Global Hints about Community Resilience

Long is the road to learning by precepts, but short and successful by examples. ~ Seneca the Younger.

I am an unrepentant data geek. One facet of my geek-ness is that I am autodidactic (I actually had a Professor call me that – I had to look it up) – I seldom accept others’ conclusions; I have to see for myself (actually, the Professor said I had to learn from my own mistakes, which I sometimes do). About 10 years ago, I first stumbled over FM’s Resilience Index. Now in its 12^th year, it is a composite of 18 different indicators.

I posted about it at the time; lots of graphs, but I didn’t really put them into a useful context. In this post, I want to take a look at hints that they may have for those of us trying to understand a community’s resilience, in particular factors that we should consider in the resilience indices so prevalent in the literature and in use in the US.

The variables. FM is an insurance company. So “resilience” has to do with physical phenomena – natural hazards and climate change, as examples. It bins the 18 variables included in the Index into two categories: Physical factors and Macro factors. The Physical factors, in effect risk factors, rely on FM’s experience in each country, except for the cybersecurity data. The Macro factors might be considered as those attributes related to recovery from a natural disaster, i.e., resilience factors. If you’re interested in the data sources and methodology, follow this link.

Whenever possible, the data are averaged over a five-year period. This is something that is generally not done for most (any?) of the US resilience indices. The advantage of this is that it smooths out some of the inevitable noise in the data while maintaining evidence of a significant trend.

All of the Macro factors that involve money are adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). The intent is to remove cost-of-living differences from comparisons. For the most common resilience indicator systems in the US, this has not been done. Thus, California counties (or other units) are indicated as more resilient than they really are because important data such as median household incomes are not adjusted for the very high cost of living (CoL) in CA. Using poverty values not adjusted for CoL, the number of people living below the poverty line in CA is less than the US average. However, once the value is adjusted, California has the highest fraction of its population living in poverty of all the states. In this context, it’s not surprising that it’s taking so long to rebuild Pacific Palisades!

Physical factors

Climate risk exposure – the portion of the country’s economically productive area exposed to climatic risks today.

Climate change exposure – the portion of the country’s economically productive area exposed to climatic risks in 2050.

Climate risk quality – enforcement of building codes for wind (90% of the indicator), and mitigation of flood and wind impacts.

Seismic risk exposure – the portion of the country’s economically productive area exposed to seismic risks.

Cybersecurity – commitment as shown in action (80%), and risk reduction relative to risk.

Fire risk quality – enforcement of fire codes (80%), and risk reduction relative to risk.

I haven’t seen the proportion of economically productive area to determine exposure to hazards used before. In the US, we either don’t include exposure data in our resilience indices, or else use something like the HAZUS code to calculate hazard losses (as is done for FEMA’s Community Resilience / National Risk Index). We certainly don’t include projections of risks in the year 2050. We also don’t include fire risks to the built environment as is done here, nor effectively give credit for mitigating actions.

Macro factors:

Control of corruption – perceived amount of corruption (public resources used for private gain) as well as “capture of state by elites and private interests.”

Education – average of expected years of schooling and the mean of actual schooling.

Energy intensity – energy consumption divided by the adjusted gross domestic product.

Greenhouse gas emissions – emissions divided by the adjusted gross domestic product.

Health expenditure – mean expenditure on health per person, both public and private, adjusted for PPP.

Inflation – annual rate of inflation.

Internet usage – fraction of the population using the internet.

Logistics – how easy it is to export to a target country in terms of the quality of infrastructure, the quality and availability of logistics activities, and public sector bottlenecks; based on survey data.

Political risk – perceived likelihood that the national government will be either destabilized or overthrown, either unlawfully or by violence.

Productivity – GDP (adjusted for PPP) per capita.

Urbanization rate – on an annual basis.

Water stress – freshwater withdrawn as a fraction of available resources.

Each factor was statistically massaged so that they were on a common scale (0-100). The resilience index for each country is then the mean of the 18 values. In contrast, in FEMA ‘s resilience index, the exposure (calculated via HAZUS) is divided into the Macro factors.

I took this data and mapped each factor against the resilience index and against each other. I won’t clutter this too-long post up any further with a bunch of graphs. The results are summarized in the following table where I’ve looked at correlations among the variables. R² is a measure of how well two variables are linearly correlated. I’ve arbitrarily chosen an R² value of 0.5 as the threshold indicating a strong relationship. All of the strong relationships are listed in the table below. If anyone wants the complete set of correlation just let me know.

Strong relationships R² ≥ 0.5
Resilience index	Control of corruption	0.76
	Climate mitigation	0.74
	Productivity	0.70
	Education	0.70
	Logistics	0.66
	Fire mitigation	0.65
	Health expenditure	0.57
	Internet usage	0.57
Productivity (GDP per capita)	Control of corruption	0.65
	Logistics	0.60
	Climate risk mitigation	0.57
	Health expenditure	0.53
	Education	0.52
	Fire risk mitigation	0.51
	Internet usage	0.50
Health expenditures	Climate mitigation	0.56
Education	Internet usage	0.68
	Climate mitigation	0.57
	Fire mitigation	0.52
	Urbanization rate	0.51
	Control of corruption	0.51
Political risk	Control of corruption	0.55
Control of corruption	Logistics	0.66
	Climate mitigation	0.54
Urbanization rate	Internet usage	0.52
Logistics	Fire mitigation	0.63
	Climate mitigation	0.57
Climate mitigation	Fire mitigation	0.73
Climate risk exposure	Climate change exposure	0.50

The strongest correlation was between the resilience index and control of corruption. This factor is not considered in any of the commonly used resilience indices. In effect, we are ignoring the community’s governance/institutional capital as a factor in its resilience. The impact of official corruption on recovery from disaster is obvious. The news from Gaza bombards us daily with a reminder of how much corruption hinders recovery. And apparently misuse of $100 M in recovery funding is another factor hampering the Pacific Palisades recovery. The only index that considers this factor is Arup’s resilience index for the 100 Cities initiative. Based on its strong relationship to a country’s resilience, this factor deserves more attention. (As an aside, I compared FM’s “Control of corruption” data with the Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International. The two are determined rather differently; however, they are highly correlated R² = 0.96, i.e., they apparently are reflecting the same thing!).

Logistics, internet usage and fire risk mitigation are all important factors strongly related to both resilience and productivity. None of them are currently included in common resilience indices. I have often said that resilience is a manifestation of a community’s strengths, not its vulnerabilities. Intuitively, the ability to move physical assets where they are needed is an important strength related to recovery. In a similar sense, internet usage facilitates movement of information across the community. More generally, this emphasizes the importance of dispatchable capital.

One surprise: exposure factors weren’t correlated with the corresponding “quality” factors, i.e., mitigation wasn’t related to exposure. While the two climate exposure factors were correlated, none of the exposure factors were correlated with any of the resilience factors. Similarly, greenhouse gas emissions were not correlated with any of the other variables.

This is the first time that FM has included cybersecurity. It doesn’t make any difference to the resilience index, and is not correlated with any of the other factors. It seems to be irrelevant to both resilience and natural hazards and fires.

There is a lot more that can be extracted from this data, but this post is long enough already. FM has provided a rather different window on resilience, pointing out the importance of variables not often considered when we look at our communities. I hope that those working to make their communities more resilient will include all of the community’s capital portfolio in their efforts – its logistics systems (physical capital), its information systems (social capital), and above all, how the community makes and implements decisions (governance/institutional capital).

It began with a bull

…and a community mired in poverty…and a stubborn man who cared enough to do something about it.

The following is based on a nifty little book by Vaughn Grisham and Rob Gurwitt called Hand in Hand. It provides more detail about Tupelo’s economic and community development and is well worth reading in its entirety. I’ve added details that reflect the city’s further progress after the book was written.

In the 1930s, Tupelo, in Lee County, MS, was an economic basket case. Its economy (primarily agricultural, mainly relying on cotton) had been devastated by the Great Depression of the 1930’s, a killer tornado in 1936 (230 died in the county), and the ravages wrought by the boll weevil on the cotton fields. The hub of one of the poorest counties in arguably the poorest state in the nation, a majority of its population were below the poverty line. Tupelo was rather isolated – with few roads and no nearby waterway; it had no amenities to foster tourism; it had no mineral resources (and severely depleted agricultural land!); it had no nearby federal installations to act as a center of growth. Today, Tupelo is the center of a thriving economic and educational ecosystem. And this amazing turnaround, this transformation, began with a bull.

Prior to World War II, city leaders had tried to improve Tupelo’s economy several times. These efforts had been haphazard and without lasting success; even the city’s electrification had had little impact. However, these efforts had shown that the fate of the city and the rural areas around it were highly intertwined. City businesses had little chance of growing unless their poor rural customers had more money to spend.

As early as 1936, the owner of Tupelo’s newspaper, George McLean, had begun editorializing that the city’s best chance for growth lay in lifting the poorest out of poverty. He expressed the belief that if the “haves” in town invested in the “have nots,” the return could be tremendous. And like all good prophets, he was ignored – at first.

Previous efforts to help the farmers had focused on diversifying their crops. What little success that had been achieved disappeared into the Great Depression. McLean and a few other forward-thinkers in the town visited several ag schools across the region and beyond to develop a new and more lasting approach. They concluded that if farmers could turn to dairying (in addition to cotton if they wished), they could greatly improve their economic condition. Instead of a single payday when they brought in their cotton crop (and living on credit much of the rest of the year), they could have a steady income from selling their milk every day or so.

Great idea! Except … a successful dairy farm requires quality milk-producing cows. By and large, the poor farmers’ cows weren’t good milk producers. A good bull was needed to provide better milkers. George and a few others then began a campaign to buy a bull. They eventually ~~pestered~~ persuaded nearly every business in town to contribute. They went to the Isle of Jersey to buy the best bull they could find. They hired a dairy expert to provide advice to aspiring dairy farmers. For $5, any farmer within a 33-mile radius of Tupelo could have his cow mounted. The first year, only 150 cows were bred, but results seemed promising. The second year 1100 cows were bred, and the total kept going up – the farmers were making money!- In fact, the demand became so great that McLean and others started a foundation to support an artificial insemination program, and bought a world champion bull. By the end of the decade, dairying was pumping over $27 million (2025) dollars into Lee County’s economy.

But that success was only the start for McLean and other business leaders. McLean in particular believed that a community’s sustained vitality required not only increased financial capital but the other forms of community capital as well – better infrastructure, better schools, closer ties between town and the surrounding county. McLean and the other community leaders concluded that achieving all of this was beyond the scope of a Chamber of Commerce but did need to be institutionalized.

This led to the formation of Tupelo’s Community Development Foundation (CDF) in 1948. Eight-eight business leaders were involved in the planning. In its first year, 151 founding members contributed over $25,000 to get it started. It has held fast to McLean’s original belief that investments by the “haves” in the “have nots” pay big dividends. However, it has not remained static in its vision. Every decade the CDF has moved its aim point in response to the city’s development. In this table, some of the returns on those investments are detailed.

Capital	Accomplishment
Physical	Prepared report for legislature which averted water crisis by using Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway as source of water Encouraged development of four-lane roads to facilitate rural access to manufacturing facilities
Human	Partnered to form adult literacy program Partnered to provide free tuition to local community college to all Lee County high school graduates Partnerships to advance education in STEM disciplines with TVA and IBM Brought a branch of the University of Mississippi to Tupelo
Governance	Instrumental in formation of Council of Governments for the county Developed Community Leadership Institute Fostered alliance between Pontotoc, Union and Lee Counties (PUL Alliance) for economic development Guided development of city strategic plan focusing on attraction and retention of talent and on improving the city’s quality of life
Financial	Aided Lee County to climb from 10^th to 1^st in the state in terms of manufacturing jobs Played major role in establishing city as a major hub for furniture manufacturing As part of PUL Alliance, captured Toyota manufacturing facility (2007) Impacts of Great Recession less than those nationally, with quicker recovery
Cultural	Guided formation of United Way of Lee County Recognized five times as an “All American City” Forged culture of accomplishment and openness to new ideas and people
Social	Built linchpin connections between city business community and rural surrounding areas

Today this revitalized city is the home of two regional banks, a Baldridge award-winning hospital, and a thriving regional automotive industry. Its poverty rate is below the national average. Tupelo’s per capita and median household incomes are about 40% higher than the rest of the state and above national averages. Its unemployment rate is about two-thirds the national average and 58% of the state as a whole. And to think this amazing turnaround, this transformation, began with a bull.

The book on which this is based has an excellent table that sums up the “guiding principles” by which the CDF operates. These are explained fully in the book but they’re worth listing here.

• Local people must address local problems.

• Each person should be treated as a resource. The community development process begins with the development of people.

• The goal of community development is to help people help themselves.

• Meet the needs of the whole community by starting with its poorest members, not just as targets for top-down efforts but as full partners in helping design those efforts.

• Community development must help create jobs.

• Expenditures for community development are an investment – not a subsidy – and will return gains to the investors. So people with money have both the responsibility and an interest in investing in the development of their own community.

• Community development must be done both locally and regionally if the full benefits are to be achieved.

• Start with a few tangible goals, and measure your progress in meeting them.

• Build teams and use a team approach.

• Leadership is a prime ingredient, but community development cannot be achieved without organizations and structure.

• Never turn the community development process over to any agency that does not involve the people of the community.

• Persistence is essential, and programs must be continually updated.

Winning Tomorrow

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but Tomorrow is ours to win. — Lyndon Baines Johnson

As many of you know, I have spent much of my later-career years focused on communities, especially community resilience. The “resilience” that I and my colleagues have talked about goes beyond the conventional “bouncing back” from adversity – survival – to include seizing the opportunities inherent in any “change” whether adverse or not, i.e., thriving.

But this put us in a somewhat awkward position: virtually all of our funding was coming from sources most interested in “surviving” crises. If you think of the Chinese ideogram for crisis, it is made up of the symbols for “danger” and “opportunity.” Our funding tended to focus us on mitigating “dangers” and on recovery when they overwhelmed communities, with much less attention to seizing opportunities.

Now that I’m self-funded (ahem), I’m trying to bring balance back into my own thinking and writing. As a part of this, I’ve struggled to find something that better captures our conception of “resilience.” If the purpose of a community is to provide the quality of life that its members want, then a community should be continually striving to meet or exceed that goal. I was searching for a way to express that idea when I stumbled across the quote for President Johnson.

Winning Tomorrow – the American Dream for communities! The American Dream is the essence of what makes America exceptional. It is inherently aspirational. It is built on a belief that anyone – even the poorest among us – can rise above even the humblest of beginnings to achieve a better life with hard work and persistence. Just as we as individuals work to make the American Dream a reality for ourselves and our families, our communities should work to make themselves better, more livable, places to work, play, and raise a family – they should aim to Win Tomorrow.

Certainly, achieving that purpose is complicated by the sea of changes in which our communities are immersed. Winning Tomorrow means that the community will continue to move forward no matter what challenges they face in the future. Communities are open systems. People are moving in and out of them continually. Today’s acceptable quality of life may not satisfy the community’s residents 10 years from now. Neighboring communities will also change. The community may be struck by a Wild Thing, resulting in loss of life, in damage to infrastructure, or to businesses closing. The state or federal government may enact new regulations altering community processes. And, of course, the community’s infrastructures and dispatchable capital will degrade over time if not maintained.

A community Wins Tomorrow if the community’s quality of life steadily improves over the long term. The community successfully adapts to its stressors before failure occurs. If the community fails (e.g., if it is devastated by a Wild Thing), it rapidly recovers, and regains its upward momentum.

It takes self-investment to Win Tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean mountains of money. It does mean institutional capital to make decisions and to implement them; human capital to take action; and social and cultural capital to sustain the effort.

Some of you cynics may scoff at this: “Mine is a poor community with few resources.” The American Dream doesn’t care where you start, or how poor you are. If you work hard and smart over the long haul, you can create a better life. In the same way, even the poorest of communities can Win Tomorrow, using what they have to take small steps that become bigger steps that ultimately become transformative.

In that sense, Winning Tomorrow is a journey, not a destination. It is not a one-time exercise but rather a continuing effort to make Tomorrow better than Today for the entire community. Efforts to Win Tomorrow should last for decades – ideally never ending. Winning Tomorrow mostly consists of incremental changes to individual community systems.

I know this may seem like what my good friend Warren Edwards calls the “Square Root of Ether” – an intellectual exercise with little practical merit. In my next post – It Began with a Bull – I’ll tell the story of a dirt-poor community who started its journey with nothing but a leader who cared about his community and the community is still working to Win Tomorrow.

Trends – maybe

“I don’t set trends. I just find out what they are and exploit them.” ~ Dick Clark

In previous posts, I’ve highlighted trends that will likely impact our communities. Dick Clark’s quote is particularly relevant to communities. A community needs to be ready for the trends that are impacting them, or may impact them. If the trend is negative, a community should take action either to minimize the impacts or to be able to rapidly recover. If the trend is positive, the community should be ready to exploit and accentuate it, if possible.

The fly in this ointment is that we sometimes think we see a trend when there may not be one at all. We humans are pattern-seeking animals. We owe our survival as a species to our ability to recognize slight changes in familiar scenes; our ability to recognize strange whispers intruding on the rhythms of our lives.

In this post, I’m going to look at two different potential trends. One of them already seems to be impacting our communities. The second may be real or not. Only time will tell.

Peak Population

According to the United Nations, the rate of growth of the global population peaked at 2.3% in 1963. Since then it has decreased to today’s 0.84%. The UN projects that the global population will peak before the end of the century (~2080) with a very high probability. Recent model developments are indicating that the UN model is very conservative; peak population may well occur decades sooner. The Eurozone, China, Japan and Russia have all already peaked. The African population is set to continue to expand throughout the rest of this century, but not enough to overcome the declining populations elsewhere.

Peak population appears to be driven by two entangled factors. Compared to 1990, women globally are having one less child. In countries with declining populations, the birth rate is simply too small – below the 2.1 births per woman – to maintain the population. In large part this seems to be a consequence of greater prosperity. In richer countries families don’t need childrens’ work to sustain themselves. In richer countries women are more likely to be working. Life expectancies are greater in richer countries.

In fact, life expectancy is increasing globally – the UN predicts that about 1/4 of the world’s population will be 65 or older in 2080. By 2070, people’s longer life spans will result in over hslf of the world’s deaths occurring after the departed has reached age 80 (compared to only 17% in 1990). In the US by 2035, the number of people 65 or older will exceed those 18 and younger.

As the UN points out, the only reason the US has not peaked (and probably won’t) is immigration. Without immigration, the UN projects that the US population would slowly decrease from today’s 340+M to 245M by the end of this century.

An important global consequence of this trend is what it implies about climate change. All of the scenarios built into our climate models assume that global popuation will not peak (at around 10.5 B people) until early in the 22d Century. Fewer people mean fewer emissions. Thus, adjusting these models to account for fewer people may drastically alter the expected climate impacts.

In the US, the consequences of this trend will vary greatly depending on the community. Communities that rely on exports to Eurpoe for their economic vitality may find that their markets are shrinking due to the decreasing population. Competition for these markets is already intensifying. However, the growth that will occur in the developing world, particularly Africa, in the next decades means that there may be new markets to exploit.

Communities that do not have a significant immmigrant population may stop growing or even contract. Longer life spans are already increasing the demand for elder services (pet care is an interesting example); these communities may not have enough people with appropriate skills to satisfy that demand. These communities may also start to hemorrhage higher paying jobs. Companies requiring a technologically adept workforce may leave because of a lack of skilled workers.

In fact, the Peak Population implies that human capital will be at a premium. We are already seeing this in a decline in the ratio of those employed to job openings – now less than 1. A part of this is the Baby Boomer generation leaving the workforce. This increased demand for workers implies that wage-induced inflation is likely to persist.

However, this does not necessarily mean that our economy will decline. Gross Domestic Product is the working population multiplied by their productivity. If AI is able to increase productivity enough, our economy may even thrive.

As we’re already seeing in our stores, immigrants bring with them a demand for products we have seldom encountered before – food, fashion, and entertainment. They also potentially bring with them severe demands for community services – schools, medical facilities, transportation and welfare. While our new President may be able to stem the flow of immigrants, he won’t be able to stop it.

Peak Population will likely have a significant impact on Higher Education. The declining number of students will place great pressure on colleges and universities to survive. This will place a premium on their reputations and “branding.” Institutions of Higher Education likely will begin to react more forcefully to acts of student hooliganism.

Other possible consequences:

Greater demand for workers may well mean greater career volatility as workers go after a wider universe of opportunity.
As the well-to-do elderly die or dowsize, there is likely to be a glut of McMansions in some communities. This should drive prices down so that middle class families can afford them, but this will have impacts on the tax base of local governments and schools.
Immigration into the US, is already impacting the country culturally and socially. Peak Population is likely to accentuate these impacts, both positive or negative.

The 2024 election and political realignment

We’ve had entirely too much theorizing over what our election meant or didn’t mean. Four things stick out to me:

Trump got slightly more votes than in 2020, meaning he got about the same proportion of the electorate in 2024 as in 2020 .
Much of the theorizing (scapegoating?) revolves around percentages, not the absolute number of votes. Since the total number of votes cast in 2024 was well below that of 2020, Trump’s percentage of the total vote was bound to be higher.
Trump’s coalition (his mix of the voters) changed. He picked up more votes from blacks, hispanics, and blue collar workers than before. Conversely, his proportion of white votes went down slightly, continuing a larger trend.
Harris got 10 M less votes than Biden. She ran an abysmal campaign, and was a worse campaigner. A lot of Dems just stayed home on election day. The telling stat – to me – is that Harris was unable to get out as much of the urban Dem vote as Biden did. She reached only 80% of Biden’s total in Chicago (Cook County) and Philadelphia, and 75% in New York (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens).

All of this suggests that the demise of the Dem Party has been greatly exaggerated. Ultimately you have to give people “a reason to believe.” The Veep never did. Had Biden withdrawn sooner so that the Dems could have had a more “primary-hardened” candidate, they might have won.

Is there a trend toward political realignment of our country? A certain – “maybe.” Definitive conclusions about party realignment will have to wait for more detailed analysis of the absolute vote totals. I suspect that it will be a definite “Yes” in only a few states. Ideally this election might mark the beginning of the end of “identity” as an important factor in our elections. We can only hope.

Ecological vs engineering resilience

The goal of resilience is to thrive. – Jamais Cascio

Both Claire Rubin and James Brooke were kind enough to forward to me a short piece from The Conversation, by Prof A A Batabyal of RIT (nice that someone is looking out for me!). Although the short essay started by looking at “sustainability,” it was really focused on “resilience.” In particular, Batabyal contrasts “ecological” resilience against “engineering” resilience.

He uses a lake and a bridge as exemplars: the former for ecological resilience (as defined by Hollings) and the latter for engineering resilience (as defined by Pimm). The bridge has only one stable state; the lake has more than one stable states. As the Prof points out, Hollings’ definition boils down to how much stress an ecosystem can withstand before it restructures. Pimms’ definition of resilience relates to how fast a system can return to equilibrium.

The Prof then points out that most socioeconomic systems – such as communities – “exist” in multiple states. Thus, Hollings’ definition should be favored. I disagree, for several reasons.

First and foremost, Hollings’ definition and the panarchic framework it leads to is not very useful for a community trying to become more resilient. The definition requires us to observe a system under stress and then watch it change. The amount of stress needed to force the system to change is its “resilience.” If I’m a community professional, in essence this implies I have to let the community fail before I can gauge its resilience! Of course this is nonsense – but it does point to the difficulty of predicting a community’s resilience using this approach.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is knowing whether a community has restructured. Take New Orleans after Katrina as an example. There were several differences in the Before and After:

The city’s population dropped by a third.
Several new civic organizations were put in place.
There were measureable changes in the performance of important community systems (e.g., student performance improved).
Much of the sleaze in the French Quarter disappeared.

Did these indicate a change in structure?

Then there’s the “resilience-to” problem.In practical terms, we know that a community generally doesn’t have a single “resilience.” Rather a community’s resilience depends on

The stressor. A community may be able to deal with a great deal of economic stress, but fold like a house of cards in the face of a pandemic.
The speed of stress. A community may be able to adapt to a high level of stress spread over time but unable to tolerate the same stress experienced as a rapid shock.
The amount and type of damage, and the resources available for recovery.

Pimm’s concept of “engineering resilience” has the advantage of seeming more like what people think of as resilience. As the result of a Wild Thing – some sort of extreme event – a community loses capacity or functionality. Over time, the community recovers from the Wild Thing and regains its capacity. The time required to regain its functionality is the community’s resilience. Bruneau et al’s concept of resilience is very consistent with this idea.

From a community’s standpoint, community systems are either functional or failed – they either do or don’t meet the community’s demand for their function. After the damage wrought by a Wild Thing, the community at large doesn’t really care whether the health care system, or the system providing electricity are structured the same as before. They only care whether they can obtain the same (or better) health care as before the Wild Thing. They only care whether they can get light when they flip the switch, or air conditioning when it’s hot outside. Community professionals are most concerned with determining how soon after a Wild Thing the health care system is functional; how soon the lights can come back on after power is lost.

The stress testing approach* that Jennifer Adams and I have developed provides community professionals with a way to gauge this type of resilience. To summarize, community professionals postulate a particular Wild Thing – type, intensity, timing. This leads to a prediction of the damage the Wild Thing will cause. This in turn leads to a prediction of which community systems will fail. The resilience of each system is then determined by the use of dispatchable capital over time. The resilience of the community is inferred to be the resilience (time to recovery) of the last system to recover.

Community professionals and communities themselves want to know how resilient they will be to Wild Things before they occur. Simply put, Hollings’ approach to resilience may be useful in explaing what happened to a community as a result of a Wild Thing after the fact. It’s not very useful to community professionals trying to determine their community’s “recoverability” before a Wild Thing strikes. There is a certain inevitability to the “ecological” resilience approach when applied to communities. If sufficiently stressed, they will fail and restructure. When and how and to what is unanswered. Measuring the “engineering” resilience of communities using stress testing methodology gives community professionals answers they can work with, and is more intuitive. The approach can indicate paths to reduce damage and community system failures. It can also point to which additional resources could speed the community’s recovery from a Wild Thing. Ultimately, it can make recovery surer and more rapid – and communities more resilient.

_______________

* M. J. Plodinec, “Stress Testing of Community Resilience to Extreme Events,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 18(2), 151-176 (2021).

Five easy pieces

“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.” ~ William James

Purpose of a community

Quite simply, the purpose of a community is to provide its members with the quality of life they want. If what the community provides either drifts or jumps away from what they want, people leave. We’ve seen this response to “defunding the police” in too many of our great cities – LA, San Fran, Portland, New York…. This mismatch between what people want and what the community provides leads to hollowed out cities. Those who can (esp the middle class), leave. The community’s remnant is a powerful elite and a struggling underclass. Some expect unearned benefits. All are crushed by the taxes and fees and other dictates exacted and enacted by the elite.

Business of a community

Quite simply, the business of a community is to increase its “community capital” so that it can maintain, and perhaps improve, the quality of life it provides. When people leave, they take capital with them. If there is a net out-migration, the community has less capital to fulfill its purpose. As we’ve seen with the Rust Belt cities and others such as St. Louis, this becomes a vicious cycle: fewer resources leading to a poorer quality of life, incentivizing people to leave, reducing the resource base even further. Conversely, communities that are growing have more resources – and more discretionary resources – to fulfill their purpose. This can lead to a virtuous cycle. There’s nothing inherently evil in “the rich getting richer;” but those caught in the vicious cycle of a crumbling community may be easily persuaded that it is so.

Knowledge and community decision-making

In 2007, Sarewitz and Pielke wrote an interesting article on “reconciling the supply and demand for science” in policy-making. They focused on research to guide policy formulation. I’ve generalized their work to “knowledge-gathering” to support community decision-making. For example, this would apply to expert advice.

S and P start with an often-overlooked aspect of decision-making – the need to engage the decision-maker when gathering knowledge to inform decisions. The decision-maker has to identify both the drivers for making a decision and the information needed. This led me to a useful (at least to me) set of 3-D cartoons that sort of predict/explain what “works” in providing information for decisions:

• A decision-maker who can communicate information needed for decision.
• A decision-maker engaged with those gathering information.
• The information provided is both relevant and comprehensive, i.e., all of the information available that helps the decision-maker make a good decision.

Each of the planes (Engagement-Knowledge, Engagement-Relevance, Knowledge-Relevance) can throw additional light on what leads to U3 advice (useful, usable and used!). In the following, the blue lines point toward the quadrant most likely to lead to U3 advice.

Human action

For many years, I have looked at communities through the lens of systems. In this age of specialists and technocrats, I’ve found this a very useful way to begin to solve a community’s problems – not just those that are obvious, but those that cascade through the community. Systems thinking lends itself to ferreting out the linkages – the interdependencies and couplings – that are key to avoiding unintended consequences.

Occasionally this approach has been criticized as too mechanical, and that it ignores the “human in the loop.” Actually, human action is at the core of my thinking. I define my systems in terms of people, and a system’s processes in terms of the actions that the people who make up the system take. So, for me, the “transportation system” isn’t roads, bridges, airports and so on, but rather the people who ensure that people and goods can safely and expeditiously go where they are needed. The people in these systems have fixed (infrastructure) and dispatchable (e.g., skilled technicians, maintenance equipment) assets that they use to take action – to achieve the system’s purpose.

This approach provides the context within which human action takes place. Too often we look at results as simply manifestations of the skill (or lack of skill) of those who are taking action. That misses the point that the results are also conditioned by how the system is connected, or wired. Skilled people usually overcome bad wiring, but at the cost of efficiency. The efforts of the less skilled are likely to be negated by bad wiring. Context counts!

Systems thinking also forces me to focus on linchpins and their connections. These are members of one system who link their system to others. In particular, these linchpins are crucial to the success of efforts to transform a community. In fact, my experience indicates that a community cannot positively transform itself without a tight web of linchpins who can work together.

“Wilding” and communities

After almost every plague in history, there has been a period of “wilding” – during which many survivors threw caution to the winds (France after the Terror may be another kind of example.). In the 1920’s, after the Spanish flu pandemic too many people invested money they didn’t have. Inevitably, this led to an economic crash but with socio-political impacts as well.

During the recent pandemic, many local governments intensified the social damage (via lockdowns and fear-mongering) caused by the pandemic which has led to a more severe “wilding” than we saw in the 1920’s. The riots of 2020-21, the public excesses of the LBGTQIA+ … are manifestations of this “– survivors”wiling.” In the 1920’s, the inevitable crash was more economic (reflecting the major mode of “wilding”?). This time, I fear, the crash will be more socio-political, and probably violent. Communities need to prepare for a crash, whether it is the violence I fear or whatever their guts tell them it will be.

Communities’ responses will likely be hamstrung economically, but good leadership can overcome that. The question we must then ask is – have we elected effective leaders?

Featured

Five Pillars of Community Resilience

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
Noam Chomsky

The other week, Claire Rubin sent me a link to an article from Beaumont resilience training – Here’s How to Use Resilience to Move out of Your Comfort Zone. The author – Laura Ponting – focuses on the personal growth of the individual, but her “five pillars” seem to fit well with my own conception of community resilience as a springboard for growth – development or strengthening – of a community, i.e., for making a community more Future-fit.

I apologize to Ms Ponting – I’m reorganizing her order to suit my [sometimes – often?] warped logic. I’ve also taken some of her words out of context, to help make my points. I’m also couching this in terms of systems; after all, communities are first and foremost complex adaptive systems (CASs). I’ll also use the Seven Community Capitals as a way to clarify some of my points.

First Pillar: Purpose. Future-fitness – growing in strength and capability – requires not just action, but purposeful action. Action — to strengthen the individual or the community. Since a community is only successful if it provides the quality of life its members want, the purpose of becoming more resilient is to safeguard that quality of life, and to improve it if possible. This is often called a vision; the community’s conception of what that stronger community will be. The community as a whole has to buy into that vision, or else it is likely that it won’t be realized.

In particular, this requires cultural capital. A common language to describe and understand that future state. A common self-confidence that breeds optimism. As Chomsky implies, without that confidence and the optimism it engenders, the community won’t work together to achieve it.

Second Pillar: Self-awareness. “Know Thyself” is not just an inscription on a Greek temple; it is the zero-th step for any community plan. For the community as a system, self-awareness means knowing who its members are. It means knowing how they are connected – or not. It means knowing the “balances” in each of its capital accounts, and the constraints or limits on the use of each capital. Most importantly, it means that the community’s leaders know how to make decisions and take action (human and institutional capital).

Third Pillar: Mindfulness. “Mindfulness” for a community equates to situational awareness. Communities as systems are in dynamic environments, with trajectories conditioned by both internal and external forces. “Mindful” communities recognize not only where they’re headed, but the forces that are driving them. The fine people at ResOrgs in NZ consider situational awareness one of the four enablers of effective crisis strategic planning.

Situational awareness rests on the community’s social capital. It requires “ears to the ground” within the community to gauge the community’s mood and its ability to move. Situational awareness also requires linchpins keenly tuned in to sources of information outside the community. They can warn the community about new sources of stress and alert the community to unexpected opportunities.

Fourth Pillar: Self-care. As individuals, we know we have to take care of ourselves. We exercise (well, some of us do). We have physicals to tell us whether we’re overweight, have high blood pressure, are pre-diabetic or any of the other warning signs the doctor looks for. And if we’re wise, we take action to avoid further damage to our vitality.

The same holds true for our communities. We know that if we fail to maintain our homes or our physical and natural infrastructure, they may be damaged in a severe storm, or even collapse from neglect. But the same holds true for our “softer” infrastructures.
• our community’s culture that, at its best, brings us together and gives us the confidence to act;
• our community’s social networks that enable us to communicate with each other, and – in times of crisis – tell us where resources are needed;
• our community’s economy that provides us with the financial capital to take action.

And just as we as individuals have physicals to point out where action is indicated to strengthen us, so too should we in our communities be aware of those signs that point out that action is needed. More frequent maintenance of physical systems, rising crime, a fraying social fabric, or growing poverty each are indicative of the need for “self-care” for our communities.

Fifth Pillar: Positive relationships. Ms Ponting couches this in terms of finding people to support us, esp. as we strive to better ourselves. The same holds true – in spades – for communities. It is simply a reflection of the economy of scale. The more resources we can bring together, the more we can do. If we work smartly (after all, two heads are better than one) we can make our communities more functional and better places to live for all of us.

But there are also traps for the unwary in this. First, “working smartly.” If we let ideology overrule reality, in other words if we don’t couple Purpose and Mindfulness/Situational Awareness, then we may actually harm our community. The debacles that so many of our big cities have become – crime, filth in the streets, the ugliness of the hopeless homeless – are monuments to failed ideologies not rooted in reality.

The second trap seems to be endemic in our age of “engagement.” Even the best of ideas can die the death of a thousand cuts in a committee. When egos are engaged, everyone wants to see a little of themselves in what’s done. That leads to inefficiencies and sometimes even alters the idea so much that it no longer supports the Purpose.

A third trap is the difficulty in overcoming the distrust and mistrust that seems to be endemic in our not-so-civil civil life. It sometimes seems that no one has the authority to act but everyone has veto power over any action. Relationships ultimately are grounded in trust. In our age, however, Trust has become a rare commodity. Thus, building positive relationships particularly in our polarized polity is not for the faint of heart.

Five Pillars for strengthening us as individuals; Five Pillars to move our communities toward a better and more secure future. That should be our Purpose. Achieving the Purpose has to be grounded in self- and situational-awareness, so we can set a realistic path from today to that better tomorrow. As we advance upon that path we must maintain those strengths we rely on to move forward – self-care. And if we can find willing partners to support us, these positive relationships can help us to advance more rapidly.

Featured

Effective leadership

The undeserved hype around Cuomo reflects the dangerous way in which style has triumphed over substance in politics. It also reflects the way in which, when it comes to leadership, we reward charisma and confidence over competence. … I do hope that if we’ve learned one leadership lesson from Cuomo it’s that we desperately need to rethink what a real leader looks like.
Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian

Several years ago a reporter for a Mobile newspaper asked me what were the essentials for community resilience. My answer was “There are five things: leadership, leadership, leadership, connections and capital. And the last two don’t count without effective leadership.”

Last June, I took a sort of zen look at the attributes of a leader. But that left open the question implied by the quote above: how do we recognize leadership. More importantly in terms of our communities, how can we recognize effective leadership. In one way, it’s surprisingly easy to recognize a leader because the one unmistakable hallmark of any leader is – followers. But having followers doesn’t mean that the leader is effective. Some leaders recognize where people want to go and simply get out in front of them (President Trump might be a good example). In effect, they let their followers push them along. Others – perhaps more visionary – pull their followers toward what they believe is a better place (Both President Roosevelts are good examples). These are the ones who are most likely to be effective leaders.

So let me advance an hypothesis: an effective leader is one who strengthens the community. We can thus evaluate our leaders’ effectiveness by looking at our community’s trajectories; i.e., by determining whether the community’s social, economic, human, cultural, governance and environmental capital accounts are increasing, decreasing or staying the same.

Strengthening the community also means that the community’s resilience is also increased. More capital means that the community can better resist chronic stresses, and has the wherewithal to more rapidly recover from acute crises. Further, it means that the community can seize the opportunities inherent in our changing world.

Thus, evaluating our leaders’ effectiveness is analogous to balancing your checkbook, or looking at how your investments in your retirement account are doing. For each type of community capital, look at the bottom line. Ask whether it’s growing or – hopefully not – shrinking.

There are a few key indicators that are easy to determine:

Community growth. If more people are coming into the community than leaving, then leadership must be doing something right. If we dig a little deeper, we may find that growth is due to business leaders transforming the community’s economy (like Hugh McColl and John Belk in Charlotte), or cultural leaders increasing the “livability” of a city (e.g., Mayor Joe Riley in Charleston).

Conversely, if the community’s population is decreasing, it is a sign that the community is not functioning at an acceptable level for many, in one or more ways. Fewer people mean fewer connections, meaning less social capital. And if those who are leaving are taking their money and their businesses with them, less economic capital as well.

Economic vigor. Communities with vigorous local economies tend to have a buzz about them. At the local level, money changing hands at a restaurant, a barber shop, a small store is as much a social as a financial transaction. In the chaos caused by our responses to the coronavirus, too many leaders seem to have forgotten – or ignored – the intimate tie between the economic and the social health in our communities. Those communities whose leaders did not forget this are the ones most likely to recover the soonest. And as our communities slouch toward their rebirth, effective leaders will find ways to strengthen this tie.

Built environment. Effective leaders maintain their community’s built capital. They know that boarded up buildings, streets acne-ed with potholes, and colored water coming from the tap “incentivize” those who can to leave the community.

Human environment. Especially in times of stress, communities rely on a skilled populace to function. Effective community leaders recognize that they have to keep those with essential skills from leaving the community. Most importantly, they must nurture new generations with future-ready skills to take their place. The loss of meaningful learning is just one of the consequences of covid. Also being lost in some communities are opportunities to challenge the best and brightest in the community to fully develop their skills.

Effective leaders will find ways to make up the lost time, e.g., with extra school days, summer sessions and educational “boot camps.” Ineffective leaders will see spikes in dropouts in their community; and a depressing loss of skills especially in poorer sections of the community.

Governance. Leaders have to make choices. If the community’s leadership is making choices that increase the community’s capital accounts, or that protect them in times of stress, then they are being effective leaders. There are plenty of barriers to making good choices: conflicting groups vying for power within the community; ideology; a lack of accurate information for decision-making. Effective leaders overcome them.

We all have seen the sorry spectacles of the elected leaders in some of our major cities refusing to take decisive action to protect their communities from destructive riots. Too often, it seems that, as Blake Carson puts it, “We live in a time when governments seem to lack the will and the competence to do hard things.”

Effective leadership is essential if a community is to be resilient. Determining the effectiveness of your community’s leadership is as simple as answering – “What’s in your community’s wallet?”

Featured

Resilience in the Age of Stupid

The Age of Stupid: A world where dialogue is dead; a world where we have stopped engaging with those with whom we don’t agree; a world where we no longer have to listen or expose ourselves to other ideas that may challenge our confirmation bias. Social media has made the promotion of ignorance much easier. With a simple block, unfriend or ban click, we can ensure that the only information we are exposed to comes from our trusted tribe of like-minded thinkers.
The Risk-Monger

Like most of you, I’m sure, I care deeply about the issues of the day. But I know that our media echo chambers (whether MSNBC or OANN) give me – at best – only a part of any story. Over the last couple of years I’ve turned to blogs, trying to see ascertain the actual situation to draw intelligent conclusions. So I read the Recovery Diva and Pointman; Living on the Real World and Climate, Etc; and most recently, the Risk-Monger.

In the passage above the Risk-Monger has provided an all-too-accurate description of the times we live in. The Left and Right are united only in their disdain for everyone else. Their shouted invectives and imprecations of their opponents drown out the more civil voices of those in the Great Middle. Their hysteria is almost cult-like – they sound like modern-day miniature Grand Inquisitors enforcing impossible doctrines.

According to the Pew Trust, a majority of Republican voters are afraid to voice their political beliefs (approximately one-third of Americans). In the wake of the election, we have seen people whose only sin was to work for the White House demonized and denied jobs. Is this the unity and mutual regard our new President promised?

Ultimately, a community’s resilience – its ability to recover from disruption – comes down to the ability of its leaders to work together to achieve common goals. That requires trust, and an ability to communicate with each other. Too often, however, we seem to be living the following parable:

In a land far, far away…

There lived two kinds of people. One was red and could see only red, the other was blue and could see only blue. They spoke different languages. The Reds were great at tasks involving red objects, OK at tasks involving orange objects, but couldn’t even see green or blue objects.

Conversely, the Blues were great if only Blue objects were involved, OK with most green tasks, but were hopeless if orange or red objects were involved.

What one would build – even if good – the other could not see, and would unwittingly blunder into and destroy. Since they couldn’t see each other or understand each other, they never could agree on anything. So no problems were ever solved.

Trust is an essential ingredient for working together, but trust fades where fear treads. This lack of trust in each other – borne of the political cacophany and covid’s woes – seriously compromises our ability to pull together in time of crisis. Thus those of us who care about our communities must ask how resilient they can be in this Age of Stupid.

As for most things in this real world, the answer is – it depends. If disasters have a direction, recovery has a context. The type and magnitude of a disruption; the community’s topology; the resources available for recovery; and the community’s leadership itself will combine to form the context for recovery. Taken together, they will determine how far and how fast a community can come back after disruption. And while I’ve couched this in terms of disaster, it is just as true for communities trying to seize opportunities or to forge new ones.

Disruption. The type of disruption is important because it determines what forms of community capital are lost or damaged and thus what needs to be replenished or repaired. Thus, covid has severely strained our social capital accounts; our responses to it have reduced our financial capital. The magnitude of the disruption sets a minimum level of resources needed for recovery.

Community topology. A community’s topology – how the various people and community organizations are arranged and interrelated – is one of the least studied but most important aspects of a community’s context. The connections – or lack of connections due to conflicts – obviously play important roles in communications and resource flows.* If a disaster sets a minimum level of resources needed for recovery, then conflicts (or the lack of connections between resources and where they’re needed) can raise the resource bar significantly. The rebuilding of the World Trade Center provides a telling example. Deep disagreements among the various regional “partners” increased both the cost (perhaps by as much as $10 billion!) and the duration (by over a decade) of the recovery.

Resources. The resources needed for recovery go beyond the financial costs. Each of the capital accounts impacted by the disruption have to be replenished. After Katrina, the physical damage had to be repaired. This required financial capital as well as human capital – construction professionals – who were in short supply even before the disaster.

Leadership. One of the facets of the Age of Stupid that should be glaringly obvious is that leadership at the national and community levels is not unitary. While the federal government can claim some credit for mobilizing the resources to develop vaccines so rapidly, it was Big Pharma and its resources that actually did it. The mayors of our riot-torn cities – Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and others – can lead the cheers and can remove bureaucratic barriers, but ultimately businesses, non-profits, associations and “just folks” will have to work together if these cities are to recover. And connections from a community’s leadership to external sources of support (federal aid; expertise in recovery of specific types of businesses – think tourism, for example) will also be crucial.

Resilience is possible in the Age of Stupid, if the context for recovery is right. As the parable illustrates, however, we need people working together to provide lasting solutions to the multi-hued problems we face. Neither the Reds nor the Blues have a monopoly on the Truth – or on Mendacity. We should not trust either side working alone to solve our problems, but only both working together.

* I cannot stress enough the impact on my thinking of the work done by Erica Kuligowski and Christine Bevc, under Kathleen Tierney’s guidance, in this regard. Looking at regional emergency management organizations (UASIs), their work clearly showed that some topologies were more effective at mobilizing resources than others.

Why Is There Air?

When you don’t understand something, you often laugh.
Bill Cosby

In my youth (and, yes, dear Cassius, I can still remember ~~parts of~~ my youth), I spent some of my allowance and gas-cutting money on comedy albums. I enjoyed the classic comedic riffs of Bob Newhart, Johnny Carson, Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley (I saw her in one of the raunchiest “concerts” ever – just what a hormonal teenager didn’t need to see!).

The central theme of one of my favorites was Why Is There Air? The answer – to blow up the volleyballs, of course?! And that brings us to communities (What?! How?).

Think of a community as a volleyball (or at least try to). Instead of air, it’s filled with all of those things that make up a community – people and their skills and connections; businesses and financial capital; buildings and the natural environment; a culture derived from its history, its people and their beliefs, and its mechanisms for making decisions and acting – what are called the community capitals.

Now think of the ball resting on a table, sitting in front of a big fan. When the fan is turned on, it blows the ball down – and it bounces. Depending on how well it’s inflated, the ball may bounce almost as high as the table. Just like the ball, a community’s bounce – its resilience – is determined by how full it is; how much of each capital the community has.

Let me torture this analogy just a little further. No matter how well-sealed the volleyball is, there will still be small leaks, i.e., the community will tend to lose capital over time. Infrastructure may age; bureaucratic regulations may take the place of governance. The ball may also be used hard, opening more serious leaks: social tensions may tear the community’s social fabric; key people may move away. If I don’t keep the ball pumped up, it inevitably deflates: community’s require infusions of capital to stay resilient – or to become more resilient.

When the deflated ball is blown off the table, it won’t bounce: communities without capital aren’t resilient.

How do I make the ball “bouncier?” The obvious way is to pump more air into it. When we pump external resources into a community, we’re effectively doing the same thing: making it more resilient. Another way to increase the ball’s bounce is to raise its temperature – in physics terms, increase its ability to do work. For a community this means reinvigorating it – raising its internal temperature so that it is more vibrant and more is happening. Then it can come back farther and faster after it’s been blown down.

A few years ago, I was drinking coffee with Liesel Ritchie and she challenged me to think about chronic conditions vs crisis-inducing events. One of the things I like about this hokey analogy is that it provides a context that incorporates both to provide an understanding of what happens over time in real communities. Communities that don’t spend the capital to deal with chronic conditions (e.g., aging infrastructure, a stagnant economy) lose their bounce – become less resilient. When faced with a crisis, they must heavily rely on external resources to recover.

So a question to you: how much air is in your community?

	John Plodinec on Thanksgiving
	Nicole Hummel on Thanksgiving
	Nicole Hummel on Yin and Yang
	Global Hints about C… on Dispatchable capital … and an…
	John Plodinec on Competence and character