The Future of the Future
Getting serious about economic resilience

The first step is to educate yourself, your company/organization and your community. The CDC and FEMA are good places to start. Next, take a proactive role by setting up resilience working groups in your chambers of commerce and community organizations. 

Better yet, consider participating in FEMA’s annual National Level Exercise. This year’s drill, scheduled for May, centers around a catastrophic earthquake in the Midwest’s New Madrid Seismic Zone, a genuine possibility with huge consequences were it to occur.

Whether it be earthquakes or exotic manmade catastrophes such as bio-terror and cyber attacks, all have the potential for causing protracted (several months or longer) interruption in the flow of basic goods and services. Such a disruption would be an economic disaster for any region, and would quickly spread across the nation and even the globe.

While a robust physical infrastructure is essential, we need to focus equally on the virtual, which will help reduce the burdens on our already fragile physical assets. This will not only serve to help us during times of crisis, but will help us to be more competitive in the normal day-to-day operations of the global knowledge economy.

Achieving economic resilience means knowing who knows what, making the right decisions and taking the right actions. A lot of dots need to be connected. We have already begun stitching together all the pieces of the enterprise. Now it’s time to start stitching together entire regions, and working our way up from there.