Andrew Zolli, author of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, says we might not be able to change the future, but we can figure out how to survive it. Photo: PopTech/Kris Krug

Andrew Zolli is a funny kind of optimist. As a futurist, he thinks it may be too late to pull the world back from many of the most dire global crises, including climate change, financial meltdown, and the energy crunch. But in that unpleasant future he sees an opportunity to embrace what he calls resilience thinking, an approach that could enable the world not to avoid disaster but survive it. In his new book, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, the PopTech impresario describes a car hurtling toward a cliff, Thelma and Louise-style. In the car are two groups of problem solvers: Risk mitigators and risk adapters. The first, the risk mitigators, held the moral high ground when the cliff was still a long way off as they sought a way to turn the car around. But Zolli thinks we may be past the point of a global U-turn. He says the people who need the worlds attention now are those in the other group, the risk adapters, who are working on building a better parachute.

Wired Business: How did you first get turned on to the idea of resilience thinking?

Zolli: Several years ago we started to notice something really interesting, and that was organizations and institutions and innovators were increasingly working not to steer us away from the big systemic challenges and risks that we face but were really beginning in a concentrated way to think about how to withstand those risks and disruptions and challenges. Big organizations the IBMs and Nikes of the world, foundations like the Rockefeller, the State Department these big organizations and lots of smaller social entrepreneurs and organizations, they were all converging on the same conversation. When you see that across the spectrum under the surface you get the sense that, wow, the tectonic plates are moving here.

Wired Business: Why is resilience a concept thats important to embrace now?

Zolli: We are in a world where were closer and closer to the cliff. Not just in climate change, but in global economic systems, global energy systems. Were closer to different cliffs across the board, and the systems are tied to one another. If we go over one cliff, we may pull ourselves over other cliffs. Our current system of globalization, for all its wonders and benefits, is like a giant hairball: If you pull one string, its not clear what other strings you might be yanking along with it.

Wired Business: Whats changed in recent years that makes you think it may be too late to bring the world back from the edge?

Zolli: Im in my 40s. I came to adulthood in the 1990s. I got out of school and came into the labor pool in the decade when the Soviet Union was collapsing. America was able to scale down its military and spend a giant peace dividend. Clintonian economics reigned. The global economy was about ideas, creativity, the end of history. It was going to be peaches and gravy as far as the eye could see. And in the middle of that you had the advent of the web, which sort of put a giant exclamation point on the whole thing. What was the decade we got right after that? A decade demarcated by global acts of terrorism followed by international wars that ended with a global financial crisis. It may come to be seen as the suckiest decade in a very long time. I think whats happened is there is an appreciation that we live in an era of intrinsic volatility and disruption and surprise. Global systems have created vulnerabilities, fragilities and disruptions. We need a new way of thinking about systems that bolsters them and makes them better at handling those disruptions.

Wired Business: So how do you actually define resilience?

When we let systems over-optimize, we often create systems that are really in danger even when they look like theyre doing their best.

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