It is my sincere hope that the future of our nation could be secured by making the most of some specific features of our society. Australia is an amazing land. In a mere two centuries we have come to be regarded, and in many ways envied, world-wide. Hard work and good fortune have combined to make us what we are today.

However, in this rapidly advancing world, we are now facing a host of new challenges. It would not be the first time, and through the trials we sometimes had to face head on, we grew more confident and mature. Our maturity is marked by a larger sense of our own place in the world and the vulnerabilities we share with fellow nations beyond our regional boundaries. Australia is no longer a faraway country; it is well and truly positioned as part of the global mosaic.

Over the past decade or so I have been involved in managing response and recovery from some of the largest natural disasters in our history. Living in Brisbane, I have been involved in events like Cyclone Larry in 2006 and the Queensland floods in 2010/11. Over this period I have focused most of my energy on developing disaster resilience programs. Some have been nationally recognised and a number have attracted interest internationally.

As the issue of resilience is increasingly raised as one of the defining factors that all societies must engage with, I believe that Australia should look at developing a ‘nation building’ resilience program. I am well aware of the existing National Strategy for Disaster Resilience that was adopted quickly after Cyclone Yasi and revised earlier in 2015. However, I am also aware of the shortcomings of that strategy as it does not embrace what I consider to be a much bigger picture.

In one way or another, the achievements of past decades can be traced to the cultural, symbolic and hard economic impacts of the Snowy Mountains and similar schemes. Hard infrastructure was the fitting answer for the economy of those times. Undoubtedly, infrastructure projects will continue to play their part, but today when we face an economy of a different kind: ideas, knowledge and creativity – we need a response of a similar scale.

Resilient Australia should be the new Snowy Mountains scheme. The iconic engineering project that brought people from over 30 countries produced vast benefits for Australia. The scheme in itself made Australia more resilient to droughts and unlocked the social and economic potential of the nation. We should look to it for inspiration for the future. I want to underscore this point: we should build resilience in response to not only natural disasters but also to a host of other disruptions. Resilience at all levels of society, from children and families to communities, businesses, cities and regions, encompasses psychological, cultural, ecological, business, infrastructure and cyber resilience. Synchronising them into one format needs to be the focus.

Research already shows that we are going to face massive disruptions, including the nature of our work, social changes, technological changes, geo-political changes, and many more. As has been noted over several years, resilience is much more than the ability to recover from a disruptive event. Real resilience is about the ability to continue to grow and prosper despite ongoing setbacks. Resilience is the new competition.

Perhaps this argument is best explored by Dr Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, in her recent work The Resilience Dividend – a book I would strongly recommend to every single Australian.

I think our government/s should do more to make a stronger link between resilience and economic investment. This is the moment for Australia to shape its prosperity by focusing on the resilience of its people, community, business, infrastructure, education and health, cities and regions. It is only a matter of time before we face global competition which will be defined primarily by our degree of resilience. There is an opportunity here to stimulate our future in a way that will be one of our most defining features in the first half of this century.

EVENT DETAILS

Date:                         8 December 2015 (Tuesday)

Time:                         11:00pm – 1:00pm

Venue:                      University of Technology Sydney, Sydney

Booking:                   Essential (tickets are limited) via Eventbrite

Refreshments:          Light Lunch provided

 

Why Reimagining Resilience

Disruptions are not new. But in our hyper-connected world, disruptions have acquired a new relevance; they’re now a key feature of our lives. Some disruptions immediately trigger a recovery process. Others trigger more adaptive processes.

Natural disasters generate a special kind of disruption. The disruption associated with a natural disaster lasts longer. Recovery can take more than 10 years. There may be several disasters that ‘roll over’, one on top of the other, as seen recently in Nepal when a second damaging earthquake was experienced only days after the first.

Oftentimes disruptions can come from multiple sources/events and can form an entangled web of complex circumstances which may include a combination of natural disaster as well as human induced such as cyber-attack on a business or other institutions.

Natural disasters increasingly tend to have a knock-on effect that reaches far beyond the area of immediate impact. The damage to nuclear power plants from the Fukushima tsunami in March 2013 resulted in an impact far beyond the tsunami itself. This type of disruption renders traditional notions of disaster management almost irrelevant. In a world where there are on average 2-3 disasters per day, this is particularly important.

Disruption is the new normal. Cultivating our resilience will give towns, cities, countries, businesses, indeed all of us, the edge to survive and more importantly prosper in a world dominated by the unknown and the improbable. Now is the time to extend our discourse on disasters beyond Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Recovery, to Resilience. Resilience has increasingly proven to be the best possible answer to the relentless level of disruption brought on by natural disasters.

Why the Speaker Series

The Global Resilience Collaborative has created a platform for trans-disciplinary dialogue, learning and innovation that will lead to new ways of thinking about resilience.  The GRC firmly believes in the power of conversation; particularly the kind of conversation where every participant is a valued contributor. Lived experience, knowledge, ideas, information, relationships all matter. The initiative is designed to create conditions for trans-disciplinary dialogue, learning and innovation that will lead to new ways of thinking about resilience. Our hope is that new ideas will lead to new solutions and projects and programs that will make resilience a genuine value.

With that in mind the Global Resilience Collaborative in collaboration with University of Technology Sydney (UTS) invites you to listen to diverse practitioners and get involved in this transformative conversation. The collaborative style of the series has been carefully modelled to ensure knowledge and ideas can add value to any professional wanting to make their work better informed by the resilience driver.

Confirmed Speakers

Michael Jerks

Assistant Secretary, Critical Infrastructure and Protective Security Policy

National Security Resilience Policy Division, Attorney-General’s Department

As an Assistant Secretary in the Attorney-General’s Department, Michael Jerks is responsible for leading the Australian Government’s approach to two significant policy areas: critical infrastructure resilience and protective security policy. Prior to his appointment as Assistant Secretary in September 2008, Michael was Director of Major Projects in Critical Infrastructure Protection. In this role Michael was responsible for establishing and managing the Critical Infrastructure Program for Modelling and Analysis (CIPMA) and the Computer Network Vulnerability Assessment (CNVA) program. Before joining the Attorney-General’s Department in 2003, Michael spent nine years as a Senior Manager in the NSW Department of State and Regional Development, and four years as Director of the Standing Committee on State Development, NSW Parliament. Michael holds a Bachelor of Arts from Macquarie University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Sydney.

 

Dr Asif Gill

Asif Gill is a Certified Enterprise Architect and Senior Lecturer at the School of Software at the University of Technology, Sydney. He specialises in adaptive and resilient enterprise architecture design and implementation. He is result-oriented and experienced author, coach, consultant, educator, researcher, speaker, trainer and thought leader. He is author of a number of academic and industry IT articles including a recent book on “Adaptive Cloud Enterprise Architecture”. He has extensive experience in both agile, non-agile, cloud and non-cloud complex private and public government environments, displaying a deep appreciation of their different perspectives in a number of commercial projects.

 

Alex Webling

Alex Webling, BSc, BA (Hons), Gdip Comms, GdipEd, ZOP, AARPI.

Alex is deputy chair of Security Professionals Australasia, a Director of Security Professionals Australasia, a member of the Standards Australia Board on Security (MB-025) and Associate of the Australian Risk Policy Institute. He is a registered security professional in the area of Enterprise Security

Alex has been Director Resilience Outcomes Pty Ltd since 2012. Resilience Outcomes is a consultancy specialising in organisational strategy and resilience, identity and information security.

Alex was a senior executive in the Australian Federal Government in national security. He was the foundation Director of the Australian Government computer emergency response team; Developed the Chemicals of Security Concern program; and was Head of Protective Security Policy responsible for launching the revised Protective Security Policy Framework (PSPF) and the single information classification system for the Australian Government.

 

Dr Zoran Milosevic

Dr Zoran Milosevic is a specialist IT architect, with skills in enterprise and solution architecture, information architecture, process and policy modelling and real-time analytics. Zoran has worked in a wide variety of complex environments spanning consulting, services, research, standardization and software development. He is renowned for his steady persistence and ability to innovate, motivate, collaborate and deliver.

Dr Milosevic has been involved in a number of large and complex interoperability projects including NEHTA Interoperability Framework and the US NCI Semantic Interoperability project. He has an active role in HL7 standards, serving as a member of HL7 Architecture Board and having led the HL7 SOA Ontology project, involving colleagues from Kaiser Permanente, Infoway Canada and DHS Victoria.

 

Cai Kjaer

Cai Kjaer holds a Master of Law and is a partner/co-founder of Optimice, Australia’s leading Social Network Analysis consulting company. He is an expert in mapping, visualising and improving business relationships using Social Network Analysis as the core diagnostic tool. He has worked with government, private and not-for-profit sectors on projects in Australia and overseas using visualisation techniques to uncover hidden relationship patterns and then develop practical plans to improve these. He has extensive experience in senior consulting, change leadership and implementation roles successfully delivering large scale global projects and business transformations.

Mr Kjaer has been the driving force and lead designer behind:

• ONA Surveys, a global leading online survey tool for collecting and processing relationship data for visualisation purposes
• Community Mapper, a community-building social networks tool
• Company Mapper, an interactive map of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) board room connections
• Web Mapper, an interactive and dynamic platform for displaying relationship patterns and a core component of Optimice’s service delivery capability.

 

David Kricker, Reserve Bank of Australia

 

Facilitator

Jelenko Dragisic

Jelenko is a collaboration strategist and disaster resilience planner. As founder of ROADMENDER, Australia’s first of its kind initiative solely dedicated to the promotion and development of collaboration as a discipline in its own right, Jelenko advocates a view that future enterprises will be critically dependent on their collaborative strategy. The formation of Global Resilience Collaborative (GRC) was borne out of years of observation and analysis that clearly identifies that resilience in a systematic manner is not possible without a collaborative approach involving a broad range of disciplines.

Jelenko has extensive experience across the private, public and not for profit sectors, having has worked in a variety of management roles in organisations such as Australian Red Cross, Griffith University and Volunteering Qld. While CEO of Volunteering Qld, Jelenko designed and implemented Step Up, one of the largest disaster resilience programs in Australia. This award winning program is based on large-scale collaboration, bringing together various levels of government, community organisations, universities and the corporate sector. A significant part of the program was dedicated to Australia’s first resilience building initiative for the business sector.

Jelenko is also founder/editor of ResilienceReporter.com, a seven-day a week resilience news, analysis and resource portal focusing on making resilience a recognisable topic for the general population.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A collaboration between ROADMENDER,Cityfood Growers, Lendlease, Global Resilience Collaborative and Foodconnect will result in an unique workshop focusing on city resilience, urban agriculture and collaboration.

Following is an excerpt from the workshop brief:

“Food is a major source of content for prime time TV entertainment. Viewer ratings suggest people love food, love watching food being prepared and love watching it being discussed by chefs and food critics. The popularity of food is not surprising. What may surprise many is that food security is now considered the top concern for global insurance companies. In a recent report Lloyds of London stated that food insecurity is currently the leading cause for concern for virtually every branch of commerce.

It is within this context that the increasing focus on resilience in business, local community, city and society as a whole makes sense to professionals across disciplines.   Along with risk exposure managers and actuaries, it is also the policy makers, economists, politicians, urban planners, architects, researchers, entrepreneurs, health professionals and many others who are seeking to better understand how to integrate emerging data and knowledge to inform their own practice.

Maintaining the relevance of current practice in any of the above fields is largely dependent on how well disruptions, such as factors causing concern for food insecurity, are likely to shape drivers for each profession. Urban planners for instance may find that their work is becoming a keystone for the social, economic and environmental resilience on which our entire society is built.

One of the key facets of a resilient system, such as a business or a city, is its capacity to adapt to disruptive forces. Similarly, built redundancies are an essential factor for a resilient entity. And this is what the emergence of urban agriculture is about: responding to disruption to our way of life by innovating new ways of food production and consumption.”

For more about the workshop follow the link:

https://weteachme.com/cityfoodgrowers/1010082-resilient-cities-expanding-urban-agriculture-with-collaboration

 

 

 

Disruptions are not new. But in our hyper-connected world, disruptions have acquired a new relevance; they’re now a key feature of our lives. Some disruptions immediately trigger a recovery process. Others trigger more adaptive processes.

The Global Resilience Collaborative is launching a new initiative designed to create conditions for trans-disciplinary dialogue, learning and innovation that will lead to new ways of thinking about resilience.

For more information fill out the below form

 

The following piece by Columbia Professor John Mutter, author of The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer, and published in Slate is really highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the diverse range of factors impacting on the way natural disasters are managed.

 

By John Mutter

Adolph Hitler visited Paris just once, in June 1940, in an entourage that included his architect, Albert Speer, and Arno Becker, the official state sculptor. He saw all the usual tourist spots, stopping to look around landmark buildings and monuments. He came just a week or so after the army of the Third Reich had occupied the city, a Paris that was by then all but empty of Parisians. But in the anxious weeks after the fall of the French army, most people hadn’t known whether they should leave or stay. Some had even wanted to believe the Germans would not come to Paris at all.

At the height of the crisis in New Orleans there were three times the number of men in uniform there as there were German troops in Paris

A few people had no doubt what lay ahead. They were the elite of Paris, and they left immediately after their army failed. They took their best possessions, stuffed them into limousines, and sped south with their chauffeurs at the wheel. Why did they leave? The most obvious reason is that they had the most to lose. But elite status also brings, or comes by way of, connections at the highest levels of government and military. So those at the top of society knew what was coming and knew to get out fast. Others were left to do what they thought made the most sense, with only rumor and fear to guide them…READ ON

 

John Mutter is a professor at Columbia University jointly appointed in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and in the School of International and Public Affairs. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His new book is The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer.