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Resilience - March 2024

Learning from the Resilience of Our Military Adversaries

  • Speaker: Eric Haseltine
  • Speaker Title: CEO, Discovery Democracy
  • Filename: /files/2024.03.resilience/223.haseltine.pdf

In combat even the best plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy. Thus, the US military strives for resilience in the face of adversity through training, delegation of authority, emphasis on adaptability, and above all, leadership. For instance, combat leaders are promoted more on how well they “take a hit” than on how well they do when conditions are optimal.

Despite its intense focus on resilience, the U.S. Military lost in Viet Nam and Afghanistan, in large part because our adversaries exhibited greater resilience than we did. The Russians also displayed exceptional resilience after initial catastrophic losses to the Germans in WWII, and more recently, major early setbacks in Ukraine.

The main point of this talk is that both military and business leaders can learn more from the resilience of our adversaries such as the North Vietnamese, Taliban, and Russians, than we can from the U.S. military, mainly because the tough resilience of these resource-constrained adversaries are not intuitive for resource-rich Americans.

  • Hits: 183

Incorporating Generative AI into Scenario Planning with Applications in Supply Chain Management

  • Speaker: Daniel Finkenstadt | Peter Guinto
  • Speaker Title: Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Air Force; Staff Officer SAF/AQCX and Former Professor, Naval Postgraduate School | Vice President of Government Affairs, Resilinc
  • Filename: /files/2024.03.resilience/222.finkenstadt-guinto.pdf
This presentation delves into the innovative use of generative AI in contingency scenario planning. It will explore how this cutting-edge technology transcends the limitations of traditional approaches, particularly in dynamic and unpredictable environments. The focus is on leveraging AI for efficient scenario identification, trend formulation, and innovative solution generation. Practical examples demonstrate its application in both business and government sectors, highlighting AI's role in enhancing adaptability and resilience. Attendees will gain insights into integrating generative AI into their strategic planning, ensuring more effective responses to emerging challenges and opportunities.
  • Hits: 181

Resilience from Within

  • Speaker: Chris Gilbert
  • Speaker Title: President and COO, Discovery Democracy
  • Filename: /files/2024.03.resilience/221.gilbert.pdf
What are the secrets of companies that remain successful over decades? The successful ones pay attention to the impermanence of things, they remain non-attached to their original ideas, they cultivate mindfulness, and wisdom. These qualities are all also important in personal resilience from the Buddhist point of view. This talk will show, through practical examples, how individuals and companies who paid attention to those principals are still thriving, whereas the ones that didn’t pay attention went under. Some examples will be taken from Gilbert and Haseltine’s book Riding the Monster: Five Ways to Innovate Inside Bureaucracies.
  • Hits: 174

Assessing, Pricing, and Mitigating the Risk of Floods and Other Natural Hazards

  • Speaker: Greg Characklis | Antonia Sebastian
  • Speaker Title: Professor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill | Professor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
  • Filename: /files/2024.03.resilience/213a.characklis.pdf

In 2022, economic losses from extreme weather and climate disaster events such as droughts, floods, heatwaves, severe weather, and wildfires resulted in global losses exceeding $300B. Of these, only a fraction ($181B) of losses were covered by insurance. This “protection gap” gives rise to financial instability that can be disruptive to both public- and private-sector actors. While managing environmental financial risk can be achieved via a combination of actions/tools that involve risk reduction (e.g., infrastructure), risk retention (e.g., cash reserves, loans), and risk transfer (e.g., insurance), it also relies on a robust quantification of the frequency and severity of potential losses as a result of extreme weather and climate events predicated on integrated modeling of natural (e.g., hydro-meteorologic), engineered (e.g., reservoirs, levees), and economic/financial (e.g., water/electricity markets) systems. This presentation will describe novel approaches to characterizing and managing environmental financial risk in coupled natural–engineered–economic systems, followed by a discussion of several recent studies that have been conducted by the Center on Financial Risk in Environmental Systems (CoFiRES) at UNC Chapel Hill. Special attention will be given to recent work that focuses on characterizing the systemic financial risks that arise from repetitive flood exposure in Eastern North Carolina and potential opportunities to increase resilience to flooding at household and community scales through targeted intervention.

Characklis Presentation: Download File
Sebastian Presentation: Download File

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The Internet of Animals and Earth’s Digital Twin

  • Speaker: Roland Kays
  • Speaker Title: Professor, North Carolina State University; Lab Director, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
  • Filename: /files/2024.03.resilience/212.kays.pdf
The Kays lab’s vision for wildlife conservation focuses on animal population size and connectivity. To realize its conservation goals first requires annual estimates of animal abundance and their trends to know which species—and where—are most in need of help. Second, species-specific measures of habitat connectivity between these populations are needed to ensure animal movement continues to provide genetic exchange and to allow colonization of new habitats as the planet warms. Both metrics need to account for the rapid changes from development and climate change, as well as the varied effects of human recreationalists and hunters. Just a few years ago, proposing these measures for all wildlife across North America would have been absurd—but now it is possible. Camera traps, hunters, Native communities, naturalists, and animal tracking are providing unprecedented data about wildlife. Satellites return live information about the landscapes and climates animals are moving through, and new analytical approaches (AI and others) allow the combination of these with animal data in population and movement models. Linking big data, live data, and real time analytics into an Internet of Animals will help us build a Digital Twin of planet Earth that includes mobile animals and the ecosystem processes they support.
  • Hits: 173