Author: John Plodinec

Dr. John Plodinec is an independent scholar. As part of the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI), he was responsible for identifying and evaluating technologies that can enhance a community’s resilience. His most important contributions have been development of action-oriented tools that operationalize the “Whole Community” concept, including CARRI’s Community Resilience System and its Campus Resilience Enhancement System. He has also helped several communities and universities develop plans to recover from economic and natural disasters. Dr. Plodinec also coordinated development of an action plan for management of woody biomass and debris generated by disasters in support of the federal government’s Woody Biomass Working Group. This effort involved a team from seven federal agencies as well as coordination with other major stakeholders in the American forest enterprise. Dr. Plodinec also developed CARRI’s Resilient Home Program, aimed at improving the survivability of American homes to natural disasters. This built on earlier work he did while at Mississippi State University, where he led the University's efforts to develop programs related to severe weather events. As part of a joint program with the International Code Council and other partners, he has led initial development of a Community Resilience Benchmark System.
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Form Follows Function, Except …

Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.

Louis Sullivan

We’ve all heard the old rubric, “Form follows function,” apparently first coined by Sullivan discussing the design of large buildings.  But it is just as true of our bureaucracies.  As I’ve ranted discussed in a previous post (see Bureaucracy and Community Resilience), “bureaucracies exist to carry out routine functions efficiently and in a consistent manner.”

What I didn’t say (and probably should have!) is that bureaucracies usually are tuned to be efficient under normal conditions.  Thus, the bureaucracy’s structure – its form – reflects business as usual.  The bureaucracy works because its structure is consistent with the tasks it must perform.

Sullivan goes on to say, “Where function does not change, form does not change.”  But what happens when a bureaucracy is faced with a significant change in its working environment – during a crisis, for example – that forces changes in how it functions?

The short answer, of course, is that it tries to handle the unusual in its usual manner.  Its organizational structure – the bureaucracy’s form, hopefully well-tuned to normal conditions – now governs its functioning.  If the organization’s form does not change, then its ability to function efficiently and consistently may well suffer.  On the other hand, if the bureaucracy adapts quickly to the new set of conditions, it may find an opportunity in change to reach a higher level of performance.

Let me look at some very disparate examples to illustrate this.  Hurricane Katrina had a major impact on the forest enterprise in the impacted regions (esp. in lower Mississippi).  In the most affected areas, 40% of the forests were damaged.  According to the Forest Service, the downed or damaged timber could have produced 800,000 single family homes and 25 million tons of paper products.  The EPA and Mississippi’s Department of Environmental Quality had no plans for dealing with this massive amount of solid debris.  It took several months before the owners of downed timber could gain permits for wet storage areas to preserve their timber, primarily because the regulators involved did not change their bureaucratic structures (and thus not their processes) to deal with this unusual situation.  While the permit process was expedited, this was accomplished by simply adding more people, not through restructuring to better handle the problem.  As a result, over half of the timber was lost with major repercussions on the entire forest products enterprise.  In addition, the downed timber led to a situation in which there was literally a new forest fire in Mississippi every day during the spring, summer and fall of the following year.  In short, regulatory functions were dictated by organizational structures tuned to “normal” circumstances; i.e., form dictated function, and resulted in poor performance.  Unfortunately, the regulators have not really learned anything from this – in the face of another Katrina, it would still take months before storage sites for downed timber would obtain permits.

Waffle House provides a very different example.  It plans for surprises, and is organized so that it can function under almost any set of circumstances.  It clearly has learned from past experience and has adapted itself so that restaurants impacted by disasters can open with restricted menus.  If workers can’t get to a Waffle House location (as happened to my community in January, 2014, because of an ice storm), workers can be temporarily brought in from other locations to minimize service interruptions.

WalMart provides an excellent example of finding opportunity in change.  In the ‘90’s, virtually every corporation in America spent huge amounts on information technology.  For most companies, the gains in productivity (i.e., the return on investment) were modest.  However, WalMart used this technological change to reorganize its supply chains so that it quickly gained a tremendous competitive advantage.  In other words, it altered its form to improve functioning.

Form follows function, except when changing circumstances demand changes in how an organization functions.  In the earlier blog on bureaucracies, I pointed out the factors that determine how rapidly an organization can change:  its history, its age, its ability to collaborate, its ability to innovate, and, most importantly, its leadership.  The resilience of an organization, or a community, is manifested in how rapidly it adapts – how quickly it changes its form – so that it can function effectively in a new environment.

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Bureaucracy and Community Resilience

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of vision.

Jim Collins

Bureaucracies are inherently anti-democratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.

Alan Keyes

I’ve had way too much experience with bureaucracies in my almost fifty years working with the federal government.  In the next couple of blogs, I’ll be looking at bureaucracy through the lens of community resilience.

First, a word of disclaimer.  My view of bureaucracy is well summarized in some of Moore’s laws of bureaucracy:

  • Bureaucracies have no heart.
  • Bureaucracies are perverse.
  • Bureaucracies will thrash about, causing much cost, pain and destruction.

If I (and so many others) feel this way, why do we still have bureaucracies?  There are two reasons for this that more or less mirror the quotes above.

  1. Most importantly, bureaucracies exist to carry out routine functions efficiently and in a consistent manner – bureaucracies are the wheels that keep organizations (governments, businesses…) running more or less smoothly.  But this also implies a more fundamental role for bureaucracies.  Their rules, regulations, and procedures encapsulate the organization’s corporate memory of what works, at least within a bureaucracy’s domain.  However, the more rigid this procedural structure, the more resistant the bureaucracy is to change.
  2. Bureaucracies tend to be self-perpetuating.  As formulated in Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:  In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.  In other words, in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Larger organizations – and communities – tend to be more bureaucratic because they tend to do more things on a routine basis. All too often, however, their bureaucracies are rigid and resistant to change. But resilience is all about managing and adapting to change.  Achieving resilience thus means tearing down the walls between balkanized bureaucracies that are busily making their silos into fortresses.  This leads to a paradox:  if a community is working to become more resilient, it will try to take action through its tried and proven bureaucratic channels, the ones least prone to change.  Further, since adapting to major disruptions (e.g., pandemics, recessions) generally does not neatly fit into a single bureaucracy’s purview, it forces bureaucracies to interact with one another in non-routine ways.  If the community’s bureaucracies are flexible, the community is likely to be more resilient; if not, any efforts to enhance the community’s resilience become much more difficult. 

Of course, these are general thoughts.  However, they lead to some specific things to consider in determining whether a community’s bureaucracies will help or hinder efforts to become more resilient.

  • History.  If a bureaucracy is a sort of corporate memory container, then look at the challenges the community, esp. the bureaucracy, has faced.  Were they varied?  Were some of them relatively recent?  Were they successfully met?  “No” answers may indicate that the bureaucracy is too rigid.
  • The age of the bureaucracy.  Just like people, a bureaucracy can get “hardening of the arteries” with age.  It can accrete documentation requirements, for example, that continue on long after the need for a document has disappeared.  In a crisis, these will sow frustration in both the public and the bureaucracy and slow down recovery.
  • Collaboration.  Has the bureaucracy worked with others outside their domain to solve crosscutting problems?  City governments such as San Diego and Baltimore that are managed in a fashion that forces bureaucracies to work together toward common crosscutting goals are likely to be more resilient than ones that are managed in a more stovepiped manner.
  • Leadership.  Is the leadership of the bureaucracy open to new ideas?  Does the leadership have experience working outside the bureaucracy?  Has any of the leadership come from outside the bureaucracy?  Again, “No” answers raise red flags.
  • Innovation.  Has the bureaucracy periodically changed how it does business?  Is continuous improvement a part of its culture?
  • Number.  More bureaucracies imply more organizations that must be aligned to actually make something happen.
  • Accountability. Do community leaders hold their bureaucrats accountable for how they have served the people?

Bureaucracy can be a boon or a bane to community resilience. It’s up to the community – through its leaders – to determine which it is to be.

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Community culture and community resilience

Culture outperforms strategy every time; culture with strategy is unbeatable.

Quint Studer

A community’s culture is one of the most overlooked – and misunderstood – contributors to its future fitness. A community’s culture is primarily its history – not the one in books but the one embedded in its mind, its heart and its soul. A community’s culture shapes its shared values, and how its residents expect each other to behave. It thus conditions how a community approaches its problems, and whether the community can even recognize its problems.

A community’s culture is related to but different from its social capital. A community’s social capital resides in its connections – how the community is wired, and how effectively those wires enable the community to share information. A community’s culture conditions which connections are made, how messages are framed and even which information is shared. Thus, a community’s culture is a sort of skeleton supporting its social connection and directing where they form.

One of the ways that a community’s culture is manifested is in whether or not the community has a “can-do” attitude. Some time ago, I read an interview of the CEO of Fluor, focusing on his move of the giant construction company from California to Texas.

[When the 2006 move became known] “California made no attempt to keep us… things started to happen quickly [in Texas], without us initiating them. The Irving Chamber of Commerce did orientation sessions for employees and spouses, even helping with new-house searches. Or ‘little things:’ Irving on its own renamed a street Fluor Drive, which in California or the Northeast would be laughable.”

This sort of attitude implies a community self-confidence that results in decisive action.

A community’s culture also reveals itself in how – whether – it recognizes its problems. When working with the Navajos, one of the striking features of their culture is the implicit prohibition against talking about bad things that might happen. This was based on the fear that talking about them would lead to them occurring. This sort of “whistling in the dark” makes it very difficult to prepare for or mitigate against disaster.

So how do I know whether my community has a culture that makes it future fit, that makes it resilient? There are several signposts.

First and foremost, the trajectory of the community. If the community’s quality of life is improving, that’s a sign of a proactive culture, indicating a self-confident community. If the community’s quality of life is deteriorating, the community is going to become less confident and less able to tackle its problems. Its future fitness is questionable.

Next, the unity of purpose within the community. As Paolo Freire has said: One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Thus, if a community’s leaders are pushing programs that negatively impact a large swath of the community – that, in fact, are counter to their cultural values – the community has a culture that is in conflict with itself. It cannot confidently attack its problems. In fact, it may not even address them until they balloon into a crisis.

Then consider how tolerant the community’s culture is. As Joel Salatin says: The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers. If one part of a community refuses to let other – different – voices be heard, then the community effectively is limiting its approach to solving its problems to only those “approved” by the intolerant. Effectively, it’s like a general stubbornly concentrating on taking the hills in front of him while refusing to look at the mountains behind. Whether it’s banning books or refusing to listen to parents’ concerns, this kind of community culture will impair a community’s fitness to face the future.

Finally – and closely allied to its tolerance – look at the community’s open-ness, its willingness to accept new people and new ideas. The quote from Fluor’s CEO about Irving, TX, indicates a culture that knows how to adapt to new people and to accept new ideas. In solving their problems, “open” communities will be open to innovations, whatever their source. “Open” communities will also be the most likely to see and seize opportunities brought on by changing circumstances.

Most importantly, “open” communities are the ones most likely to have some sort of strategic vision for their community. They know what they want to become. They may even have mapped out a plan for their future. These communities – their actions compounded from culture and strategy – will be the ones best able to cope with change and to seize the opportunities inherent in change. They will be the most future fit, the most resilient.

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Cognitive bias and community resilience

Beliefs are not like clothing: comfort, utility and attractiveness cannot be one’s conscious criteria for acquiring them.

It is true that people often believe things for bad reasons – self-deception, wishful thinking and a wide variety of other cognitive biases really do cloud our thinking.

Sam Harris

Have you ever tried to convince your boss, your spouse, or someone else about something?  And found your blood pressure rising as you thought to yourself “Why can’t he / she keep an open mind?”  You may have been a victim of the other person’s cognitive biases (of course there’s always the possibility that you were wrong!).

When we receive new information, we try to fit it into our existing mental models – the patterns that we have formed to help us organize information.  These patterns are important and useful because they help us rapidly respond to threats.  However, sometimes our existing mental models act as barriers to incoming information, especially if the new information doesn’t fit into an existing pattern very well.  This is known as cognitive bias.

Community leaders are human.  They are just as subject to cognitive bias as anyone else.  But that means that they may under- or overestimate risks facing the community, or ignore potential solutions to the community’s problems, or accept “solutions” that simply won’t work.  Thus, cognitive bias can have profound impacts on a community’s resilience.  In this post, I want to explore some common kinds of cognitive bias in a community context.

Perhaps the most important kinds of cognitive bias are what I call “delusions of competence.”  These appear in many different guises.  Sometimes we ignore new information because we don’t trust the source.  The messenger may be our political opponents (For example, a recent paper found that most Republicans who didn’t believe in climate change cited the fact that it’s being touted by liberal politicians as a primary cause of their disbelief.  The state of denial by progressive politicians [now there’s an oxymoron!] of the truth of recent revelations of Iranian nuclear misdeeds may have a similar cause.).  We may think we’re smarter than the messenger.  Or better at making decisions, or at predicting the future.  However it appears, this type of cognitive bias usually causes us to discount or ignore new information.  It introduces blind spots in our thinking.

Another type of cognitive bias arises because humans are social animals.  Most of us want to be part of “the group” (whatever that is).  If (noboby/everybody) thinks X then we should think the same.  Or we let our instincts be overridden by trying to be politically correct, or polite.  Or we respond to the confidence exhibited by a squeaky wheel.  This type of cognitive bias often ends up in a sort of community groupthink and misdirected actions.

A third type of cognitive bias is “the Tyranny of the Status Quo.”  Often, we tend to value what we have so much that we will do almost anything to avoid change.  This kind of bias can be summed up in something my friend Jim Kelley once said to me:  “People will only change when the pain of not changing becomes too great.”  This type of cognitive bias can also show up in more subtle ways.  We may tend to downplay some new information because it either conflicts with or pushes aside what we are concerned with now.  Or, rather than recognizing a new pattern, we may try to force fit new information into an old mould. 

Confirmation bias is closely related.  In this case, we pay attention to new information only if it buttresses previously held opinions.  This is particularly pernicious because we are flooded with so much information and so many studies that come to contradictory conclusions that it is way too easy to fall into this trap.  It seems that Climate Change Zealots on both sides are especially prone to this.

Every one of us as humans will fall prey to cognitive bias at some point – pattern making and matching are important evolutionary advantages.  But the leadership of our communities is made up of more than one person.  Inherent in the types of cognitive biases described above are ways that community leadership can avoid their negative impacts.

  • Diversity.  The best way to counter groupthink is to have people with diverse mental models each grappling with new information.
  • Respect.  If people respect one another, then they are highly unlikely to overweight their capabilities against someone else’s.  They are also more likely to listen to each other.
  • Good governance structures.  Diversity can lead to conflict; respect can lead to a desire to placate everyone.  Both can lead to inaction.  Good governance structures can achieve an appropriate balance as well as adding other checks and balances to avoid cognitive biases.

Our communities need information to gauge the risks they face and to find ways to either adapt to or mitigate those risks.  They need information to find ways to grow healthier and to recognize and seize the opportunities around them.  They need information to strike a good balance among their myriad needs and competing priorities.  Cognitive biases disturb and distort the flow of information.  If our communities are to become more resilient, they must find ways to combat cognitive bias.

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Insights from Scale, by Geoffrey West

To sustain open-ended growth in light of resource limitation requires continuous cycles of paradigm-shifting innovations.

Geoffrey West

I recently finished reading this book (official title is Scale: the universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies, whew!) published in 2017. Somehow, I missed it when it first came out; I found a reference to it in something else I was reading. West is a former President of the Santa Fe Institute and a distinguished nuclear physicist – in spite of that his book is relatively easy reading.

The general basis of the book is that there are properties of cities that scale in certain ways with population. In general, infrastructure scales sublinearly with population. As an example, if we graphed miles of roads vs population of cities from around the world we’d get a line that would curve down from a straight line. In other words, the larger the city the fewer miles of road per person (Mathematically, road miles scales with population raised to the ~0.85 power, 1 being linear).

However, some properties do scale linearly with population. For example, “the total number of establishments in each city regardless of what business they conduct turns out to be linearly proportional to its population size. Double the size of a city and on average you’ll find twice as many businesses. The proportionality constant is 21.6, meaning that there is approximately one establishment for about every 22 people in a city, regardless of the city size. Similarly, the data also show that the total number of employees working in these establishments also scales approximately linearly with population size: on average, there are only about 8 employees for every establishment, again regardless of the size of the city.”

On the other hand, socioeconomic properties scale superlinearly (curve up from a straight line, with exponent ~1.15). “The larger the city, the higher the wages, the greater the GDP, the more crime, the more cases of AIDS and flu [and covid, as we saw during the pandemic], the more restaurants, the more patents produced, and so on, all following the “15 percent rule” on a per capita basis in urban systems across the globe.” Both what’s good and what’s bad about cities, in one mathematical relation!

This seems to imply that population growth leads to socio-economic growth indefinitely. But, as West points out, growth can’t go on indefinitely. Similar to Moore’s Law for computer chips (doubling in power every two years), eventually you come up against some physical limitation that slows down growth. Unlimited growth inevitably leads to collapse…unless…

And that leads to what I see as the most important reason to read the book: West’s insights on growth, innovation and change. Innovation leading to positive change can enable continued growth. Thus, West posits a sort of symbiotic relationship among the three.

“Change and, by implication, innovation, must occur in order to continue growing and avoid collapse. Growth and the continual need to be adapting to the challenges of new or changing environments, often in the form of “improvement” or increasing efficiency, are major drivers of innovation.”

He also has a valuable insight about the rate of transformation. He points out that communities trying to fundamentally change and rise above their peers must temper their desire with the knowledge that positive transformation can be a very slow process. “Perhaps the most salient feature is how relatively slowly fundamental change actually occurs. Cities that were overperforming in the 1960s, such as Bridgeport and San Jose, tend to remain rich and innovative today, whereas cities that were underperforming in the 1960s, such as Brownsville, are still near the bottom of the rankings. So even as the population has increased and the overall GDP and standard of living have risen across the entire urban system, relative individual performance hasn’t changed very much. Roughly speaking, all cities rise and fall together, or to put it bluntly: if a city was doing well in 1960 it’s likely to be doing well now, and if it was crappy then, it’s likely to be crappy still.” This is an interesting sort of echo of the Law of Conservation of Community Momentum.

In the book, West concentrates on the overall trends. However, the real opportunities for fruitful investigation by the rest of us are the outliers to the trends.

What communities have leapfrogged their peers? How have they done it? New Orleans after Katrina seemed to have done this in several areas, e.g., education. But now NOLA seems to be backsliding – reverting to the mean or even worse, especially in violent crime. I think this book is essential reading for those interested in our communities – both for the hidden relationships it reveals and for the food for thought it provides.

I read this appreciation of George Orwell this morning. Well worth your time.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/17/why-orwell-matters/

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The Price of Time and Our Communities’ Futures

Only entropy comes easy.

Anton Chekhov

I have been reading excerpts from Edward Chancellor’s The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest for the last few weeks. I suggest you get a copy – I think it will become one of those books that shape people’s thoughts and color public dialogue. It illuminates the path our country took to get into its current economic mess. It is an in-depth study of what I wrote about in “Masked Villains.”

Chancellor has an interesting metaphor that I want to borrow. Suppose there are two cities, separated by a raging river. One city is the Present and one is our desired Future. There is a bridge that crosses the river – the only way we can get to that Future.

But we live in the Present, and have to meet the Present’s daily needs: food, clothing, shelter, education for our kids, medical care … And so, it is all too easy to forget about the bridge to our Future. But there is a price to pay for our forgetfulness, for our neglect – entropy. Entropy is the price of that wasted time.

Entropy is perhaps the most difficult physical property to understand. Temperature, mass, distance, velocity, volume, and even time are all concepts that we almost intuitively understand. And yet entropy is in some ways the most important, because of its ties to our own mortality.

Entropy is Nature’s drive toward randomness, seen in the buildup of waste products and the dissipation of energy and order. It is the loss of information in messages, the fading of memories, and the decaying of our bodies and bridges. Entropy embodies uncertainty, risk, and friction.

It takes effort – energy – to combat entropy. Our bodies’ systems geared toward repairing the day to day wear and tear on our bodies first and foremost rely on our internal energy generation systems. As we age, those systems become less and less efficient until our bodies no longer are able to withstand entropy’s inexorable pull. Thus, in a very real sense, entropy kills.

At the community level, entropy means concrete will inevitably crack, stone will erode, and iron will rust. We often call these the ravages of Time, but just as it takes effort to maintain our bodies, maintaining our physical infrastructure also requires effort – energy. In fact, all of our infrastructures – whether physical, social or economic – require effort if they are to be remain viable parts of our communities.

If we neglect them, they will inevitably crumble: the concrete pillars holding up a condo will fail; our children will forget how to interact with others on a human level; our businesses will waste their capital on meaningless gestures instead of investing in themselves. One need only look at our frayed social networks and our confused and conflicted culture to recognize entropy’s fingerprints.

Because of entropy, our communities will always face chronic slow-onset crises that eventually will require immediate attention and action. It is all too easy to become so wrapped up in the Present’s crises that we forget to maintain the bridge to our Future. The Chekhov quote is a stark reminder of how easy it is to forget, and of how hard it is to remember to invest in our bridges toward our Futures. If we don’t invest and maintain those bridges, we risk their collapse. And if they collapse, we may fall into the river’s swift current, perhaps never to find our desired Future.

===============
A side note. The sharp-eyed may note that Chancellor in effect is calling interest (e.g., on loans), not entropy, the Price of Time. In effect, interest is a measure of the entropy of financial systems. When the interest rate is decided by the financial market without government interference, it is a reasonably accurate measure of the financial system’s entropy. In times of low monetary volatility, market interest rates tend to be low, indicating the market’s conclusion that the loss in value of the loan’s principal over the term of the loan is relatively low. As market volatility and perceived risk (uncertainty) increase, the interest charged increases. So, too, with increasing length of the loan – longer time, larger uncertainty.

Unfortunately, when central bankers do silly things like giving us negative interest rates (where we still are now in almost all of the developed world), then the measure becomes highly inaccurate.

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Impedance matching and proximity

It’s very important in life to know when to shut up.

Alex Trebek

If you’ve ever had an EKG or been tested for sleep apnea, you probably remember those funky sticky pads containing electrodes attached to various body parts. Back in my youth (aka “When Dirt Was Young”), electrodes were stuck on with collodion – some of you may remember how much fun(?!?) it was to get that stuff out of your hair.

The sticky pads and the collodion are there to minimize the barriers to transmission between your heart, for example, and an electronic receiver. Essentially they’re making sure that the messages your body is sending are getting through as efficiently as possible. This is called impedance matching.

Social capital in a community ultimately is about ensuring that information flows through the community to where it’s needed and can be acted upon. This is very similar to an EKG. In our communities, the social networks that connect us to our family, friends, neighbors, and to the rest of the community play the same role as the wires do for an EKG – acting as conduits for information.

But too often we forget the impedances to information flow. If I’m a migrant or an illegal alien, I’m not going to listen to a law enforcement officer or an emergency manager; in fact, I’m more likely to run the other way if I see a cop. If I’m a flaming progressive, there is little chance that a dyed-in-the-wool conservative is going to listen to anything I have to say (sadly, this knife cuts both ways). In fact, research has shown that the resistance of many conservatives to climate change messaging has as much to do with who’s been delivering the messages as it does with the messages themselves. As far as conservatives are concerned, the impedance around messages from Al Gore, Greta Thunberg or John Kerry is simply too high for those messages to get through.

The really tough problems our communities face are multi-dimensional (and probably multifarious!). Real sustainable solutions for most of them are unlikely to be flaming red or icy blue but rather various shades of purple. If we’re going to find those solutions, we’re going to have to share information and work together.

The old saw is that we have to find common ground, and I don’t disagree with that. But if we can’t discuss things rationally and respectfully, it’s hard to know where the “common ground” is to be found. Melding the idea of impedance matching with insights from the science of innovation can help us to begin that journey.

Successful innovation requires movement of ideas – information – from the thinker through intermediaries to the do-er. There are several possible paths for information flow, but the one commonality among them all is that they all rely on some form of proximity for successful information transfer. To anticipate my bottom line, proximity is a means of matching impedances to maximize information flow.

The simplest form of proximity is geographic. All other things being equal, I’m more likely to listen to my next-door neighbor than someone who lives three states away, let alone in another country (take Prince Harry … please). If one of my neighboring communities has solved a problem I’m facing, then I’m going to look hard at adapting their solution to my needs. And their nearness to me means that I’m more likely to learn about their successes (and failures!) than I am those of a town at the other end of the state or country.

But there are other forms of proximity. Take social proximity for example. I have a certain level of trust in those in my social networks. It may be conditional (”I can trust them except when the discussion is about _.”) but it means that I will at least listen to them.

Technical proximity provides another example. If the information to be transferred is in the literature, I might come upon it in my professional reading. Or, I might learn about it by attending professional association meetings. During the pandemic, much of the information used directly by restaurants and hotels and motels came from professional organizations such as the American Hotel and Lodging Association and the American Restaurant Association. These associations turned the rather turgid guidance from the Centers for Disease Control into actionable information for their members. While the CDC lost credibility during the pandemic, these organizations retained the trust of their members.

Businesses often have trading partners or alliances with other businesses. They may work together in clusters. These business interactions can also be low impedance communication channels, facilitating information flow. Cultural organizations and faith-based centers bring together people with similar values and language. They, too, can lower the barriers to information flow.

Even legal or regulatory – institutional – relationships can be used to foster information flow. Although we seldom think about it, working relationships between community and state and federal officials can also provide good working conduits for information flow.

So if I have a message, how do I make sure that it gets through even to those who otherwise wouldn’t receive or accept it? The stock answer is to find common ground. In practical terms, that may mean impedance matching: using existing relationships and information flow networks to get my message where I want it to go.

If I am passionate and vocal about climate change, for example, a message from me to conservatives likely will have high impedance. The message simply won’t be accepted. I could train to better communicate my message but the lack of cultural proximity between me and conservatives will always be a source of impedance. So if I really want to get my message across, I’m better off finding ways to use existing religious or business relationships to get my message through. In other words, I should shut up and find others who can convey the message better. I want my messengers to have as many points of proximity with the intended recipients as possible.

Ultimately, solving the really tough problems our communities face demands that Left, Right and Center find that elusive “common ground.” We can only do that if we can find ways to communicate together. Impedance matching is a way to start those necessary conversations. Done properly, we can begin to solve those problems while increasing our communities’ social capital, and their resilience.

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For Want of a Nail – Uvalde

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
for want of a shoe the horse was lost,
for want of a horse the knight was lost,
for want of a knight the battle was lost,
for want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

Old English saying

The mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has been the proverbial grain of sand that, in falling, has caused an avalanche of action toward making our schools safer. The media coverage has focused on guns and the police response. In the following, I’ll use the old saw above to provide a slightly different framing of what happened. There are aspects of this sad incident that have broader implications and applications in our communities.

In what follows, I’m using the publicly available information as of this date. Some details may later be found inaccurate, but the big picture is unlikely to change. The interpretation of the events and their context are mine.

Nails (linchpins and keys)

Several organizations work together to provide security to the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District. The District has its own seven-person police force, whose officers play a similar role to School Resource Officers. The Chief is also the communications linchpin* between the school district and the Uvalde Police Department, and with the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Department. He is expected to facilitate communications among these organizations so that actions are properly coordinated.

The District’s police department had participated in joint active shooter training exercises with other law enforcement organizations in August, 2020. In March of this year, the District itself hosted a similar joint training exercise for local law enforcement agencies. However, it appears that teachers and staff have not had similar “live” training.

The District has software for monitoring students’ social media accounts and for visitor control. The district also has several security policies and procedures, as well as physical protective measures: fences to limit access to school grounds and doors that can be locked to prevent access to classrooms. District procedure is for classroom teachers to keep their classroom doors locked.

Robb Elementary (now closed permanently) had a chain link fence to limit access and entrance doors that automatically lock when closed. The doors to the classrooms could be locked from the inside; School District security policy states that teachers are to keep them locked. The classroom doors had a steel jamb intended to prevent an outsider from breaking into a classroom. None of the local law enforcement agencies had master keys to open the doors.

Knights and Battle

The shooter, once he turned 18, purchased two AR-15s from a legitimate gun dealer, and over 1600 rounds of ammunition – some in stores and some on-line. On the day of the incident he posted his intent to shoot his grandmother on Facebook. He then shot her about 30 minutes before the carnage at the school began. Though severely injured, the grandmother called 9-1-1; it’s unclear whether she knew of his intent to go to the school.

The shooter then took his grandmother’s car and drove toward the school. He crashed into a ditch and shot at two witnesses coming out of a nearby funeral home. He then apparently scrambled over the chain link fence into the school’s parking lot. At the school, one of the teachers had propped open one of the auto-lock doors with a rock. While closing the door, the teacher saw the shooter crash his car, and start shooting. The teacher then called 9-1-1 reporting that a man with a gun was in the school’s parking lot. Ironically, a patrolling Uvalde police officer heard the 9-1-1 call and pursued a person he thought was the shooter. Unfortunately he was mistaken – he had driven past the shooter.

When the teacher closed the outside door, its lock did not engage, allowing the shooter to enter the building. Shortly thereafter, seven police officers entered the same way, and took gunfire from the shooter. Two of the officers were wounded. The shooter also fired ~100 rounds into a classroom, immediately killing a teacher and several children.

The shooter then closed the door to the classroom, and locked it. The shooter fired a few shots at the door and through the walls of the locked classroom, and then more or less went silent. The School District police chief concluded that the situation had changed and had become a barricaded shooter with hostages incident, and calls were made for tactical equipment to breach the doors.

It is important to note that the School District police chief did not consider himself the Incident Commander. He considered himself to be a first responder and had left his radio and protective vest in his car so that he could move more rapidly. However, as the first police chief on the scene, others expected him to play that role.

Some of the police officers set up a perimeter around the school. Parents had been notified via social media, and asked to go to another location to be reunited with their children. Unfortunately, many parents went directly to the school to retrieve their children. The police officers at the perimeter did everything they could to keep the parents away from the building.

Almost immediately after the shooter locked the door to the classroom, a search for a key began. A rather futile search – apparently a janitor had several key rings with keys but they were unlabeled. No one knew which might be the master. The School District police chief thus had to try each on the door to a classroom across the hall until he found the right one. As a result, police officers were not able to enter the classroom until almost 80 minutes after the gunman entered school grounds.

In the meantime, children in the classroom had managed to call 9-1-1 at least five times, detailing the carnage and asking for help. Since the School District police chief did not have his radio, he knew nothing of these calls.

Kingdom lost, and lessons to be learned

Once the right key was found, a tactical team entered the classroom and killed the shooter. Nineteen elementary school children and two teachers ultimately died. One of the teachers and, perhaps, some of the children who died could have been saved had the police taken down the shooter sooner.

I do not want to second guess the police – I’m not qualified to do that. But there are some clear (and not so clear) lessons that emerge to me as I dig into what happened.

School District police should have had a master key. This likely would have saved the lives of some of those (e.g., one of the teachers who died in an ambulance after the shooter was killed) who were shot but not killed outright. Many school districts ensure that their resource officers or local law enforcement have keys. More generally, schools and other public buildings need to make sure that police and fire and other emergency responders have ready access to their facilities. In particular, it’s good practice to have police and fire personnel do walk-throughs of public buildings. They can point out potential vulnerabilities, and be able to more rapidly and accurately respond to emergency situations. This applies to any building where the public may congregate and which provide a tempting target: schools, libraries, hospitals, government buildings, hotels and event venues. This is a lesson that incidents such as the terrorist attacks on hotels in Mumbai should have hammered home.

It’s laudable that local law enforcement had had an active shooter training exercise in the school just two months before the incident. Clearly though, the exercise did not simulate the actual events that occurred; for example, the shooter locking himself in the classroom. Further, teachers and staff weren’t involved in that training. Teachers – and school librarians, and others in direct contact with large numbers of students at any one time – are truly first responders in these situations. Their instinctive reactions can be crucially important in saving lives. The teacher’s action in propping open the door the shooter entered through was probably wrong; her calls to alert police were certainly correct. Both were instinctive; training hones the instincts and builds mental muscle to make the correct response.

Students also need to have some training – we hold fire drills (we do, don’t we?) and we should provide some age-appropriate instruction for active shooter incidents, as well. For example, very young children need to see policemen in tactical gear – and firemen in firefighting equipment – so that they understand that these aren’t monsters coming after them, but rather potential saviors.

The police have been severely criticized for their efforts to keep parents away from the school. This Monday-morning-quarterbacking is wrong! The social media messaging from the school specifically asked parents not to come to the school because it would potentially put them in danger and hamper the police.

The decision to treat the incident as a “barricaded subject” event once the police realized they didn’t have ready access to the classrooms may have been theoretically incorrect but, in the circumstances, it matched the situation on the ground as they knew it.

The School District police chief has deservedly received a great deal of criticism. As the situation unfolded, he had two overlapping roles to play – Incident Commander and linchpin for communications among all of the law enforcement agencies involved. From his own remarks, it is clear that he did not recognize that, as the first police commander on the scene, he became the Incident Commander. Coordination at the scene devolved into whispered conversations, attempts to negotiate with the shooter, and a shambling scramble to find a key. The School District police chief’s split-second decision to leave his radios in his car meant that he could not act as the linchpin either: he could not be informed that there were still children alive in the classrooms. Had he known this, the decision to treat the event as a “barricaded subject” situation might have been changed.

More generally, we too often ignore how important linchpins are in our communities, especially in crises. They may not be leaders (as the School District police chief was supposed to be here), but they are always the key connectors that hold our communities together. 9-1-1 operators, the complaint departments for our road and water systems are important – and often overlooked – parts of what we call our community’s social capital. By explicitly recognizing them and their importance, we can strengthen our communities. And by recognizing a lack of linchpins, and filling those gaps, we can help community leaders make better decisions. In this event, one man – flawed as all of us are flawed – didn’t understand his role. Tragically, his misunderstanding may have cost lives.

In the coming months, I intend to do a deeper dive into “social capital.” Within the research community terms like “social capital” and “bonding, bridging and linking” are too often glibly tossed around. Some researchers massage a mixture of measures with statistics, trying to torture out whether one community has more social capital than another. Lost in this effort is a simple truth: a community’s social capital is all about people and their connections to one another. The statistics mask the trust or distrust, the respect or disrespect, and the laughter and the tears that mark all connections between real people. I firmly believe that building a community’s social capital must be rooted in this simple truth, and want to explore this further with you.

*In systems science, linchpin connections are what social scientists call bridging or linking social capital. These are simply boundary-spanning connections from one system – here the School District’s police department, to other systems – the other law enforcement organizations involved. The linchpin in this context is the member of the School District’s police department who is connected to the other law enforcement agencies. If we think of communities as small worlds, then linchpins are crucial elements for rapid and accurate communications.

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Flawed Men

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

Four men – four Presidents – honored in granite. Men of their times, with all of the imperfections of those times, but whose deeds transcended their eras and shaped our futures.

The first President, always the one asked to lead: the Continental army, the Constitutional Convention, the nation as first President. The indispensable man for the birth of our nation. And yet a slave owner, and a sometimes scheming land developer.

The third President; his words have gone down in history as the definition of freedom and human rights. Sparked both the American and French Revolutions. And yet a slave owner who recognized slavery’s inhumanity but continued to own slaves, and a sort of moral coward who never battled his opponents head-on, always relying on proxies.

The 26th President; shaped the modern Presidency. The first conservationist President, won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Russo-Japanese war, the trust-buster always on the side of the common man. And yet he preached eugenics, to stop “degenerates” from breeding.

The sixteenth President; saved the Union in its darkest hour, freed the slaves, and wrote the greatest memorial to those who have fallen in war in the English language. And yet he was clinically depressed and married into a family of slaveholders.

In recent years, their reputations have come under attack: statues removed, their names expunged from public buildings, their lives dissected and their flaws magnified. And yet they accomplished so much.

Today we here in the US honor those who have paid the ultimate price for the freedoms we enjoy. In small towns across the country (and a few – too few! – large cities), there will be parades and other festivities to remember them. But too often we forget that these fallen heroes were also flawed, just as the four on Mt Rushmore were. Some were racists, some were thieves, some were rapists – the litany of their flaws goes on. As humans, our common lot is imperfection. And yet because of what these flawed men and women did, we can celebrate with family and friends – backyard barbecues, going to the beach, taking in a ballgame, using the holiday to reconnect.

The lesson for me is that though we are all flawed – even the greatest of us – we can all accomplish great things, working together. Even as those we honor today achieved so much for us. But to honor them we must step into life’s arena as they did. We must accept that we are all flawed, but overlook the flaws in others so that – together – we dare greatly to build a better life for all.

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Defining Victory

To a man without a map all paths look the same.

Loose translation of an African proverb

A recent column in my local newspaper really resonated with me. The author discussed several lessons from the Viet Nam War. Since my service there, I have thought much on what we should have learned from that experience. Thus, I was disappointed that the writer didn’t cite what I believe was the war’s most important lesson: you need a clear picture of what Victory looks like. Without that anchor, policies are like a boat beating on a dock, doing little good and damaging both the dock and the boat. In Viet Nam, this resulted in way too many “We have to destroy this village in order to save it”s in a war that ultimately ended in failure.

One of my Beloved’s favorite jabs at the Bush Administration is that they didn’t have an exit strategy for Iraq – and she’s right. What started out as taking down Saddam Hussein (and looking for weapons of mass destruction we never could find!) evolved into a complicated mess involving nation-building and terrorist-hunting. In other words, we never seemed to have a clear picture of what we were trying to achieve, so we never got out until we just basically said, “To Hell with it! We’re leaving.”

In my User’s Guide to Expert Advice, I pointed out that clearly describing Victory is a prerequisite for success for community leaders. In one of my examples, I contrasted the US and Swedish approaches to dealing with the pandemic. The US approach to the pandemic has been to “flatten the curve,” i.e., victory was [sort of] defined as no Covid-19 deaths due to lack of appropriate medical care. The Swedish approach has been much more “Whole of Society” – balancing protection of the most vulnerable with maintaining an acceptable quality of life. We had the same dichotomy of approach among the US states. In general, the red states strove to limit the impacts of the virus on everyday life, while protecting the most vulnerable. Conversely, the blue states imposed strict lockdown and masking measures for much longer to prevent the spread of the disease (In fact, cities in some blue states are actually re-imposing masking requirements.).

In today’s inbox I received the results of a study (by the National Bureau of Economic Research) looking at each state’s overall performance during the pandemic. The authors looked at each state’s excess mortality, economic performance, and educational impacts. The states that took draconian actions to prevent infections did somewhat better in fighting the pandemic’s infectiousness than the others. On the other hand, those states’ economies took bigger hits and have taken longer to recover – some still have not. The biggest difference was in educational performance – kids in states that kept them out of school longer fell further behind academically and had more negative mental health incidents (and more suicides!) than their peers in more open states.

This echoes the results of international studies with similar findings. We now have a lot of data indicating that defining victory holistically leads to better overall outcomes than a single focus on just one aspect of life.

Going to the community level, several major US cities defined victory as defunding the police. They succeeded. But what did they achieve? Spikes in crime, officers’ resignations, loss of economic activity. In this case, “Victory” [=defunding the police] was easy to achieve but the cost to these cities is already outrageously high and getting worse. For example, just today it was reported that Seattle is not able to investigate sexual assaults because there are not enough police officers to do so. Rapes can be reported via an automated messaging system, but nothing happens with these reports. Experience indicates that single women and families will begin to flee the city in increasing numbers, further hollowing out its economy and making it less and less attractive for tourists.

To me, defining victory can be a cornerstone of community resilience, if done properly. We unfortunately don’t pay enough attention to it – it’s that “vision thing” we tend to ignore. So let me offer a few simple guidelines for community leaders.

• While Victory may not be measurable, it has to be clearly defined. Not only you as community leaders must understand what victory looks like, but its description has to be clear and understandable for everyone who cares about the community. Otherwise, it is unlikely that any progress toward it can be sustained.

• Victory has to enhance the quality of life in the community – for everybody. Doing something to help one group at the expense of another will ultimately help neither (see Seattle’s example). This implies that Victory needs to be thought of in a “Whole of Community” manner. Community leaders should ask, “Will the entire community be better off if we reach this destination?” If the answer is no, the community leaders need to regroup.

• Since Victory is a destination – an endstate – there needs to be a realistic path to get there. A rural community generally doesn’t have the resources to implement “big city” programs for health or economic development. So setting up the goals of those programs as the target for community policies simply isn’t realistic. In other words, no path = no victory.

• Although it’s not a formal part of their qualifications, the community expects its leaders to implicitly obey the first tenet of the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm. If Victory entails great sacrifices or harm greater than its benefits, or is perceived as such, then community leaders need to go back to the drawing board.

Above all, community leaders need to recognize that defining Victory in essence draws a roadmap for the community to follow toward its Future. It points to a destination and sets a path toward it. Thus, the brief guidelines I’ve drawn above can be summarized as:

  • If you can’t clearly describe the end-state you’re aiming for, don’t start down the path until you’re sure you’ll know it when you get there.
  • If the end-state isn’t good for the entire community, you need to rethink it.
  • If reaching Victory means needless suffering, then you need to rethink the path – and maybe the endstate.
  • And, finally, be damned sure to do no harm to any member of the community.

Without that roadmap, all paths will look the same, and almost all will lead nowhere.