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.

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.

If we think of a community in terms of a hierarchy of size or inclusiveness (individuals < families < neighborhood < community < state < country), we can see that a crisis can occur at any one of these levels.  If I’m having serious trouble with my kids, which is not a national crisis,  it’s up to me and my family to resolve it.  Conversely, the national debt is a national problem – I can’t solve it at my level (no matter how much I’d like to!).

Walker points out that in eco-systems we tend to focus on the scale of the problem but pay insufficient attention to the levels above and below.  Conversely in communities, we too often ignore the scale of the problem and waste precious resources by trying to solve problems at the wrong scale.  Thus, flooding is best controlled at the community level (or perhaps at an even higher level).  However, I must decide how and where to rebuild if a flood has destroyed my home. 

Poverty provides a good illustration of the problem of scale.  While it is clearly in a community’s (and a country’s) best interest to eradicate poverty, we must recognize that being poor is an individual and family condition – it has to be solved at that level.  The ineffectiveness of most of our federal poverty programs over the last forty years seems to indicate that we’ve been trying to solve the problem at the wrong level.  The relative success of the welfare reform enacted in the Clinton era implies that the proper role for higher levels in problems such as this is to facilitate problem solving at the appropriate scale either through providing resources or by removing barriers.

The myriad of urban renewal initiatives undertaken by our major cities provide more examples.  These efforts attempted to fix blighted neighborhoods by tearing them down and building anew, i.e., imposing a solution from above.  In most cases, this resulted in increases in crime, AIDS and other anti-social behavior with no real improvement (except cosmetic, and that only temporarily) in the neighborhoods themselves.  Initiatives that have focused on solving this problem at the neighborhood level have had much greater success (e.g., David Gershon’s work in Philadelphia).     

For me, these thoughts on the problem of scale thus resolve themselves into thoughts on setting appropriate goals.  Too often, we have seen initiatives started with much fanfare that ultimately failed because their goals did not reflect the scale of the problems they were to solve.  We should not try to “end poverty” but rather help people to avoid or quickly get out of being poor.  We should not attempt “urban renewal” but rather help neighborhoods make themselves safer, cleaner, prouder.  We should worry less about “health care” and more about living healthier lives.  In other words, don’t give out fishes; make fishing poles available and make sure there is someone in the community who is willing to teach how to fish – matching the scale of the solution to the scale of the problem is a hallmark of a resilient community.

We at CARRI have always held that sometimes, for good reasons, emergency managers have taken actions that delay recovery. One such instance we discover is that those who know/think they lost loved ones were not being given access to their bodies.

The doctors and morticians were being careful, I know. But in the midst of being careful, they were preventing people from having closure and moving on. Thankfully, they revised their way of dealing with grieving relatives. Rather than rely on DNA testing, they decided to allow people to identify relatives by a distinguishing mark or feature, such as a tattoo. A good and wise move.

DNA testing could have taken days/weeks. In the meantime, the painful process of recovery and healing would be stalled for many as they awaited confirmation when all it would have taken is describing something distinctive—guess I’d be the guy with the big belly! Remember, humor, even in disaster is important.

But now the questions—all worthy of research and recounting—about recovery will come forth:

Did Joplin have a debris management plan in place? How many small businesses had business continuity plans in place? How about the destroyed hospital, did it have a business continuity plan?

Answers to these, and many other ones are exactly what CARRI is working on to help communities self-assess their resilience. Timing everything in this case. Too bad Joplin could not have been a ‘test’ CARRI community.

Led by an energetic Daniel Homsey from city hall, this city government sponsored program includes a dynamic set of strategic partnerships among government agencies, non-profits and community organizations, a NEN University to engage the academic community, an awards program, a storytelling arm and robust use of all social media.  Its projects are organized and managed by the neighborhoods themselves, based on the core needs identified by the residents, and facilitated and encouraged by the city. 

You can find everything about the San Francisco Neighborhood Empowerment Network at www.empowersf.org.  The site is well worth your visit.

One of the things we at CARRI want to do is to highlight ways that communities are organizing themselves to become more resilient.  If you have a example, contact us and let’s get these great stories told.

This has been a team effort combining the work of over 175 participants – researchers from numerous disciplines and community leaders representing all aspects of community life drawn from across the nation.  We believe that we have developed a good, functional prototype – a system of processes and resources that any community can use to increase its resilience across a wide spectrum of disturbances.  But – and it is a big but – we won’t know if what we have cooperatively created has value until we get it in the hands of real communities and watch it operate.  For that, we need a group of pilot communities that will agree to work with CARRI and the CRS to help us understand what works, what doesn’t work, and what needs further development.

CARRI is in the process of actively recruiting 5 to 10 CRS Pilot Communities.  While we would like for this set of communities to include the diversity that will allow us to understand how the system operates in a variety of settings – different sizes, different economies, different threats, and different geographies – the most important factor in pilot community selection is commitment.  The communities that undertake this journey to resilience must have a dedicated core of committed leaders who understand that this is a lengthy trip – a long-term commitment to making their community different, better, more resilient.

The CARRI team, working through the Community Resilience System Initiative Steering Committee, has identified a number of potential pilot communities.  Other communities have come forward and indicated a desire to participate in the pilot program.  Between now and mid-summer, we will carefully work with each candidate community to ensure mutual understanding of the tasks, the pitfalls, and the rewards.  Simultaneously, we are working to identify the resources required to undertake these pilots and anticipating a full pilot community launch by the end of the summer.

We know that the system is neither as complete nor as robust as we hope that it will eventually become.  These pilots are designed both to test the system and allow conclusions about its usefulness, practicality, and effectiveness; they will also help us identify additional supporting resources and processes that will make the system more powerful.  In this sense, these pilots are both tests and creative development opportunities.

While we have identified several communities and have begun discussions we have made no final selections.  Communities who may be interested in becoming pilots should contact CARRI and let us know of your interest. 

We at CARRI, acting as the Community Resilience System Initiative Steering Committee’s representatives, are excited about the prospect of taking the work of so many dedicated initiative participants and watching it operate in US communities.  We think that these pioneer resilient communities will set an example and the standard for building a truly resilient America anchored in resilient American communities.

The Chinese ideogram for “crisis” is made up of two characters – “danger” and “opportunity.”  One facet of resilience is finding the opportunity in a crisis.  When we talk about the state of our infrastructure we tend to stress the dangers – especially when talking to politicians.  We will eventually fix our infrastructure.  We may do it in a deliberate and planned manner, or in response to more incidents like the bridge collapse in Minneapolis.  In other words, on either a “pay me now,” or a “pay me [more] later” basis. 

But if we proceed wisely to repair and rebuild our infrastructure, I see real opportunities that are too often overlooked.  Here in the US, by using better materials, building in better locations, using sensors to allow us to know the conditional status of our infrastructure at almost any point in time, we can again make our infrastructure a competitive advantage.  Investments like these will reduce maintenance costs, provide greater safety, and allow us an extended life for what we rebuild.

And the use of these same new technologies can also spark real economic growth from foreign buyers. The infrastructure in much of the newer developed world (esp. what Thomas Barnett calls the “new core” – Brazil, India…) though younger than ours – is built on the American model, with American ideas.  If we can push to make good investments and solve our own problems soon, the solutions we develop will provide economic opportunities for us as countries in Latin America, Asia and elsewhere begin to face the same challenges we are now.  American firms can once more be in the forefront of rebuilding the infrastructure of the world.

Certainly we should stress the dangers when talking about our infrastructure crisis.  However, we should also stress the opportunities inherent in dealing with those dangers.  We should not allow our current fiscal mess to prevent us from investing in ourselves in ways that will provide a huge return on that investment.

All three working groups that came together to assist us in this project – a group of researchers (the Subject Matter Group); a group of community representatives (the Community Leaders Group); and a group representing government and the private business sector (the Resilience Benefits Group) have completed their formal work, although we remain in constant contact with them and continue to benefit from their wisdom and experience.  In all, well over 200 individuals provided input, advice, ideas, and constructive criticism.  We have documented hundreds of hours of in-person workshops and telephonic listening interviews, numerous short surveys on specific topics and a significant amount of individually produced thoughts, ideas and suggestions in summary reports for each work group.  Each of these reports will be published on or about April 1 as annexes to the full project report of the CRSI Steering Committee.  The final Steering Committee report will also include a set of policy and other recommendations flowing from the working groups’ reports that bear on community resilience. 

We know that every community is a complex social organization with its own characteristics, needs, challenges and potential solutions.  The Community Resilience System  acknowledges this and provides a framework from which communities will be able to tailor their individual resilience vision, programs and action plans without being overly prescriptive.  It guides communities in how to think about resilience and provides a well conceived set of actions that will lead to community self-knowledge; to outcome driven actions; to an implementable, sustainable plan; and, we hope, to community improvement.

We are indebted to the scores of people who have shared their experience and wisdom to make the system possible.  We are keenly interested in any suggestions, connections and ideas our readers would care to share.

The recent cholera outbreak in Haiti has exposed twenty-first century youth to a problem as old as human communities—the need for clean water. It may come as a surprise to many, but it is widely held that the provision of safe, potable water is the single greatest contributor to our longer life spans.

There are many communities in the United States that have serious drinking water supply problems. Most know that the greater Los Angeles area is too dry to sustain its population and water must be piped in from a distance. Many other western cities have made the list of those facing water shortages. Closer to the east coast, Atlanta has now made the list. Doubtful that any would argue water shortage as an issue influencing a community’s ongoing resilience.

What may be less clear is the growing fragility of the water delivery system. Underground, out of sight, there are some very large man-made streams. Water mains in excess of 72 inches in size crisscross communities, having to endure extreme variations in temperature, pressure, and the constant shifting of the earth, including that created by cars on the surface.

The force of a large water main breaking is something to be reckoned with. It can toss cars like matchbook toys. It can flood basements in seconds. I can sweep people away with virtually no warning.

 Here is another fact probably not well known. Most all underground water lines leak—that is what eventually leads to a major break, and it makes sense when seen that way. A loss of 10 to 20 percent of the water pumped is considered ‘acceptable.’ But a sudden drop in pressure from a burst line can require extraordinary precautions to maintain sanitation.

 The American Waterworks Association tells us that a water main breaks every two minutes—for a total annual count of 300,000. The nation’s water system was mostly built in the 1950s and 60s—and is rapidly aging. Washington DC’s average pipe age is 77 years.

Needless to say, a community whose pipes do not hold water very well in normal times will probably experience even worse problems in the aftermath of a disaster. Water pipes are indeed, out of sight, and thus we don’t have to look at them as a part of our aging infrastructure. But we should.

Or are they really out sight? Aren’t they really readily visible when you walk in your kitchen and turn on the tap