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.

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.

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.

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.

This leads to a skewing of the information that we take in. Most information will have caveats and situations in which it does not apply. When we dig deeper we may find more information that contradicts our position but we are also bound to find information which confirms our distrust of the initial contradictory information. Of course if the initial situation concurs with our initial ideas we don’t look further and so never find any subsequent information that might contradict us.

Psychologists have shown repeatedly that when people taking part in an experiment are presented with a mixed body of information they will pick out that which confirms their beliefs and find reasons why contradictory information does not apply. In a group with opposing beliefs the same information will be interpreted by both sides as supporting their own positions.

For effective decision making we need to firstly be aware of this behaviour and then develop techniques and approaches to ensure that we investigate supporting and contradictory information to the same depth and apply objective criteria to the assessment of both type of information.

Before I do, however, my disclaimer. I am clearly not an economist (I’m not sure that’s a disqualification, since the economists are all over the map on how to recover!). Further, politicians will be making the most crucial economic decisions over the next few months, and they are clearly not economists (not to mention their roles in getting us into this mess in the first place).

Our national economy is in what economists call a liquidity trap. In a liquidity trap, there is relatively little investment because those with money are very risk averse. Consumers don’t spend, businesses don’t hire, and everyone looks at the economic glass as half empty. And that’s what we’re seeing right now – individuals and businesses are paying off their debts, individual debt is at levels not seen since the early 1990’s; those who can are saving at rates not seen since the 1970’s; and businesses are sitting on their cash (and not borrowing) rather than investing in new products and jobs.

The two antipodes of the debate over how to fix our economy – escape the trap – are characterized by the “Spend, Baby, Spend” school and the Tea Party’s call for government austerity. The Spend, Baby, Spend school is epitomized by economists such as Paul Krugman, who vehemently believe that our federal government should be spending more, much more, to spur demand for goods and services. This group points to our nation’s crumbling infrastructure as a place where investment would create jobs, creating demand, and facilitating economic recovery. At its core, this view sees lack of demand for goods and services as the problem that needs to be addressed.

The Tea Party-ers, on the other hand, see the size of our government as the core problem. In this view, a smaller government, with fewer regulations and lower taxes, would put money back into people’s hands to spend on goods and services, thus jump starting the economy.

You’ll notice, however, that neither view really addresses the core problem – how we get out of the liquidity trap. Or, said a little differently, how do we help businesses, in particular, become less risk averse so that they will invest the cash they are now sitting on in new equipment or new jobs. Framed this way, it seems that government spending per se is somewhat irrelevant to getting out of the trap. Recovery will come only when people have confidence once again that there is a secure future. That’s not to say that government spending is unimportant, just that stimulus spending doesn’t really seem to be the right answer.

If this is true, then what should government do to put us on the road to a resilient economy? Simply put, governments should do those things that will remove uncertainty from people’s minds and those things that will make people more confident in their futures. In this light, it seems that we need to take some of the medicines prescribed by both schools of thought to help bring us out of our national malaise.

We need to recognize that the current pace of regulation creation is creating great uncertainties for businesses and individuals. In the first two years of the present administration in Washington, we created more regulations than we did in eight years of the previous administration. Further, whether we like it or not, small businesses are already telling us they won’t be hiring in the near term because of the possible impacts of health insurance reform (and those impacts won’t be fully known until 2014 at the earliest!).

We also need to recognize that our national debt is unsustainable – if we continue on our present path, we as individuals eventually will end up paying exorbitant amounts in taxes to support intolerably high interest rates to service both our national and personal debt. We as individuals or investors or business owners recognize this and are saving at almost unprecedented rates to provide our own safety nets for ourselves.

However, we also have to recognize that the government must continue to make investments that will help us to have a more certain future. We must invest in our infrastructure – not to stimulate spending but to ensure that we can continue to move goods, people, and information where they are needed. If we don’t, we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the disasters that will expose our infrastructure’s fragility.

We also need to heed the lessons we have already learned about what went wrong and put regulations in place that address the root causes of those problems. The current regulatory framework for the financial industry has much that is wrong with it; recently passed legislation is likely to drive smaller community banks – who in the main were not at fault in getting us into this trap – out of business. This will make it more difficult for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get the capital they need to start up or expand their businesses, i.e., will make our economy even less resilient. Meanwhile, many of the more speculative financial sectors remain unregulated even though they were prime actors in our economic tragedy (and are doing nothing to help us recover).

We must provide a safety net to those of our citizens with special needs. Not because of their vulnerability but as an investment in their future and in ours. The safety net should be focused on outcomes – for example, living healthier and more productive lives – rather than means, for example insurance. Just as with our physical infrastructure, if we don’t make these kinds of investments we will spend far more to respond to and recover from the human tragedies that will result.

I don’t think it requires a rocket scientist (or a Ph.D. economist!) to see a path to recovery. It only requires a clear recognition of where we are as a nation, and then some common sense actions to move to where we need to be. We have to cut government spending and the pace of regulation, but we also need to invest in ourselves and take actions to prevent us from falling in the same trap again. At its core, we have to restore our confidence in ourselves if we are to recover. Neither school of thought, neither political party, can or will be successful unless they grasp this simple truth – this is the only path to economic recovery and greater national resilience.

So, over the next few months, I’m going to be writing Community Resilience for Dummies – detailing what this neophyte has learned about community resilience in a way that I hope others can use. As we in CARRI have talked to people about resilience it has become clear that – like sustainability – resilience is a word in danger of losing its meaning because it is being used by so many in so many different ways. So I’ll start by talking about what community resilience is.

As do so many others, we at CARRI have our own definition of resilience:

A community’s ability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through adaptation, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change.

In fact, on the CARRI website, you’ll find a document that compares and contrasts many of the definitions.

Most people who are using the term resilience are doing so in a crisis context – a crisis being anything that strains the community’s resources. While resilience may be an inherent trait of a community, its resilience is only seen in how well it recovers from the crisis. As a community evolves over time, it may become more or less resilient. Thus, in these parlous economic times, most communities have become less resilient toward natural disasters or human-induced crises due to dwindling resources – both human and financial. Those communities that have maintained their same level of resilience (and the few that have enhanced it) have generally done so by finding ways to adapt to the financial crisis they face.

Adaptation is the key to resilience – it’s the ability to turn disaster into opportunity; to create social capital to augment finance; to form partnerships to replace or repair needed infrastructure when no one entity has enough money to fund projects. Greenburg, KS’ response to the devastating tornado that hit the town is an example. Prior to the 2007 storm, the town was in danger of dying. It used the opportunity provided by the devastation to attempt to create a different and more sustainable Greensburg.

Mayor Tom Tait’s (Anaheim CA) “Hi, Neighbor” campaign is an example. It recognizes that in the event of an earthquake, one’s neighbors are the real first responders, and should be the enduring support structure for individuals and families. The campaign seeks to build up the “social capital” of Anaheim’s neighborhoods.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey provides another example. It has formed a public-private partnership to fund and operate a replacement for the Goethals Bridge that links New York and New Jersey. This type of arrangement would have been unheard of even five years ago; now, it represents a very innovative way for a community to do what’s necessary with less.

Thus, while resilience is not a uniquely American trait, this ability to make lemonade when you’re handed lemons is embedded in the American spirit. And it doesn’t take a dummy to see that our resilience is being tested as never before. In the next post in this series, I’ll begin looking at what makes up community resilience – starting with leadership.

The authors start by talking about traditional safety and risk management approaches. To paraphrase the authors, these approaches have inherent limitations:

• They are based on analysis of failures. They do not reflect either that risks can emerge from “normal” situations, or that some of the greatest risks may actually be unanticipated surprises.
• They seek to mitigate without considering either the real gap between intended actions and real capabilities, or that coping with crises is dependent on “the strategies, initiatives, tinkering and ingenuity brought by individual and collective skills in real time.

The application of these to emergency management seems straightforward and very appropriate.

The authors then go on to quote a definition of resilience by Hollnagel:

The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.

I’m not a big fan of defining resilience – too many have spent too much time in what becomes an unproductive exercise in navel contemplation – but the authors put legs under this one by trying to determine how anesthesiologists make decisions both in routine cases and in complex ones. Their conclusions are worth noting because they seem to apply so well to the relationship between the federal government and local community leadership.

• Resilience – in addition to vulnerability assessment – involves consideration of local resources and capabilities.
• Decisions are designed to empower those coping with crisis, and not to control them.
• Organizations should be structured so that local standard practices can be shared.

While some may argue about the conclusions, what was striking to me is the very different way of trying to find resilience. Most of the resilience literature focuses either on vulnerability or on case studies of past disasters. What the authors have done is look at behavior – both in routine and unexpected situations – to try to find clues to resilient behavior.

Thus, if we are trying to judge the resilience of a tree to a high wind, we may walk through the woods looking at one that has fallen and try to judge the cause and how to prevent it from falling. Or, as the authors have done, we can study the forest, during both calm days and those with brisk winds, and see how each tree adapts in its own context.

As we were putting the Community Resilience System (CRS) together, one of the strongest sentiments expressed by our Community Leaders Group was that the CRS had to improve normal operations as well as easing the transition to a new normal. This paper not only agrees with that, but shows that understanding how the community functions in normal conditions is a key to understanding its resilience to a crisis.

In other words, watching how trees bend and sway in the wind can often tell us more about the resilience of trees than exhaustively researching why one fell.

My personal fascination is about how we make decisions, and the articles that I will be writing for this blog are about decision making and how, by understanding some of the ways that we make decisions, we can improve our decision making.

 What has decision making got to do with resilience? When we are planning to create a more resilient group or organization, we are constantly making decisions about how we can best do this and what threats we need to take into consideration. On the personal side when we experience a crisis situation, we are making decisions for ourselves and others. Unfortunately in all these situations our decision making processes are subject to a number  of built in biases; however if we can understand these biases, then we are in a position where we can develop techniques and ways of thinking to counteract these innate biases.

It is difficult to clearly quantify how much poor decisions cost either in monetary terms or in lives and suffering, but it would seem obvious that even a small improvement in our decision making could have really significant benefits. In this article I would like to introduce some of the ideas that I will be developing in future articles.

I will start by stating the obvious – we make decisions with our brains. But let us consider what our brains are for. They have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to help us survive, and to that end they are highly effective decision making instruments. However, in modern day situations these mechanisms for decision making may not be the best. So rather than spending time on developing sophisticated decision making strategies it is bound to be useful to understand some of the mechanisms that our brains have developed to make decisions. By understanding these mechanisms we can become sensitized to their shortcomings and so develop approaches to counteract these shortcomings and thus make better decisions.

We can make better decisions. The good news is that we have a brain! In our brain we have over ten thousand million neurons, and the number of possible interconnections between these neurons is 10 followed by 100 zeros. We have an immensely complex piece of machinery in our brains. However, is the brain fixed in the way it processes information?

In order to drive a traditional black cab in London, a taxi driver has to pass ‘the knowledge’. This is a test about the streets of London and the best way to navigate around them. It has been known for some time that the hippocampus, an area of the brain, is responsible for processing geographical information. In the year 2000 a team from University College London scanned the brains of some taxi drivers and found that their hippocampuses were bigger than those of normal people. This is a really significant finding! It shows that exercise and practice can physically develop areas of the brain and increase the connectivity of the neurons.

The bad news is that the brain has a very specialist design. It has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for survival purposes and not necessarily for making the best decisions. Part of the specialist design is our memory systems. When brain scans are done on chess players some interesting results are found. Masters and Grand Masters seem to have activity towards the rear of the brain which is normally associated with our memory systems. Less competent chess players tend to have most activity towards the front of the brain, in the pre-frontal cortex, which is normally associated with decision making. When we make decisions are we using our memory of past situations or analysing each situation anew?

Large areas of our brains have developed for pattern recognition. This is obviously useful for recognizing objects and faces. Unfortunately we also tend to see patterns when there are actually none there.

Our brains are also very good at establishing habits. These are very useful ’short cuts’ to our decision making processes. We don’t need to think about everything that we come across on a daily basis. Let’s have a look at one habit we have developed – how we fold our hands.

So let’s try it out. I’d like to ask you to fold your hands. If you look at your hands you will notice that one index finger is above the other one. When we are young we have to learn to fold our hands like this. Each way is equally likely at this point. However a habit quickly forms and one way becomes dominant. When we are older we will usually only fold our hands in one way. So for most of our lives we have been folding our hands in only one way. You would think that a habit as well established as that would be hard to break. But let’ try this. Try folding your hands so that the other index finger is on top. What does it feel like? Most people find this quite uncomfortable but bear with me for a moment. Let’s try slowly folding our hands back to the original position and slowly back again to the second position. And then back again, and back again, and back again, and back again, and back again, and finally back again. Now just shake your hands. So let’s try it again. I’d like to ask you to fold your hands again. Can you remember if this is the way you did it originally?

What’s interesting about this is that most people, after only five repetitions, feel much less awkward. Some people cannot even tell the difference any more. This is a very simple example of how a life-long habit can be overturned (or at least lessened) by only five practices at doing it a different way.

We have seen that our brains have some limitations when it comes to decision making.

The good news is that if we understand what these limitations are, we can reprogram even long established habits. We can also grow parts of our brain.

So if we can understand how our decision making works, we can spot the deficiencies in our decision making. Knowing what these deficiencies are, we can take countermeasures to improve them.

Boatlift tells the sadly under-reported story of the marine evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11.  In 9 hours, almost half a million people were evacuated in all manner of boats – more people than were evacuated from Dunkirk in nine days!  This operation was called for by a Coast Guard lieutenant (on his own) and coordinated with a wide array of maritime organizations and individual vessel captains.  The scenes with the gravelly-voiced captain of the fishing scow Amberjack V were perhaps the most affecting of the day, as he talked about never wanting to have to say “I should have.”

Wounded Warriors focuses on a few of the “wounded warriors” from our mid-East conflicts.  It demonstrates forcefully their resilience in the face of devastating wounds, finding opportunities for themselves in the midst of their personal disasters.  In the panel discussion after the video presentation, Denis Oliverio (who had been wounded while warning others from the top of his tank) typified the upbeat feelings of the wounded warriors when asked what he would do differently – “Duck!”

Gulf Coast Resilience is a paean to the resilient spirit of those on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  Mayor George Schloegel (Gulfport) told amazing stories about getting the Hancock Bank back into business after Katrina, while Chief Pat Sullivan and Bill Stallworth portrayed the human impacts so well.  After the video, Governor Haley Barbour accepted the first Community Resilience Award on behalf of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Renewal is a glimpse into the near future of the World Trade Center site.  The two cascading pools of water where the Twin Towers were are belted with a bronze ribbon honoring the names of those who died.  The new One World Trade Center skyscraper will make a statement while being the safest building in the world.  But, for me, the real star is the World Trade Center transportation hub that will open in about two years – a beautiful representation of a bird taking flight – it will be as striking in its setting as the Opera House is in Sydney Harbour. 

Interspersed among the videos were talks from a diverse group of speakers, each speaking to one or more aspects of the theme:  Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; Mary Fetchet, Executive Director of the Voices of September 11^th; FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate; Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta; former Secretary of State Madeline Albright; Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour; representatives from Canada; the chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, and others.  The story of Gander, which more than doubled in size when on 9/11 planes from foreign lands were diverted there – the friendship and kinship with we Americans they showed – was a quiet coda to the earlier stories of resilience.

Closing the event, Warren Edwards announced the names of the 7 leading communities who will be the initial pilots for CARRI’s Community Resilience System (CRS):  Anaheim, CA; Anne Arundel County and Annapolis, MD; the Charleston (SC) Low Country Area; Gadsden, AL; Greenwich, CT; the Mississippi Gulf Coast; and Mount Juliet, TN.  These communities will use the CRS to enhance their resilience and at the same time will provide feedback to CARRI so that we can improve its usability and usefulness.