The Stability of Instability

A look at the relationship between instability and stability during incidents.

Introduction

This is a short, experimental post. The grounds for this experimentation is found in working through the experience of COVID-19, fighting wildfires and focused on stability during whatever you consider to be an emergency or a disaster, an incident. This post is about decisions made about what is in the world during periods of upheaval, namely, instability and stability. Upon ruminating on experience, I began to question the notion of stability and how else it might be used in the course of calamity.

Stability, Conventionally

Even in the flow of daily life, stability, the state of being stable, appears as the settling of instability, the slowing of the pace of experienced time, a decrease in turbulence and volatility, and the arrival of a situation that does not involve some kind of expedient action. Stability is evident when the swirling of uncertainty meeting velocity subsides. In conventional wisdom, gaining stability may mean that the storm clouds have parted, some, if not all the way, and the worst is over. In emergency and disaster situations, stability can be ephemeral and arise in periods marked on the timeline of the incident. As said in the last post, these are moments to exploit for all the value that can be tactically and strategically extracted from them before the worlds of those involved become unstable again.

The Stability of Instabilities

Stability can retain its meaning of the state of being stable while referring to conditions that are far from it. Written about in the above are characteristics of stability descending upon a situation. Their inverse is instability, simply the lack of stability; the state of being unstable. To repeat and expand the above from a different perspective, instability comes from quickly moving uncertainty stemming from unknown relationships of cause and effect, rapidly moving experiential time, turbulence, volatility, necessary expedience, and dealing with a situation that is not easily described or explained, and at worst, has the appearance of continually dissolving relationships between things and the things themselves.

Experience suggests that every incident stabilizes eventually, and it can then be grasped hold of, and then the next management phase can begin, though it should be noted that stability can be found during an incident as well. It also seems likely that it might be beneficial to talk about stability as less than an ideal state to capture and reference instabilities. For example, quickly moving uncertainty and change, turbulence, and difficulty making sense of the situation can all persist and be considered stable even though they cause instability. Although factors that cause instability, by definition, are the lack of stability, their persistence acting as antagonists to stability produce a state of stability all the same. Instability becomes stability as the state of instability continues despite being a state of stability that is undesired. The incident has stabilized as one that is unstable as long as the instabilities continue. In this case, the “state of being stable” refers to the staying power of instability that continues to spiral, but can be seen as stable dynamics because it endures. Continued instability is a stable state despite being highly active and unpredictable; instability becomes a stability. By being constant, instability becomes normative and stable despite also being in motion, but this does not negate its stability as a state, as the instability is stable by definition. Ongoing instability is considered a stability in describing the incident. Counterintuitive, yes, but a potentially interesting way of perceiving an emergency. The incident has stabilized as unstable, and this too may be short-lived before stabilizing with stability.

Conclusion

Making decisions that sustained periods of instability are a form of stability changes how the incident’s evolution is perceived. Although periods of instability complicate management efforts, the recurrence of the factors that cause instability is a form of stability, a state of being stable. The incident may be devolving, but it is moving from states of instability stability to stability stability. This produces a bounded and punctuated incident timeline at one level, while another seeks to understand how one state transitioned into the next.