Modeling and Measuring the Resilience of Collectives

Abstract

Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and the ability to recover from them. What does this mean for organizations that are very volatile in their dynamics, for example collectives or project teams? Differently from engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state cannot be defined because individuals join or leave and social relations change quickly.

To model such organizations, we combine agent-based modeling and multi-layer network approaches. They allow to quantify the impact of agents and their relations, using data about the collaboration in teams. Based on these information, we model the robustness and the adaptivity of collectives and propose a novel resilience measure combining these two dimensions.

References:

1. Modeling social resilience: Questions, answers, open problems https://www.sg.ethz.ch/publications/2022/schweitzer2022modeling-social-resilience/

2. Struggling with change: The fragile resilience of collectives https://www.sg.ethz.ch/publications/2022/schweitzer2022struggling-with-change/

Presentation Slides

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