Scenario Immersion
Embedded adaptive resilience
(building on previous policy and resilience forums originally published for Architects of Positive Futures)
Networked processes
As enterprises and institutions evolve toward open, decentralized models, the profile of governance, technology and risk management has taken on great significance. Today, there exists a complex and unclear view in the overall stability and exposure faced across an extended digital environment, including the complexity, strategic control and opportunity risks associated with tightly coupled processes and networks.
Web-scale operators, who are often providers and competitors in these hyper-networked services have built low cost, low risk, high performant architectures, while rapidly expanding their focus and capacity to disintermediate all manner of service sectors.
In the global finance sector alone, during 2010-2020, institutions have collectively seen over half a trillion in operational risk losses. The shift to a more balanced approach across financial and non-financial risk has seen regulators intensify demand for transparency and pervasive controls for systemic risk stability and resilience. Enterprises are subsequently designing new control functions, to understand the true extent and scope of risk events, while building in flexibility to capture new opportunities.
Increased granularity in metrics and telemetry, site reliability to support multi-cloud operations, and embedded architectural governance, are some of the contemporary techniques deployed to provide assurance in regulation, transformation and expansion.
Expansive Scenarios
Strategies are shifting the focus toward high-touch communications for digital service design, outcomes for the wider market structure and resilience testing across a far broader range of future scenarios.
4 contemporary scenarios:
- Remote working disruptions: Workforces unable to commute for prolonged periods, caused by inaccessibility or server lockdown in-transit.
- Large scale data compromises: Unauthorized access and/or loss of public and non-public data and all associated risks once data is compromised.
- Public health crises: Pandemic outbreak of contagious of communicable diseases with threats to all or specific groups of people.
- Borderless ransomware: A large scale distributed denial of service, withheld data and extortion
Shoring up for digital resilience doesn’t stop here. The combination of VUCA ecosystems (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) and the transformative powers of well funded, well implemented emerging technologies, including on-demand, darknet cybercrime services, throws an alarming array of participants, with new and unprecedented scenarios, into the arena.
Stability and resilience models for prevention, containment, response and absolute end-to-end recovery, require intensified review, collaboration and immersive preparation for plausible future scenarios.
Example: Futures Action Model for Policy & Strategy Wind-tunnelling (source: ActionForesight)
Wind Tunneling
The concept of a wind tunnel is a considerable extrapolation of the historical policy stress test. The wind tunnel immerses the entire enterprise and/or institution, with all its supporting functions, as well as current as future strategies, through a series of simulated environmental shocks, both practical and far-reaching in scope. It mirrors the extremities of aerospace wind-tunneling with zero fault tolerance and zero trust design and engineering.
Wind-tunneling goes beyond the stability and resilience of the current state, to model out plausible future scenarios and stress the viability of both enterprise and competitor strategies in such events. The technique is further elaborated by modelling different objectives against these scenarios, whereby one objective may perform well in one scenario while a different objective performs less well.
By looking into compelling, plausible futures such as competitor advantages, connectivity outages, cybercrime attacks, geopolitical shocks and more, early warning signals and metrics can be defined and monitored, to determine how these scenarios may actually be coming to pass. While this type of embedded adaptive resilience is not entirely new in economics and military strategy, extended enterprises now find themselves in this mindset, as they interact with an extended, high-tech ecosystems and either consciously or inadvertently become systemically important to that ecosystem.
In turn, this shifts the enterprise or institution toward more sophisticated adaptive and active policy implementation. In a study of globally and domestically systemic financial institutions, more than half of these still had a high degree of passive policy implementation, using basic frameworks and operating procedures, which, while satisfying legacy compliance obligations, did not support adaptive capacity for resilience, transformation and organic expansion.
Artificial and synthetic intelligence, together with extended reality systems, will evolve to play an increased role in advanced signal analytics. They will work 24-7 to collect, curate and visualize expansive data from the ecosystem. Innovation in all areas of resilience, will develop new themes of interpretation, as diverse inter-agent teams are brought together to make sense of information abstractions and join forces in immersive simulations.
Author: Ivan Sean, c. 2018-2020 | USA
© 10 Sensor Foresight
Period: 2017-2019 | Language: English
Core Concepts: Scenario Immersion
AI-Usage: Non-generative digital platforms, output validation
Conflict of Interest: None
References: 'Scenario Immersion', Global Finance Working Group, Canada, 2018 | 'Resilience Reset', Architects of Positive Futures Key Note Talk, Asia-Pacific, 2019 |