ABSTRACT
The ability to observe and adapt to changing circumstances is a desirable attribute for organizations that must respond to environmental and other sorts of threats. There are two key aspects of this wider sense of adaptive management: learning from experience, especially learning as situations develop over time, and monitoring conditions and adjusting responses accordingly. This chapter reviews several observations in greater depth while discussing some steps for coping with various obstacles to adaptive management and demonstrating the general feasibility and usability of adaptive planning and preparation for extreme events. It considers some characteristics of extreme risks and the challenges these characteristics pose to planning and preparations. The chapter develops the concept of a 'planning frontier' to describe the level of attention to preparations for threats depending on their position. It focuses on the idea of a planning frontier to discuss ways of ensuring that efforts in preparation for lesser threats will be helpful if a more extreme event should occur.
