The 5th Annual Critical Infrastructure Symposium

I had the opportunity of attending the Critical Infrastructure Symposium on April 7-8, 2014 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Critical Infrastructure Symposium is a collaborative learning community comprised of students, educators, practitioners, and government officials all engaged in developing the next generation of critical infrastructure protection and resilience leadership, technologies and strategies.

Engineering will need to help create and build companies and organizations that are more resilient. Cities will need to learn how to manage with extreme volatility while companies with need to learn how to profit from the same volatility.  Global climate change and increasing constraints on resources will require companies and cities to fundamentally rethink their strategies, operations, and business philosophy in order to create new value and thrive.  This will require engineers to design and build in a world of imperfect choices.  This new world of resilience will require engineers to ask difficult heretical questions, help organizations and cities to design better investment tools, and collaborate in radical new ways.  Engineering for a world of resiliency will require us all to get better at pivot strategies - - where we speak to both the notion of a sound defense but also a smart offense.