“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?