John Plodinec

Notes on the International Disaster Conference and Expo

January 27th, 2012 - John Plodinec  

Last week, I attended the first International Disaster Conference and Expo in New Orleans. Rather than give a blow by blow rundown, it’s probably more useful to lay out major themes that kept popping up, as well as a few interesting (at least to me!) insights I gleaned.

Public-private partnerships, and the emerging importance of the private sector. Virtually every speaker spoke to the value of private sector involvement in disaster preparation and recovery. Craig Fugate talked on his “Waffle House indicator,” and the CEO of Waffle House described his company’s approach (He probably had to handle some of the toughest questions – for example: “Would Waffle House be as proactive if it was a publicly held company?” He did a superb job of laying out the importance of WH’s corporate culture for the corporation’s actions, something that receives too little attention.)

The presentations on the humanitarian response to the earthquake in Haiti provided an interesting twist on this theme. Several speakers pointed out that one of the unintended consequences of the outpouring of humanitarian assistance was the harm it did to local companies. By providing goods for free, aid organizations essentially shut out local companies that could have provided goods and services to strengthen the local economy.

Whole community. Craig Fugate did his usual good job of explaining this but the theme was reinforced and amplified by several speakers. I appreciated his point about the tax base being an indicator of recovery. In CARRI’s work, we have encountered those in local government who felt that they had no business worrying about business. As Fugate implied, they had better worry about business – if they lose businesses, their ability to provide the services expected by their citizens is diminished. Several of the international speakers echoed the importance of involving the entire community both before and after an event.

Information. This became the most important theme of the conference for me. If the Whole Community is to be effectively engaged, then each member of the community must have accurate, relevant and timely information. Dave Kauffman of FEMA pointed out that there is three times more information available now than in the 1980’s, and it’s volume is growing at 30%/year. Dave and one or two others talked about the need for tools to pan the river of data to find those golden nuggets of needed information. Social media can play a crucial role, as sentinels signaling a changing situation, as validators of data, and – increasingly – as platforms for action. This led me to wonder if we might see more mini-“Boatlifts” (the almost spontaneous organization of the evacuation of Manhattan Island after 9/11) facilitated by Twitter and its siblings.

Community resilience. I was very pleased to see more and more people looking at community resilience as a “virtue with big shoulders,” something vital and active rather than a pallid and passive shadow that is only seen after a disaster happens. Meir Elran from Israel pointed out that active communities were resilient communities, and that resilience could be built and enhanced. He described several steps being taken in Israel ranging from training elected leaders to providing age-appropriate programs for students from kindergarten to college. If we want to build a culture of resilience, what better way than starting with youth. Dave Kaufman pointed out that one of the key drivers FEMA sees in our future is the greater involvement of the entire community in preparation and recovery. We need to actively build trust between the governing and the governed to do this effectively.

Education. While this wasn’t an explicit theme in the presentations, I was struck by the number of educational institutions who were part of the Expo and what they offered. Noteworthy were:
• The Stephenson Disaster Management Institute at LSU. Probably their most visible accomplishment was conceiving and helping to foster the foundation of the Business EOC in Louisiana. An excellent example of government making a commitment to work with the private sector.
• The Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology at the University of New Orleans. UNO also touted the usefulness of some of their urban planning programs.
• Tulane’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. Dr. Ky Luu and his colleagues have pulled together an excellent interdisciplinary program. I have to admit somewhat ruefully, though, that the curriculum seems too daunting for any current leader to take it (which is too bad). Let’s hope their graduates are among the next generation of leaders.
• Anna Maria College, near Worcester, MA. They have some interesting “nuts and bolts” programs (e.g., a degree in fire science, as well as an MS in Emergency Management).

Warren Edwards

An Ideal Federal Program

January 18th, 2012 - Warren Edwards  

My colleague, John Plodinec, recently suggested that resilience has become a movement (CARRI Blog, “Resilience – One Movement, Many Voices,” December 19, 2011). If so, there is no better example of the movement beginning to take hold in some parts of the federal government than the publication in December of FEMA’s Whole Community Approach to Emergency Management” (www.fema.gov/about/wholecommunity.shtm). Not only does it mark a significant, practical milestone in the federal government’s acceptance of resilience as a policy but it is also the example of an ideal federal program for a new era.

By formulating the Whole Community Approach, FEMA has created a meaningful shift in the doctrine of national emergency response. FEMA has recognized according to Administrator Fugate that, “a government centric approach to emergency management will not be enough to meet the challenges posed by a catastrophic incident. That is why we must fully engage our entire societal capacity.” This movement from government as the focal point for meeting the nation’s challenges to the mobilization of American society to find new, innovative and much more collaborative ways to solve societal problems is a tremendous step forward for any federal agency. In the area of making resilience practical, FEMA is clearly in the lead.

FEMA has two critical roles in national emergency management. It is the responder of last resort. It brings the power of the federal government to situations where local, state and regional capabilities are not sufficient to meet the crisis. This is the way that the agency is most often viewed and the way it operates much of the time. But FEMA also has an equally critical role to facilitate, encourage, provide expert knowledge and set goals and standards for local and state emergency managers. The Whole Community Approach acknowledges that second role in a very helpful but non-intrusive way. . It does not prescribe, set unrealistic national goals or try to force its ideas into a single inflexible template. It does not provide funding that may not be sustainable and can never reach all communities. Instead it offers core principles, key themes and pathways around which communities may organize, assess, plan and take action to solve their own challenges. It exemplifies the ideal federal program – leveraging the power of the federal government to assist communities in identifying challenges, taking ownership and finding local solutions.

By itself, FEMA cannot foster truly resilient American communities. True resilience in communities encompasses all aspects of community life. Resilient American communities are resilient in their economy, their social capital and their various infrastructures. This standard of resilience is well beyond FEMA’s charter.

In the federal government, FEMA has taken the lead. It has taken the first practical steps to turn rhetoric into reality; to give the movement a real, useful shove forward. Other federal departments and agencies need to think about creating their own “ideal” federal programs.

Ian Moore

Risk, Utility and Probability

January 18th, 2012 - Ian Moore  

UTILITY

For the completely rational human being the concept of the ‘utility’ of a thing (that is its ‘usefulness’) should be directly related to the amount of the thing that they receive. For example £10 should be twice as useful as £5. Two cabbages should be worth twice as much as one cabbage.

Actually the relationship between most items and utility is more like the following diagram which depicts the relationship between utility and money for a typical person:

To demonstrate this, how would you answer the following question:

Which would you prefer?

100% chance of winning £1,500
50% chance of winning £3,000

Most people will choose the $1,500 even though logically they both have the same value.

This is because, as you can see from the graph, twice the amount of money corresponds to less than twice the amount of utility.

This utility/money curve of course varies from person to person and how risk averse they are but similar curves exist for the majority of people.

The curve also implies some other things. The further the amount of the resource increases (in this case money) the less the relative difference. For instance your response to the question above will probably be even less logical (and more risk averse) if the amounts were £10 million and £20 million. The other side of the curve implies that £20 probably has more than 10 times the utility of £2. The exception being if you needed the £2 for a bus home, in which case you would be highly risk averse to any gamble.

RISK AND PROBABILITY

This behaviour is also similar to our risk versus probability curve:

If we have a very low probability of something happening (the left hand side of the curve) then there is little perceived risk because it is very unlikely that we would make that choice. For instance if we could bet £1 at 1 in ten thousand odds of wining £10 we are highly unlikely to take the bet.

The right hand side of the curve also is perceived as low risk. It there is a very high probability of something happening we perceive it correctly as low risk.

The highest risk is at the 50/50 probability where it is totally uncertain if an event will happen or not.

From a purely logical perspective this curve does not make sense, it really should be a triangle with straight lines. It differs from this because humans do not easily perceive very low probabilities as being as low risk as they are (and vice versa for high probabilities.) For a probability of 99.9% that some event will happen there is a small doubt in our minds and this increases the perceived risk. consider the following scenario: your house insurance is normally £500 per year but your insurance company has a strange offer on, for £100 per year you can insure your house for all days starting with a T or an S (that is 4 out of 7 days), would you take out the insurance?

We do not react linearly to utility and resource, logically we should.

We do not estimate risk against probability well.

If we can incorporate an understanding of these behaviours into our decision making we will be able to improve it.

John Plodinec

Demographic Trends and Community Resilience

January 10th, 2012 - John Plodinec  

Two weeks ago, the Brookings Institution released an interesting report on Five Things the Census Revealed about America in 2011. The authors were focused on America as a whole, but in the following, I’d like to look to look a little deeper at what their findings may mean for American communities.

Minorities are driving growth, and replenishing America’s youth. In the 1950’s, about one-fourth of our population growth was due to minorities (non-whites). On the 2000’s, almost all (92%) of our population growth was due to minorities, mainly Hispanics and Asians.

While non-whites in particular are driving population growth, the overall rate of growth is slowing. The nation’s population increased by about 10% from 2000 to 2010, the lowest rate of increase since the 1930’s. This reflected less immigration because of a poorer economy, and a lower birth rate because of an aging population. It’s as if everyone in Quebec, Ontario and the rest of the eastern half of Canada (about three-fourths of their population) moved to the US in just ten years. We clearly are continuing the process of becoming a “majority minority” country, just a bit more slowly than we have been.

The rate of growth of the population 45 and over is eighteen times that of those 45 and under. As one important result, only one in five households consist of a married couple with a child under 18.

The rate of migration continues its slow decrease. About 20% of us moved our homes in the ’50s and ’60s; in the last five years that dropped to just over 10%. Simply put, more and more Americans are staying home – with one major exception. We are seeing a “Reverse Migration” of the Black population to the South, as well.

The median household income declined the past decade for the first time on record, by about 9%. There was a concomitant increase in the poverty rate, to 15%. As we’ve seen so pointedly for New Orleans after Katrina, poverty is spreading from inner cities to the suburbs as is ethnic diversity.

Clearly, each of these trends will impact our communities, and each in a different way, depending on the community. However, there are a few generalizations worth noting.

• Communities’ responses to the diversification process will be telling indicators of their resilience. Some communities will not cope well; others will find strength in their increased diversity. Fortunately, there are models that are working (e.g., Anaheim) that others can emulate.

• Perhaps the greatest danger inherent in this diversification is that the community’s sense of itself may be dampened or destroyed. Without positive action, there is a real danger that a community may splinter based on race, language, age, or economic condition. If these become barriers to communication in a community, groups will tend to isolate themselves, and their members may have greater allegiance to their group than to the community as a whole. As a result, community resilience will suffer. It will be important for communities to develop inclusive “community mythologies” to prevent these barriers from forming. The reduced rate of migration may be a trend that counters this in many communities.

• Concentrated poverty is an extreme example of this isolation and an important one because poverty has a tremendous impact beyond just the poor. We’ve seen what happens in many big cities (e.g., Detroit) when poverty is concentrated in a neighborhood like plaque on a blood vessel. Crime and other anti-community activity increases. Those who can, leave – creating a potential death spiral for the neighborhood and a resource-sucking “Black Hole” for the larger community.

• While there will be greater diversity (based on ethnicity, age…) within communities, at the same time we are likely to see greater diversity among our communities in terms of their makeup, the specific challenges they face, and the resources they have available to deal with them. This implies that one-size-fits-all solutions from the federal government will be even less likely to work. Given the inertia in the federal system, this also means that communities are going to have to cope with their demographic changes largely on their own.

• As communities aim toward the future, they will have to consider whether the present mix of community services matches future needs. If the immigrant population in the community is growing, that may imply a need for more youth services, and for provision for those with little or no English. If the community is “graying,” this likely will mean the need for more services aimed toward the elderly. In areas of high unemployment, homelessness will impact not only those agencies that serve the poor, but education, and others as well. More resilient communities will meet these changing needs with solutions that include private business, non-profits and other essential service providers, as well as local governments.

• At the same time, local governments and other service providers will have to look at their services in a regional context. As we’ve seen so pointedly in metropolitan New Orleans, poverty has spread to the suburbs. For many communities, this means that they will have to look at themselves in a regional context more than ever before. Through effective coordination of service delivery among different organizations and jurisdictions, there is the potential for greater efficiency and greater resilience as well.

Many of our communities are already being impacted by these trends. These trends indicate many more will be. A community’s anticipation of what these trends portend for it, and its actions to positively respond, will perhaps be the best indicator of that community’s resilience.

Warren Edwards

Searching for Project Impact

January 9th, 2012 - Warren Edwards  

In the FEMA “Think Tank” (www.ideascale.com) I recently noticed another recommendation to bring back Project Impact. That suggestion almost always surfaces in discussions of communities, community resilience and community disaster risk reduction. With such frequent mention the idea is clearly worth thinking about.

For the few who are not familiar, Project Impact was a program created by FEMA Administrator James Lee Witt that began in 1997 with seven cities and grew to several hundred cities. It was cancelled in the early days of the Bush administration in an effort to save $25M. The program’s purpose according a FEMA spokesman was to “protect families, businesses and communities by reducing the impact of natural disasters.” It accomplished that goal by bringing together different levels of government and the private and non-profit sectors to work in close partnership to identify specific actions and programs for reducing risks and enhancing response and recovery. By almost every account, it was a very successful federal program.

Its flaw may have been just that – it was a successful federal program. FEMA provided the funding for each city. Cities received federal grants to implement Project Impact and grants to implement the projects it produced. There doesn’t seem to be an instance of a city adopting a Project Impact program that was not subsidized by FEMA. It was a great idea that was widely embraced and achieved substantive results but because it was wholly sustained by federal funding it was not resilient. It was subject to the vagaries of shifting politics and it could never be funded robustly enough to reach all US communities.

Does that mean that we should abandon the idea of bringing back Project Impact? No. But we need to acknowledge the flaw in the original model and find a way to meet the original goal in other ways. Federal resources to assist communities in becoming more disaster resilient are declining and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. There is simply neither the political will nor the available funding to begin a new federally funded, community risk reduction program.

Much more importantly, a fully federally funded program is the wrong way to approach the problem. The Project Impact vision of bringing the full community together to collaborative solve challenges was exactly right. But by tying it to federal funding the program never become the community’s program. Cities acknowledged the power of the process but never internalized ownership. In almost all cases, when the funding went away, the program ended.

Like it or not, communities own the challenges. Communities must own the solutions. Federal encouragement, facilitation and indirect support of Project Impact-like programs in America’s communities are desperately needed. A new federally funded program is not.

Warren Edwards

The Power of Community Assessments

January 3rd, 2012 - Warren Edwards  

We often view assessments of our communities as mechanical processes accomplished by outside experts who tell us what’s wrong with our community. But community resilience assessments collaboratively accomplished by the full fabric of the community using its own “experts” can be a powerful tool for building community unity, creating positive energy and amplifying what is right.

Community resilience assessments can be powerful team building exercises. Rather than calling on outside specialists, the process relies on community-based practitioners with inside knowledge of how common services are provided to their community. The process brings the community members with the greatest stake in a service together to assess it objectively. These stakeholders from throughout the community include elected or appointed officials, business leaders, naturally emergent leaders and ordinary citizens. By assembling these assessment teams for each service, the community creates a dedicated, insightful, group of advocates that can assess present conditions, envision a future and consider positive, practical and innovative actions.

Rather than simply using the traditional process of examining the community’s infrastructure and processes for vulnerabilities and risks, a community-conducted resilience assessment seeks community developed answers to the questions, “Who are we?” and What are we?” in preparation for answering the question “Who and what do we want to be?” The assessment is holistic in examining the community services that all communities provide, evidence based in that it is grounded in measurable community data, but it is also inward looking in a way that allows the community to collectively understand what makes it unique. In addition to examining vulnerabilities and risks, a comprehensive assessment acknowledges that a resilient community has a strong sense of identity – the special qualities and characteristics that make it unique. When a crisis occurs a resilient community works quickly to restore the positive aspects of its identity. But a resilient community is also aware of the negative aspects of its identity and recognizes that crisis can provide opportunities to change. The community resilience assessment provides an opportunity for the community to gain knowledge of itself in both aspects of its identity.

Building robust, community-based assessment teams and focusing them on the uniqueness of their community creates the conditions for objective, participative analysis of community services and the systems that provide them. The groups look at capacity – how well the service meets the community’s needs. They identify critical assets – which components of the services are essential to meeting community requirements. They identify the critical assets at risk – which assets are most at risk to the threats that the community has identified as the most significant. Finally, the teams look for the recovery resources – those resources that can be mobilized in the event of a crisis identifying gaps and shortfalls that must be addressed in the action planning phase of resilience development.

Objective assessments are critical to the community resilience development process. The assessment process imaginatively constructed, however, can be powerful in ways that help encourage community cohesion and commonality of purpose. Bringing together groups of stakeholders, creating a common view of community identity, and collaboratively but objectively assessing the unique characteristics of a community creates a powerful step on the road to resilience.

John Plodinec

Resilience — One Movement, Many Voices

December 19th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Earlier this fall, I attended the annual meeting of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH). For those of you who aren’t familiar with FLASH (see www.flash.org), they are doing an amazing job in raising consciousness about strengthening homes to severe weather conditions. I was struck by the applicability of their motto – quoted above – to resilience.

For resilience has become a movement; and like all movements it has developed branches as diverse as the roots from whence it came. Transition Towns and Resilience Circles, Asset-Based Community Development communities and many others are all fluorishing branches of a movement aimed at strengthening communities so that they can withstand adversity.

The Transition Towns approach to community resilience is ultimately based on a philosophy of despair (as is that of its close cousin – Resilience Circles). The British founders of this approach see Peak Oil, Global Warming, and the Great Recession as working together to fundamentally change the nature of society. They foresee a rapidly approaching end to the Age of the Automobile, and a concomitant possibility of severely disrupted supplies of food and other necessities. Some of their writings seem almost apocalyptic in their forecasts, including the collapse of civilization. Their answer is to make communities as self-sufficient as possible. Hence, an emphasis on growing food locally, and a more communal lifestyle in general. While there is an anti-technology Luddite element to this, one cannot deny that participants have found much satisfaction – and even joy – in the renewed sense of community in Transition Towns.

The Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach has a very different philosophical basis. Developed by John McKnight and co-workers at Northwestern, the ABCD approach seeks to discover and develop community competence by helping neighborhoods, for example, to recognize the assets and capabilities they contain within themselves. While ABCD shares with Transition Towns a general distrust of the ability of external bureaucracies to address local problems, it ultimately celebrates the capacity of the commons working together to solve local problems. David Gershon’s work in Philadelphia and New York, while not explicitly based on ABCD, shares much in common with it.

There are many other branches that deserve recognition – FLASH’s work to make homes more robust, TISP’s efforts to develop a more resilient infrastructure, the Department of Health and Human Services’ inclusion of resilience as a core element of their strategic and operational planning, the Army’s work to enhance the resilience of soldiers and their families, and especially FEMA’s Whole Community approach to emergency management spring to mind. Where then does CARRI’s approach fit in?

Back in July, I wrote a blog about resilience and the problem of scale (Community Resilience and the Problem of Scale or There are Horses for Courses). CARRI’s approach focuses on the community, and particularly on the challenges that communities face. While some of these challenges are universal (economic distress), most of them reflect the specific conditions and setting of the community itself. Applying Brian Walker’s insight from ecology, this means that CARRI must help communities consider these challenges from both the individual-family-neighborhood and regional perspectives, if the community is to successfully meet them. As William James said, “The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.” And sometimes the community must call on resources beyond its own, if the impulse is to lead to positive action. CARRI is thus centered on the community, and its role is thus to energize and empower the individual to influence the community to take action to meet the challenges it faces.

Ian Moore

The Framing Effect

December 14th, 2011 - Ian Moore  

The way that a question or situation is phrased has a strong effect on your answer or decision. We tend to make decisions which are closer to the ’starting point’ which the issue has imprinted on our minds.

For instance in one experiment two groups of people were asked (in 5 seconds and without the use of a calculator) to perform the following calculations:

Group 1:
2*3*4*5*6*7*8

Group 2:
8*7*6*5*4*3*2

Obviously, at least for most people, 5 seconds is too short a time to work out the answer. Most people start working from the left and when their time runs out make an estimate based on what they worked out up to this point. Group 1 answers were smaller numbers than in group 2. Their estimates seem to have been affected by the last number they were able to calculate before their time ran out.

In large numbers of tests Group 1 participants answers averaged at 512, Group 2 participants average was 2,250, nearly four times as much. (It is also interesting to note that since the correct answer is 40,320. Both groups dramatically underestimated.)

Another interesting example of the framing effect is when the people were given the following two scenarios (try this out yourself):

Scenario 1:
An event is expected to kill 6,000 people. You can adopt one of two interventions:
A. 2,000 people will be saved
B. There is a 1/3 chance that 6,000 people will be saved and a 2/3 chance that no one will be saved
Which intervention would you choose?

Scenario 2:
An event is expected to kill 6,000 people. You can adopt one of two interventions:
C. 4,000 people will die
D. There is a 1/3 chance that no one will die and a 2/3 chance that 6,000 people will die
Which intervention would you choose?

There are no right or wrong answers to these but let us first have a look at Scenario 1. If you choose intervention A, then 2,000 people will be saved. If you choose intervention B, either everyone will be saved or no one will but the weighted probability is that 2,000 people will be saved (the same as A). Interestingly the vast majority of people (nearly three quarters) choose A.

In scenario 2, intervention C is exactly the same as intervention A and intervention D is exactly the same as intervention B. However the interventions chosen are reversed with the vast majority of people choosing intervention D (over three quarters).

The only thing that has changed between the two scenarios is ’saved’ to ‘die’.

So the way that a decision choice is phrased has a very strong effect on the decision that people make.

John Plodinec

Resilience for Dummies 2: Effective Community Leadership

December 13th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Not too long ago, an interviewer asked me what were the keys to community resilience. I answered “Leadership, leadership, leadership. And, oh yes, connections and resources.” We talked a bit more about that, and the whole conversation was then pushed to the back of my mind’s garage. It was recently brought back to me when I read a blog from Bill Hooke (Living on the Real World) on leadership, which led me to a column by the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins on Tim Tebow, which led me to some very interesting work by Robert Hogan.

First, let me define what I mean – and don’t mean – when I talk about a leader. In terms of community action, an effective leader is someone who
• Mobilizes at least part of the community, and its resources, to achieve common goals.
• Works effectively as part of a team to achieve those goals.
• Is committed to improving the community.

Hogan provides some valuable insights into the qualities that make an effective leader (see the figure that I’ve adapted).

First, he notes that being a leader implies having followers – and that it is both the leader’s innate personality and the followers’ perceptions of that personality obtained from the leader’s behavior and actions that make the leader effective. Hogan then identifies the key personality traits of an effective leader:
• Integrity. If followers believe the leader has integrity, it creates trust that the leader will carry out promised actions.
• Vision. People are more likely to follow if they believe that the leader has a vision for what the future should be that is aligned with their own.
• Clarity. People are more likely to follow if the leader can clearly communicate a vision, the goals that must be achieved to attain the vision, and a plan to achieve them.
• Decisiveness. People are unlikely to follow the wishy-washy. Decisiveness indicates a confidence in one’s own direction.
• Competence. To be effective, a leader must be able to use the tools available to move the community forward. Playing the blame game to explain lack of forward motion eventually is seen as a sign of incompetence. While the first four traits can boost a person into a position of leadership, incompetence will eventually unseat them. However, to be competent, a community leader should have experience in working on problems that involve a large part of the community.

An effective community leader does not have to be an elected official; he or she can come from any sector. Hugh McColl, a banker, was not an elected official, and yet he spearheaded the transformation of Charlotte, NC, from a declining textile town into the nation’s second largest financial center.

An effective community leader is not necessarily a manager. Managers are made responsible for the motion of their subordinates in some pre-defined direction based on their positions, through command. Leaders take responsibility for achieving a vision and move others to follow them, through conviction.  However, more often than not, effective community leaders have experience working at the community level. They almost have to, if they are to be able to convince people throughout the community that following them will lead to positive results for all. This is probably why we so often look to elected officials for community leadership. They generally have experience at the right scale of action.

It may be instructive to look at the election of President Obama in 2008. Certainly, there were few apparent differences in the integrity of the two candidates. Mr. Obama laid out a vision for America that was more generally appealing than that offered by Senator McCain, though there was little clarity in either’s vision. Mr. Obama’s confidence during the campaign inspired confidence (or at least hope) that he would be a competent president, while Senator McCain’s choice of Governor Palin led many to question his potential competence as president. Neither candidate had an apparent edge in decisiveness. Thus, the electorate’s view of Mr. Obama as a better potential leader certainly increased his electability.

It is interesting to note that the President’s “leadership quotient” among the electorate has distinctly fallen. He has not demonstrated the ability to get things done, and is continuing to play the blame game after three years on the job. Whether this will hurt him in the upcoming election is questionable, though, and will depend on the personality of his opponent, and the voting public’s perception of his opponent’s leadership potential.

In the next post in this series, I’ll continue looking at community leadership, particularly communications. The ability to communicate is probably the most important single skill a leader must have.

John Plodinec

Resilience and the Hole in the Rock Expedition

December 5th, 2011 - John Plodinec  

Jenae Holtzhafer in the Emmaus (PA) Patch posed this question in a posting this summer.

“What if our circumstances on this Earth suddenly changed? Would we be able to endure the extreme physical and mental challenges faced by our ancestors to push through the hardships and survive with nothing more than basic necessities?”

She pointed to the Hole in the Rock expedition of 1879 as an example of the resilience of our forebears. For those who don’t know the story, in late 1879, 236 Mormons set out on a missionary expedition to southeastern Utah. They had selected the shortest path to their destination – they expected it to take only six weeks, but one that was largely unexplored. Trapped by snow behind them two weeks after they started, they were forced to go forward. Perhaps their most difficult feat was building a wagon road through the hole in the rock – a narrow cut in the cliffs surrounding the Colorado River gorge – and crossing the river. It took them about 8 weeks to build the road and get all of their supplies across, and another 10 to reach the site they choose to establish their “colony.” Amazingly, no one died on the five-month trek, and 238 arrived at the new settlement – two babies were born en route.

Holtzhafer’s gut answer were “No, we are not as resilient – we have lost the skills to survive these hardships.” A closer reading of history, though, makes her conclusion less compelling. The intrepid party – even though they set out as winter neared – was reasonably well-prepared. Eighty wagons, over 1,000 head of cattle, tools, dynamite and other necessary supplies – they were ready to confront what they faced. They had taken full advantage of the technology available to them. In similar circumstances today, most of us we would do the same. While we may have lost some of the skills those hardy Mormons possessed, we have other skills and technologies they did not have.

However, the expedition has an important lesson to teach us – being ready for surprises. The missionaries expected to be gone about 40 days; instead, they were on the road for 100 more. They didn’t expect to have to build a bridge across the Colorado, but they did.

Most communities try to prepare for specific threats – hurricanes, earthquakes, human-induced crises. But look at some of the events the Gulf Coast has experienced in the last decade – a recession in 2001-2; Hurricane Katrina and the levee break; the BP oil spill; the Great Recession…what’s next?

The pessimist looks at this list and says “Why bother to prepare? The next event may well be different. We’ll just adapt to it when it comes.”

The optimist says, “We’re strong, we will weather whatever comes; let’s prepare for what we know.

But the resilient realist says, “Prepare for the known threats, but be sure to include in your preparations those things that will help you survive and thrive in the face of any threat. Most importantly, make sure your people know each other and will help each other, no matter what threat they face.”

A simple thought, but with some profound implications. First, it means we shouldn’t rely on institutions to pull us through a crisis, but on ourselves. Second, we can’t count on getting resources from outside in a crisis – we can only count on what we have in our homes and our neighborhood. Most importantly, the one thing “Government” in general is not doing but could do to prepare us is to hammer these messages home.

Yesterday, I was speaking to a victim of one of the many floods that have hit the St. Louis area. Her house up to the top of the first story was flooded – she had to live in the upper floors. She “commuted” to wherever she had to go in her neighbors’ boats. She pointed out that it took 45 days before the floodwaters had receded enough for safe vehicular traffic to her home. By the time she and her family were ready to begin recovering, the news cameras had moved on; her story was old news; most of the government assistance was gone. With good grace and a sense of humor, she is coming back more or less on her own, with the help of her friends and neighbors.

Her experience shows that some of us, at least, are as resilient as any who came before. Her experience also testifies to the wisdom of the resilient realist: people are the best preparation for surprises.

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