How Civil Institutions Build Resilience

"In an effort to support U.S. Air Force space community resilience objectives, researchers conducted a review of the academic literature defining and describing resiliency in various domains, and case-study reports about how organizations build resilient missions. This report summarizes key findings from this review that have broad application to any organization seeking to enhance resilience, which includes the space community. This report presents the approaches taken by three different types of communities to develop and maintain resilient operations. The discussion presented in this report illustrates three methods for building resilience, each illustrated by the approach of one community; resilience through withstanding an adverse event (impact avoidance and robustness), resilience through adaptation and flexibility, and resilience through recovery and restoration. These approaches are broadly described in this report as: withstand, adapt, and recover. Communities seeking to develop more resilient operations can gain insight from applying the various methods described in the literature, and applying lessons derived from similar operational environments and how they addressed resilience. Recognizing that any given organization can incorporate all three of these approaches in various parts of an overall resilience plan, this report seeks to highlight organizations that will be most likely to emphasize one of these approaches over another"--Publisher's description.