off. That was it for the heating, okay? But a Volkswagen will operate no matter what. My wife actually had—one of her first cars, was one of these Volkswagens, and it was so beat up that the passenger-side floor was rusted out, and what she did is put two two-by-fours so a passenger could put their feet on those two-by-fours. Of course, it wasn't very good if you were going through a lot of rain or through gravel, but it allowed the passenger to have their feet on something. The Volkswagen worked. Imagine the Porsche. Can you imagine being able to put two two-by-fours instead of the floor on a Porsche and it would work? And in fact, and this is been my experience with rental cars, sometimes it the radio doesn't work, the car won't work. If the temperature controls don't work, the car won't work. Moreover, your ability to actually know what's going on, with the Volkswagen, you opened up the back— Yes, the motor was in the back, and you could see all the motor. You could see the various parts of the system operating. In a Porsche, if you open it up, what you will find is one big black box, a big black box that without very specialized machinery, very specialized instruments, you cannot tell what's going on. Again, think about this as a life choice. Which one would you rather drive, depending on which environment that you are in? Now a lot of this stuff comes down to the subcomponents of systems, and that's what we're going to talk about next, and that is networks. Networks are, essentially, the building tools of systems, and we're going to come to those, and I'll explain what a network is and how it works in the next lecture.
