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.

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.

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.

Many may not know that regular homeowner’s insurance does not cover flooding. This was the reason for protracted legal cases on insurance reimbursement after Katrina. If a home was destroyed by water (flood), then private insurers did not have to reimburse for damages. If the owner had enough foresight to buy flood insurance—separately purchased through an insurance agent but backed by the US government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)—then they would be reimbursed. If the home was destroyed by wind, then private insurance would cover—but when a home was simply gone in an area that had both high wind and water, it was very difficult to say which destroyed it.

Homes and buildings in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from federally regulated or insured lenders are required to have flood insurance. But many homes that could flood in an exceptional event are not required to have flood insurance. Such homes are not within a FEMA defined “flood zone.”

 Zones that begin with “A” or “V” are high-risk flood zones, and the purchase of flood insurance is federally mandated on loans secured by properties located in communities that participate in the National Flood Insurance Program. Zones “C,” “B,” and “X” have a lower risk of flooding, and the federal mandatory purchase requirements do not apply. “V” flood zones are on the coast and are subject to wind-driven water, i.e., waves. “A” zones are subject to a 1% or greater chance of flooding in any given year; in short, they are in the 100-year flood plain.

Since most people buy their homes with a mortgage, if they are not required to buy flood insurance they assume they do not need it. With water forced many miles inland and torrential rains, many Katrina property owners found out the hard way that they were not going to be reimbursed or only partially reimbursed for their loss.

Access to outside resources—in this case, insurance money—is a critical part of community resilience. In lower flood risk areas, NFIP-backed insurance can be as low as $129 a year. That seems like a very small amount to insure against the risk of total loss.

Resilient communities build public awareness of the risks they face and the potential losses—they do not rely on mortgage companies to tell them their risk. No doubt many without flood insurance wished they had known this as they watched Irene move up the coast.

But then the grind of recovery comes. I remember in Charleston seeing debris truck after debris truck after debris truck for several months. I remember getting several flat tires from roofing nails that were blown off roofs.

I remember the task of cleaning up my office building after it took several inches of surge water. Many thought the College of Charleston should shut down for the semester. But President Harry Lightsey defied those faculty and staff, and the College reopened a mere week and one-half after Hugo. The College’s buildings were largely ok—some with water damage and blown out windows and others with stripped roofs. Getting the College of Charleston kids back on the city’s streets was a remarkably fresh breath of normalcy.

In yesterday’s (August 17^th, 2011) New York Times, there was a remarkable story. I quote the reporter, A.G. Sulzberger in the story:

JOPLIN, Mo. — When the red brick schools here were reduced to rubble by a deadly tornado three months ago, local leaders announced a goal that seemed like a longshot: the new school year would start on time.

But on Wednesday the city made good on its promise, and students reunited for the first day of school, marking the end of a difficult summer as they streamed excitedly into makeshift facilities that replaced the 10 schools damaged or destroyed by the tornado on May 22.

As they exchanged standard so-good-to-see-you-again greetings — the boys slapping hands, the girls embracing — juniors and seniors swapped schedules and marveled at the modern touches of their new high school, built in just 55 days inside a recently vacant department store at the back of a shopping mall. Outside, residents of a local retirement home lined the streets to welcome them.

 What could make life seem more normal than kids going back to school in the fall? With effective leadership, Joplin was able to achieve a “longshot.” Going for a reopening of schools likely took some priority over other things that needed tending, but such are the choices we have to make in planning recovery.

It is a remarkable story that gives me heart in the ability of communities to be resilient. Joplin has given us all a clear message about what is important in being resilient, and we should both take heed and applaud them. A difficult summer notwithstanding, the community has likely turned the recovery corner.

Developing a plan, especially in a time when so many communities are strapped for resources, means making choices – we are going to do this, we are going to stop doing that, we’ll do the other later.  In the CRS, we invite the community to develop a vision for its future that in effect becomes an operational definition of its common values and aspirations.  This vision becomes the set of scales that the community uses to weigh the many options for action and to prioritize them.

CARRI recognizes that creating a common vision is hard work.  It often requires the patience of Job to reach a consensus about what the community wants its future to be.  But reaching that consensus is essential.  Lacking a common vision, it is virtually impossible to take any long-term action to improve the community. 

Our current impasse over the federal budget is a perfect example of this and a microcosm of the macrocosmic problem that plagues our nation at all levels:  an unwillingness to prioritize because we lack a common vision of what we want to become.  One of the primary reasons we lack this vision is because we do not have a common understanding of the problem. For example, surveys indicate that less than one-third of the electorate understands the realities of where our federal dollars go (40% debt, 40% entitlements, about 15% defense, and the rest everything else).

In developing the CRS, we have tried to provide community leaders with information about their communities – strengths, weaknesses, threats – that they can use to forge the necessary common understanding of the state of their community.  Once that is gained, then achieving a common vision becomes easier (I didn’t say easy!).  That vision can then drive the development of a plan to make the vision a reality.  If done well, the result is a more resilient, more vibrant and more vital community.

Welcome as well is a recognition that some actions taken during emergency response may actually erode social capital. Before Hurricane Hugo, in the Charleston region, there was one vehicle access point to Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms. That was the Sawyer Bridge—a drawbridge that was literally spun off its balance point by Hugo’s winds.

Residents of Sullivan’s Island and the Isle of Palms were denied boat access to the island by National Guardsmen. The argument was the islands were overrun with snakes (an unlikely event since a surge would have swept them inland) and that structures were unstable and dangerous. The latter point is valid, but in many other areas throughout the region that actually were harder hit that the two islands, residents could not be stopped from entering because they had multiple points of access. I walked down King Street in downtown Charleston two days after the Hurricane when the street was littered with broken glass and everything from pieces of metal roofs to downed street lights.

From a risk analysis standpoint, the issue was one of someone stepping on a nail or getting cut from a sharp object. I do not question the good intentions of emergency managers here—rather only whether or not they factored social capital into their decision. Some individuals had a chance to sift through their wrecked homes and salvage things that were personally valuable to them. After several days of rain and weeks of being denied access, much of what they could have recovered was no longer recoverable.

Social capital is about holding on to a sense of place and that includes connections to the past. This is why it should be included in our analysis of community resilience.

But at the same time, by vaulting social capital to the forefront, I wonder if there is too much of a backlash.

In the social sciences, we speak of “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions for something to happen. A sufficient condition is one that in and of itself is enough to cause something to happen. A necessary condition is just that, but not sufficient to cause something to happen. Water in the atmosphere is necessary for rain, but not sufficient in and of itself. It needs other factors—temperature, etc. to make rain occur.

In terms of resilience, we should see social capital as necessary. Absent strong bonds to community and place, both created by social capital, community resilience will be seriously degraded. But social capital is not sufficient in and of itself to create community resilience.

Aside from social capital, communities need access to resources for effective and efficient recovery. Resources can come in many forms—help from outside volunteers, insurance, donations, government aid, savings accounts, etc. But these are not sufficient for recovery absent a resolve on the part of community members to stay and rebuild.

In addition, a community whose infrastructure is in bad shape before a disaster will have recovery hindered no matter how much social capital they have.

Recovery is about time in a very important way—how quickly a community can rebound from a disaster. Strong reserves of social capital are necessary, but so are access to resources. So is ensuring that a community’s infrastructure is maintained. There are a lot of necessary parts of recovery. None, alone, are sufficient.