Resilience Engineering and Leadership in Crisis Specialization

Resilience Engineering and Leadership in Crisis examines the qualities and practices of leadership amid conditions of uncertainty, chaos, or catastrophic system breakdowns. Within the complex 21st century risk environment, critical infrastructures essential to public health, safety, and well-being are inherently vulnerable to cascading failures. The cascading effect of system failures reflects the interdependence among systems and adds to the complexity of effective resilience leadership, which may require interaction across multiple operating domains. The nature of such unknown or unanticipated threats challenge leaders to be prepared. This specialization introduces resilience concepts with applications to resilience engineering and crisis leadership. The courses draw on resilience policy and contemporary literature to construct a holistic understanding of resilience as dynamic processes embedded within and among complex systems. With a focus on socio-technical systems, these courses identify processes, tools, and methods to measure or approximate their essential qualities and characteristics. They also examine how knowledge from resilience assessments can influence leadership strategies and organizational plans for navigating ongoing threat vulnerability. Case studies and current events like COVID-19, industrial accidents, and climate change will provide a context for identifying the qualities, characteristics, and practices of resilience leadership. Applied Learning Project Throughout the specialization, learners participate in hands-on assignments relative to a specific project of their choosing. This involves identifying a complex system scenario with social, technical, and environmental dimensions. The specialization’s 3 courses utilize the scenario in subsequent assignments. In course 1, learners conduct a threat and hazard assessment and identify core capabilities associated with the resilience of their scenario. In course 2, learners create a crisis management plan for their scenario and conduct a resilience assessment that includes recommendations for improvement. Learners apply COVID-19 critical infrastructure resilience and organizational resilience themes to their project scenario in course 3. The last assignment involves applying sustainable development and climate change concepts and principles to their scenario. Each of the individual project assignments progressively builds upon the project scenario chosen early in course one.