What Is Whole-of-Society Resilience
TC Lee | Chairman of CDAT, Founder of the Ganghu Civil Defense Team
“Whole-of-society defense resilience” — you hear these words a lot lately.
From the national perspective, it’s a policy framework with committees, budgets, and initiatives.
We hear the word resilience a lot, but we don’t seem to use it much in everyday life.
Resilience is the speed at which a person, an organization, or a system recovers from a blow.
A rubber band has a certain resilience. Our bodies have a certain resilience. Our nation and society need to build resilience too.
In terms of civil defense and society, this definition can be applied at every level.
Individual resilience means you can get through three days without water or electricity.
It means you have some food stored, a fully charged power bank, and you know where the water shutoff valve in your home is.
You won’t lose the ability to sustain yourself in an instant. You can handle basic natural and man-made disasters.
More specifically, it means your body can hold up.
There are no elevators at a disaster site. Moving things requires people. You might have to walk a long way.
Running, weight training — these are actually part of civil defense too.
The Home Fortress workshop that the Ganghu Civil Defense Team has been promoting — this is the layer we’re trying to help everyone prepare for.
If possible, don’t go to a shelter.
Don’t be forced to leave because your home has no food, no supplies, or conditions have deteriorated.
To avoid having to go to a shelter, you should be thoroughly prepared.
At the same time, prepare yourself physically and health-wise.
The next level up is the family.
Family resilience means that when someone is injured, someone in the household knows how to handle it.
It means the whole family has agreed on where to meet if they can’t reach each other.
This doesn’t take much time, yet the vast majority of families have never had this conversation.
Basic minor injuries and illnesses — you can handle them yourself.
Even when an ambulance can’t arrive in time, you can sustain a family member’s life until help arrives.
If you can do that, you already have significant resilience.
The next level up is businesses.
This layer is often overlooked, but most people spend eight to ten hours a day there.
For adults, most of their waking hours are spent in the workplace.
If something happens to the company — IT systems go down, the office is inaccessible, the supply chain breaks — can the company respond quickly?
Not a hundred percent, but can it get things back to seventy or eighty percent?
Can it maintain communication among colleagues, with suppliers and customers?
Can it keep cash flowing? Keep paying salaries? Keep paying rent?
And this doesn’t have to wait for war.
Taiwanese businesses should already be regularly discussing extreme scenarios: what if the internet goes down, what if the power goes out, what if employees can’t get home, where’s the data, who has access.
The difference between having discussed it and not having discussed it is enormous.
In the past, working from home might have been a corporate perk. Now it might be your corporate resilience.
Parallel to businesses is the community.
This is the layer I feel most personally connected to, because the Ganghu Civil Defense Team is a local community group.
We live in the internet age.
You might be close with your friends, but you rarely see them in person.
It’s hard to meet new people, and your friends live far away.
Because of the technology industry parks in Ganghu, many young people in the civil defense team have moved to Taipei from other parts of Taiwan.
Living alone in a shared apartment or a small room, when something really happens, your family might be in Taichung, Changhua, or Kaohsiung. Nobody can come help you right away.
The person who can help at that moment is someone who lives within a ten-minute walk from you — and whom you know.
So what local community groups are really doing is building physical connections between people.
This can’t be done online. That’s why we have almost no online activities.
We want people to know each other, to become familiar, to trust one another.
While WFH is a form of corporate resilience, most businesses and employees would probably agree that 100% online meetings don’t always deliver the best results.
The occasional in-person meeting can still effectively boost productivity.
Finally, there’s the nation.
National resilience is the sum of the previous four layers.
If every individual, every family, every company, and every community can recover to at least a passing level of functioning after taking a hit — whether natural disaster, man-made crisis, or war — that sum is whole-of-society resilience.
If the bottom four layers are empty, no amount of budget at the top can hold things up.
People often ask: will Taiwan and China actually go to war?
I don’t know. Nobody knows.
Whether the other side decides to act, and how they choose to act, is not in our hands.
What is in our hands is whether we’re prepared.
When every layer is prepared, the cost for the other side to make a move becomes very high.
Preparation itself is deterrence.
Some people will say, it sounds like there’s so much to do.
It’s really not that much.
Between now and November, everyone’s time and attention will go to local elections. That’s completely understandable — mine too.
Regardless of the outcome, after the election, take a little of the time you were putting into politics and redirect it.
Don’t redirect all of it. You’ll genuinely burn out.
An hour or two a week is already more than enough.
Learn some knowledge.
Practice some skills.
Get to know the people around you.
Civil defense doesn’t have to take a lot of time, and it doesn’t have to involve a lot of action.
But it has to start.