ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part deals with the construct of risk and a risk-based resilience construct. It addresses their combination and aims to understand how the more elaborate intellectual and functional architecture for risk and resilience reasoning would support and complement the three chains in a large, complex, distributed business: the value chain, the reputation chain and the supply chain. The part focuses on how the three objects of interest–risk, resilience and reasoning–do classically operate, and how they could better operate as rational constructs–that is to say, objects which have been put together via some kind of deliberate controlling cognitive and behavioural narrative. It shows that the journey of design has been a question of appropriate systems thinking. When organisations are functionally or geographically highly distributed, this tends to greatly increase the complexity of any risk and resilience system.
