Neither backword nor forward: understanding crazy systems resilience

Abstract Not all black swans are black in the same way: they may be unpredictable events in kind, or they may simply be unpredicted by certain actors in a certain context. In this line, a case is the COVID-19 pandemic where previous experiences of virus diffusion had been scientifically studied and a protocol of emergency action even produced by the World Health Organization. Then, why do these events were not detected? This implies a distinction between improbable but imaginable events and unimaginable events. When facing deep changes, socio-economic systems orient their response towards the normative sediment that constitutes social genotypic memory. While this reduces uncertainty, it also activates constraints that normalize change. This normalization does not have an unambiguous outcome: crazy systems may be resilient as well. This premised, is still possible to assign to resilience the role in the creation and spreading of new knowledge it had? By drawing on the literature on resilience, crazy systems and robust-yet-fragile systems and analyzing the “Italian Civil Protection” case, this work is an attempt to respond to this question.