As the world slowly recovers from the CrowdStrike failure impacting Microsoft this week which  quickly dominoed into a global meltdown of essential IT services, ARPI urges all sectors of global  society, particularly governing bodies and telcos, to think past immediate ‘system recovery and  damage control’ to understand how and why it happened in a broader societal sense. Could  anything have been done to protect society against this global vulnerability – and previous global  vulnerabilities – which rapidly bypassed awareness and went straight to crises? Is there is similarity  to continuing cyber-attacks, Covid, Global Financial Crisis, 9/11 and attempted political  assassinations? 

The way we live and work has changed rapidly this century, becoming interconnected and  interdependent like never before, now a virtual meta-grid. Economic dominance prevails, product  innovation remains unmatched by fit-for-purpose risk and reliance systems thinking, causing  service and product delivery systems to be inherently vulnerable and subject to rapid deterioration.  

IT systems innovation has not occurred in parallel with an essential progression and advancement  of risk and resilience thinking, and whole systems approaches, to assure the meta-grid of  dependence, that it is secure, safe, reliable and resilient. For example, was the upgrade (patch) by  CrowdStrike examined for vulnerabilities (requiring protection against) before it was applied  simultaneously across the world? If not, a compound or domino vulnerability was created. 

An ARPI Principle states that ‘Risk today is based in vulnerability, concerned with consequence.’ Accordingly, resilience depends on looking for, identifying and protecting against vulnerabilities.  Vulnerabilities being defined as potentiality or possibility of strategic risks.  

Global leadership paradigm change is required urgently to transition from ‘reaction and/or denial’  which are often too little or too late by maintaining outdated silo or organization-centric thinking,  to a new leadership paradigm, viewing the world in whole-systems – reflecting the meta-grid of  interconnectedness and interdependence. This is the resilience key to identify presently ‘hidden’ .

Vulnerabilities, visualize network consequences, and enable early executive action to protect  against vulnerabilities. The result will be increasingly enhanced ‘up-front’ resilience of critical global  infrastructure including water, electricity, gas, bushfires, floods, transport, communications,  medicines and fuels. The global aim is redundant resilience. 

ARPI as a global thought leader has developed Strategic Risk Policy® – www.arpi.org.au – which  supports necessary leadership paradigm change to achieve vulnerability-protected infrastructure  resilience. This will be illustrated by ARPI at The Resilient and Renewable Society (R2S) Summit at  the Imperial College London on 23rd and 24th September this year.