ABSTRACT
This introduction opens the arguments of the book described as a journey of design. This journey begins by examining where we are. Industry standard risk based resilience reasoning systems for large, complex organisations are introduced as having great breadth but little coherence. They offer narratives of compliance with un-validated, and poorly contextualised, best practices and Standards. The resultant, highly contradicting, desires to reconcile fundamentally different processes, data types, narratives and audiences cannot be met within the extant over-simplified reasoning vehicles and impoverished measurement practices. Nonetheless, wide-ranging industry pressures can be shown to prejudice this evidently unsophisticated reasoning within a low tolerance for complexity. Using systematic deconstruction across six applied case studies, the journey describes where we need to go. Policy and decision makers must constructively move away from practices which enshrine suboptimal reasoning and failures of logic towards an effective synergy of operational evidence, organisational psychology and applied statistical technique. Alignment with this requisite science will create evidence-based definitions, reasoning choices, tools and metrics aligned, through a pragmatic appetite for complexity, to business-material goals. To get there we introduce the series of principles and techniques for organisations which strengthen the performance of their reasoning systems into a business value proposition.
