The Art of Resilience

Whenever I start a new endeavor, I try to assess it in terms of the factors set down over two millenia ago by Sun Tzu in his great work, The Art of War.  According to Sun Tzu, successful generals assess their strategic situation in terms of the weather, the terrain, the leadership, the discipline and the Way.  Communities can become more resilient if they assess themselves using the same five factors.

When a community assesses itself in terms of the weather, it shouldn’t literally think only of natural disasters, but rather consider all of the storms that swirl around it, including pandemics, economic disasters, and even civil chaos (think of the riots in the ‘60s).  Each of these brings its own challenges.  The resilient community anticipates crises, and objectively determines what the consequences might be.

A community’s terrain is not only its geography but also its internal terrain – its networks that actually perform the actions needed by the community.  A resilient community understands that just as different neighborhoods may be affected and respond to crises in different ways because of their geography, so, too, different parts of its networks may respond in very different manners to a crisis.  Thus, in assessing its terrain, the resilient community recognizes its strengths and weaknesses, and realizes that disasters are likely to magnify its weaknesses, while reducing its strengths.

A resilient community recognizes that its leadership goes beyond government, and is most often a complex network of public and private partners.  Time compounds this complexity:  the attributes of successful leadership during the response to a disaster (e.g., heroism) have to evolve to the patient perseverance of a saint as the community recovers and redevelops itself.  Indeed, the community’s “decisions” made during recovery often will be the sum of hundreds or even thousands of individual decisions made by those in the community.

Resilient communities will exert discipline by planning for disasters, and by practicing those plans.  Those plans will identify the human, physical and fiscal resources needed, and where they will come from.  Through practice, these plans are refined and revised.  Communities seeking to become more resilient will also invest to reduce their vulnerabilities. 

The Way is at once the most difficult of these factors to grasp, but likely the most important.  The Way is a complex compounding of vision, communication, and trust that provides a signpost to any member of the community in reaching decisions.  The resilient community strives to achieve a coherence – a moral accord – an agreement – a shared vision across the entire community about what the community should be.  If a community has a recovery plan or – better yet – a strategic plan, it can inform those hundreds or thousands of individual decisions made during recovery so that the overall outcome is positive.  Thus, it is useful for communities to develop recovery plans before disasters, to lay out the general principles by which all in the community will act.