BRINGING RESILIENCE HOME
In our tour of resilience patterns, we have crossed a range of geographies, disciplines, contexts, and ideas. We’ve seen some of the ways systems can become fragile and break. We’ve examined how their connectedness can create feedback loops that (often invisibly) either amplify or erode their resilience. We’ve explored how resilience strategies from one domain might find application in another. And we’ve glimpsed how individuals, groups, and communities can bolster their resilience by embracing a warm zone of connectedness, collaboration, and diversity.
It turns out that Goldilocks had it right all along: Resilience is often found in having just the right amounts of these properties—being connected, but not too connected; being diverse, but not too diverse; being able to couple with other systems when it helps, but also being able to decouple from them when it hurts. The picture that emerges is one of strategic looseness, an intentional stance of both fluidity (of strategies, structures, and actions) and fixedness (of values and purpose).
The problem, of course, is that many of the aspects of a given system’s resilience are defiantly context specific. The particular approach that makes one organization more resilient in a given situation may make another more fragile. (Note the word “more”; there are no absolutes in resilience, no binaries, just measures of more and less.) Every resilient solution is rooted in its setting and not necessarily a sure path to others’ success.
How, then, do we put these principles into action?
MAPPING FRAGILITIES, THRESHOLDS, AND FEEDBACK LOOPS
While there’s no single recipe for every circumstance, every journey toward greater resilience begins with continuous, inclusive, and honest efforts to seek out fragilities, thresholds, and feedback loops of a system—grasping its holistic nature, identifying its potential sources of vulnerability, determining the directionality of its feedback loops, mapping its critical thresholds, and understanding, as best we can, the consequences of breaching them. Doing so calls us to greater mindfulness—assessment, without judgment, of the world as it truly is. And this is just as true for organizations and communities as it is for people.
As we’ve seen, fragilities can take many forms: chronic, long-term challenges like persistent poverty; or the erosion of social mobility; or increased susceptibility to environmental shocks; or the vulnerability of supply chains and infrastructure to climate disruptions. Fragilities can emerge when a corporate culture slowly migrates to an inappropriate level of risk tolerance; or when effective governance wanes; or when a loss of cognitive diversity leads to groupthink; or when a loss of biodiversity devastates an ecosystem. Fragilities can be rooted in the impossibly complex Gordian knots that sometimes tie systems together, as we saw in the tortilla riots, or in the brittleness of a system that is unable to cooperate when it counts. In an organization or a community, fragility can arise from a lack of trust among community members or employees, from a deep resistance to change, or from the slow erosion of psychological resilience. And fragilities don’t even have to be negative, per se: They can take the form of a “golden handcuffs” dependency on an external subsidy, or on a single mode of highly profitable but undiversified operations.
All civilizations face their fragilities. Many residents of the world’s wealthiest nations, particularly Americans, have felt fortunate to live through a period largely insulated from shocks and disruptions. This “vacation from history” enabled many to become accustomed to living at the efficient-but-fragile end of the robust-yet-fragile continuum. In a world temporarily devoid of consequences, the slow erosion and increasing inelasticity of the country’s political, financial, socioeconomic, and ecological systems scarcely seemed to matter. Now that a new, more volatile chapter has begun, those now-compromised systems have flipped from being engines of resilience to sources of fragility themselves.
All of these vulnerabilities are distinct and require different responses, yet all have the same effect: They make their host systems less adaptive and increasingly robust-yet-fragile—capable of dealing with anticipated disruption but likely to collapse in the face of an unorthodox challenge.
In spite of this, surprisingly few communities or organizations have any kind of structure in place to think broadly and proactively about the fragilities and potential disruptions that confront them. This has to change. Today, it’s unthinkable for an organization of any meaningful size not to continuously monitor its financial or supply chain risk; soon, it will be equally unthinkable not to scan for a broader array of potential disruptions, from environmental issues such as carbon, water, energy, and climate risks to internal cultural factors like levels of cooperation and trust, and social issues such as the health and well-being of the communities these organizations operate in.
Even so, it’s important to remember that seeking fragilities does not guarantee finding or eliminating them. Surprises are by definition inevitable and unforeseeable, but seeking out their potential sources is the first step toward adopting the open, ready stance on which resilient responses depend.
This is not to say that resilience is solely about risk management—in the decades to come it’s also going to become a significant driver of innovation in its own right. Developing new technologies and services that help enterprises decouple themselves from scarce ecological resources or that help customers contend with unpredictable shocks is going to be big business, worth many billions, if not trillions of dollars.
Consider Kilimo Salama, an innovative agricultural microinsurance program developed in rural Kenya, and one example of a resilience strategy with significant future economic prospects. Created by the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, UAP Insurance, and Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom, Kilimo Salama (which means “safe farming” in Swahili) insures tens of thousands of smallholder farmers, who may plant as little as a single acre of corn, against the possibility of severe weather events such as drought and excessive rain. These are precisely the kinds of events that are likely to become more frequent in a future increasingly influenced by climate change.
Kilimo Salama’s customers are often near-subsistence farmers, whose labor costs are very low but whose adaptive capacity in the face of bad weather is almost nonexistent: One badly timed drought can be catastrophic. To mitigate this risk, Kilimo Salama enables farmers to purchase very small insurance contracts on each bag of seed they buy, at the point of sale, for 5 percent of the cost. Contracts are purchased using M-Pesa, a mobile payments platform deployed ubiquitously throughout Kenya, on the farmer’s own mobile phone.
Once they’ve registered a farmer, Kilimo Salama uses a series of distributed, solar-powered wireless weather stations to monitor climate patterns around the farmer’s land throughout the growing season. If there’s too much rain, or too little, at the wrong time, the farmers get a payout automatically via their mobile phones, covering the cost of their seeds.
The innovations here are numerous: First, using automated weather sensors means that one of the costliest aspects of delivering insurance—having to check manually if an adverse event has actually affected a particular farm—is effectively eliminated. “Farm visits make sense if you have a large-scale farm, because the cost of the visit can be rolled into the policy,” says Rose Goslinga, Kilimo Salama’s founder. “But for a small-scale one-acre farm, the math just doesn’t add up—and this has been among the main reasons insurance hasn’t been available. By using wireless sensing stations, we don’t have to visit the farm, which transforms the economics.”
Similarly, by linking the weather sensors directly to the M-Pesa accounts of the customers, the entire claims process is eliminated: If the weather turns bad, payment is automatically made via a mechanism the farmers know and trust, much faster than if a claims adjuster had to be involved. Better still, the information that these sensors collect is used to develop insights on relevant regional climate trends. In a positive feedback loop, these are then delivered back to farmers via targeted, timely text messages helping them to become better farmers even during good years.
Not only does microinsurance insure against loss, it lets people make investments they wouldn’t feel comfortable making otherwise, because they can hedge them. Goslinga points to one farmer she knows who took a chance on a higher-yielding, more expensive variety of corn only because he could ensure it with Kilimo Salama. His yield increased 150 percent.
Other innovations are less technical but no less important to the success of the program. Developing Kilimo Salama required Goslinga and her colleagues to figure out how to use the technology to bundle and service nontraditional customers in a nontraditional way, how to restructure the insurance supply chain accordingly (all the way up to the reinsurers, who insure the insurance company), and—most important—how to get skeptical farmers to sign on.
The resulting service is not just an important part of the future of climate resilience, it’s going to be an important part of the future of the global insurance industry itself. The MicroInsurance Centre estimates the market for microinsurance products of all kinds to be at least 1 billion people, less than 3 percent of whom are currently served. With opportunity like that at hand, the Kilimo Salama model will soon be exported, not just to other countries in the Global South, but, in a reversal of received stereotypes about the flow of innovation, also to countries in the Global North. In this century, resilience will not just be a social good, but a global market opportunity from which developed nations have as much to learn as they do to teach.
EMBRACING ADHOCRACY
As we’ve seen again and again, wherever we find social resilience, we rarely find just big, formal institutions at work. Instead, we often find a rich stew made up of bits and pieces of public and private organizations, informal social networks, government agencies, individuals, social innovators, and technology platforms, all working together in highly provisional, spontaneous, and self-organized ways. Since each disruption and circumstance is unique, there can be no prefabricated organizational chart for the players—indeed, one of their first tasks is to create it.
There’s a name for this mode of organization, which was first popularized in the 1970s by the futurist Alvin Toffler and management theorist Henry Mintzberg: It’s called an adhocracy. It’s characterized by informal team roles, limited focus on standard operating procedures, deep improvisation, rapid cycles, selective decentralization, the empowerment of specialist teams, and a general intolerance of bureaucracy. In the digital age, an adhocracy can be put together in a plug-and-play, Lego-like way, well suited in fast-moving, fluid circumstances where you don’t know what you’ll need next. If it were a musical genre, adhocracy would be jazz.
A successful adhocracy was, for example, at the heart of the success of Mission 4636 initiative in Haiti, in which dozens of self-coordinated collaborators—some as large as the International Red Cross and the U.S. Marines, others as small as an individual graduate student volunteer—worked together with nothing more than shared purpose and good software holding them together. Adhocracy also underwrites the success of CeaseFire’s violence interrupters, who are able to bring together the right array of people and resources, at the right time, to cool down a shooting. In these cases and others like them, the resilient response is improvisational and provisional, established at the speed circumstances dictate.
In a larger sense, adhocracy is what all of the lessons, insights, and strategies in this book are really about. Whether expanding the cognitive diversity of a team, like Greg Fontenot and the leaders of Red Team University; or weaving diverse social networks together like Noah Idechong in Palau; or facilitating cooperation among traditional antagonists like William Ury and his colleagues at Abraham Path; or co-opting the swarming tactics of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; or promoting eBay-like approaches to managing complex campaigns as espoused by John Arquilla; or creating complementary currencies like the WIR; or building the adaptive capacity of individuals through mindfulness training like Elissa Epel and her colleagues—all help to ensure that an adhocracy can emerge and thrive when it’s needed.
The converse is also true: When systems are structurally overconnected—as they were in the 2008 banking crisis; or when responses fail to represent a diversity of genuine stakeholders, as they did at 33 Liberty Street; or when interventions are bureaucratically imposed on communities rather than developed with them, as in the case of the Bangladeshi wells, there is no space for an adhocracy to germinate.
This is not to say that formal institutions don’t have a role in resilience—they certainly do. But when we focus too strongly on them as the sole actors in response to a disruption, we don’t just ignore, but can actually smother the opportunities for these kinds of successful, improvisational approaches to emerge. Unfortunately, in fields ranging from international development and diplomacy to disaster recovery, that’s exactly where our instincts take us: We usually bias in the direction of the bureaucracy, rather than away from it. What’s needed is an approach that complements these silos of excellence and works in the white spaces between them, where resilience (and social innovation) is so often found. That’s what resilient organizations, and their translational leaders, do: They create the opportunity, connectivity, permission, and encouragement for people to meet in the white spaces. The leadership imperative in such circumstances is centered on influence and coordination, not command and control.
THE FIERCE URGENCY OF DATA
Adhocracies thrive on data. And by a stroke of fantastic luck, we’re currently witnessing the global birth of an adhocracy of data—a global revolution that, for the first time, empowers organizations with the capacity to collect and correlate widely distributed real-time information about the way many critical systems are performing. This kind of open data will play a central role in resilience strategies for years to come.
A perfect example is given by FLOW, a powerful new data reporting system developed by the international water and sanitation organization Water for People, which is used for measuring the success of water and sanitation projects over time.
“Today, we rightly celebrate the day when a community gets water for the first time,” says Ned Breslin, Water for People’s CEO and a longtime veteran of global water projects. “But the way many water and sanitation agencies operate, it’s as if this is the end of the story. It’s not—it’s just Day One. Unfortunately, due to poor planning and a lack of community ownership, within a few years of being completed, up to 60 percent of the water projects in Africa and Asia are broken or abandoned. I’ve walked right past broken wells dug five or ten years ago to build new ones.”
To tackle this problem, Water for People developed FLOW, or Field Level Operations Watch, software that allows field-workers to use their mobile phones to map the health of water access points—sort of an Ushahidi for water. The system provides at-a-glance reports on thousands of health and sanitation points in a given region—not only their operational status, but also the level of community support and oversight—and injects a new level of transparency, efficiency, accountability, and resilience into water and sanitation efforts. Imagine how differently things might have turned out in Bangladesh had such a platform existed. Or in New Orleans after Katrina, for that matter.
Mining the data exhaust from platforms like FLOW and Ushahidi can tell us a lot about where systemic fragilities are emerging and where interventions aren’t working—often in a matter of minutes, rather than months. By making this kind of data externally available (with appropriate safeguards for privacy and anonymity) it can be remixed and correlated to produce dramatically more valuable insights, far beyond what might be feasible for any one organization to collect. That in turn helps separate an early, weak signal of a genuine disruption from simple background noise, and gives us more time to act upon it.
In the future, this data will increasingly be the fodder for sophisticated, predictive machine-learning algorithms that will not only help identify where weak signals are occurring, but where they will likely occur, helping us not only to react faster, but preemptively.
That’s the theory behind EpidemicIQ, an initiative to track the global emergence of public health epidemics worldwide through the collection and correlation of literally billions of social media data points every day. The system monitors countless Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, mobile text messages, blog posts, local news reports, and the like, in thousands of languages around the world, in real time. A sophisticated artificial intelligence system ingests and sorts through this gargantuan mountain of data, seeking to separate possibly relevant reports from irrelevant ones. Once potential hits are identified, they’re sent to human beings for verification, including, ingeniously, online players of the video game FarmVille on Facebook. (Players are offered virtual goods in exchange for correctly identifying whether a particular social media post is actually about a disease outbreak.) These confirmed hits are then sent on to a pool of subject-matter experts who analyze them using proven epidemiological models. This is an adhocracy of a different sort: of artificial intelligence software, untrained human beings, and skilled experts, all seamlessly collaborating to find digital needles in vast digital haystacks.
And it works. During a recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, EpidemicIQ was tracking cases five days faster than the Centers for Disease Control and eight days ahead of the World Health Organization. But the ultimate promise of such systems may be in telling us where the pattern might go next, before it does. Cross-referenced with data about human and animal migration, transportation systems, trade networks, and countless other variables, a future fast-moving contagion might be arrested by selectively decoupling and islanding parts of various global systems without inducing mass panic. Imagine how a similar system of financial observatories might help regulators like Andy Haldane in the next economic crisis.
Such possibilities are a big part of the reason global organizations like the UN and the World Bank have made commitments to opening the data about their development programs around the world. It then becomes possible to correlate outcomes from, say, the UN’s food relief efforts with the quality of water access points from Water for People and the development programs funded by the bank. This is also why global companies like Nike, GE, and IBM are creating open data initiatives covering many aspects of their operations. They’re betting that the competitive cost incurred by becoming more transparent will be dwarfed by the value of understanding how their own operations relate to other critical global trends.
These approaches also hold promise for gluing governments and informal community networks together for greater resilience. An effort called Open311, for example, seeks to create a standardized interface to the 311 public information service used in many American cities like New York, so that a resident could, for example, automatically report a pothole, receive a text alert when its filled, and map a route to work that is as pothole free as possible. Such a gateway could be used for far more than reporting when something is broken; it could also collect subjective data on how residents feel about the safety and livability of their neighborhood, or residents’ thoughts on what to do with a vacant lot, or how to guide volunteer efforts during a crisis to the places they are most needed. These efforts expand resilience by broadening the possibilities of cooperation, collaboration, imagination, and responsiveness among the city’s residents. In so doing, they expand the varieties of informal governance far beyond what the formal government could do on its own—once again, by embracing adhocracy. And for organizations of all types there is a powerful lesson here: Resilience benefits accrue to organizations that prioritize the collection, collation, presentation, and sharing of data.
This is not to say that the open data revolution is without risks or downsides: Just as correlations can be made to sense and respond to trouble, they can be used by those seeking to create trouble as well. Some governments—and not just despots and dictators—are already finding open data tools an irresistible tool for tracking citizens in ways that may violate their constitutional liberties. And it’s not just governments, but criminals and terrorists who are also getting into the game: After Mexican drug cartels successfully silenced their traditional media by killing journalists who reported on their activities, they took to reverse engineering the identities of bloggers and social media users as well, recently hanging several of their mutilated corpses from a bridge with a sign reading, “This is what happens to people who post funny things on the Internet. Pay attention.”
Equally disturbing, during the Mumbai hotel terrorist attacks mentioned in chapter 2, the terrorists on the ground remained in constant satellite phone contact with a distant coordinator, who looked up the online identities of hostages; when he confirmed that a hostage was, for example, an American or Jewish, his compatriots shot him. In a further perverse echo of Mission 4636, the same coordinator scanned Twitter postings from the terrified populace and used it to improve the attackers situational awareness and body count; indeed, the open data was so valuable to the terrorists, the Mumbai government asked the populace to stop tweeting live updates about the attack.
There are no simple answers here. Crisis mappers and those involved in the humanitarian community have begun to discuss ways to improve security and to implement codes of conduct and shared principles for harm minimization, but these will always be in tension with the need to ensure that platforms for sharing open data are as accessible and participatory as possible. Ultimately, like many aspects of our modern information society, it comes down to a value judgment: that while the risks of potential abuse are real, they are, in the main, vastly outweighed by the benefits.
REHEARSING THE FUTURE
Even with robust data in hand, healthy communities can’t be expected to anticipate all of the surprising, nonlinear ways in which systems behave when they’re disturbed, any more than the experts do. What’s needed is an inclusive way of thinking about various possible, probable, and preferable futures and their implications. Here again, new tools and technologies promise to help communities and organizations map critical thresholds, rehearse the consequences of disruption before they occur, and make better choices.
One pioneering example is a scenario-planning platform called Marine InVEST, developed by a consortium called the Natural Capital Project. Like an ecologically focused mash-up of Google Maps and the video game SimCity, the Marine InVEST software allows coastal communities to develop a sophisticated perspective of the many interactions between the land and the sea in their particular geographic region. Starting with a spatial map of the coast and aquascape, ecologists add science-driven models of local biodiversity and species distribution, ecosystem services, fishing, industrial activity, shipping, recreation, tourism, and the like. The resulting map illuminates the real financial value of the services that the ocean currently provides and makes clear how various activities constrain and shape one another. It also translates between denominations of value in the system—revealing the underlying exchange rate of dollars, fishing stocks, biodiversity, tourists served, miles of coastline preserved, etc.
Many of the connections between these systems are multidimensional. For example, adding fish-farming pens to a system might increase a local company’s revenue, but it may also affect wild fisheries, as pens are a perfect breeding ground for parasites that affect penned and wild species alike. At the same time, adding such pens can alter the water quality by increasing effluents, which in turn can affect how much of a coastal system can be used for recreation.
By making visible these kinds of connections, Marine InVEST enables onshore communities to generate plausible answers to real-world what-if questions: What impact might a specific increase in commercial fishing have on nonfished species? How would installing an ocean-energy system affect aquatic recreation and tourism? What’s the future cost (and benefit) of protecting a certain amount of shoreline—not just in dollars, but in biodiversity? How much additional activity is safe before important variables are pushed close to a critical threshold?
Understanding the answers helps the community holistically balance competing economic, ecological, and social interests while avoiding the critical thresholds that could flip the system into a less desirable state—just as ecosystems-based fisheries management (EBFM) approaches call for.
Picking a specific approach is no mean feat as, in the real world, some individual stakeholders will inevitably be shortchanged to some degree: Fewer fish will be caught than could be caught; fewer tourists will be accommodated than could be. No plan is without its compromises, and getting people to live with less-than-peak efficiency isn’t a software problem—it’s a political one.
To address this, the Marine InVEST team works closely with the community to build consensus around the goals, trade-offs, and costs of a given scenario. “Without this engagement, the results are meaningless,” says Anne Guerry, one of the project’s scientists. “On the other hand, when the community members have scenarios in hand it changes the nature of their conversation. It lets stakeholders play things out in a particular direction, see the risks and rewards of a particular scenario and how it might get into dangerous territory and fail, but without the real-world consequences of doing so.”
In a manner reminiscent of Red Team University, this form of serious play encourages community members to think through the complex and less-than-obvious second- and third-order implications of a given set of choices. And it often reveals as much about the nature of relationships between the stakeholders as it does about the implications of the scenario itself. “In many ways, these renewed relationships and engagement processes are the software’s deliverable,” says Guerry. “The models get better every time we engage with nonscientists and”—echoing Noah Idechong’s work in Palau—“so do their relationships with one another.”
Even a tool as sophisticated as Marine InVEST won’t capture every possible source or consequence of disruption. There will always be surprises, and nothing can force people to make the “right” decisions. But getting communities to reflect together about the implications of such scenarios builds resilience nonetheless: A community that learns to discuss one possible disruption is better prepared to deal with any possible disruption.
LEARN FROM RESILIENT PLACES
It’s important to state again here that the path to resilience doesn’t mean the elimination of every disturbance. As we noted earlier, artificial, prolonged stability can itself be a sign of fragility—an indication that a system may be conserving too many of its resources, like a forest overdue for a prescribed burn. Weathering the occasional disruption is one of the most important ways systems learn, by turning the spotlight on potentially severe fragilities without causing the system to flip completely into a degraded state. They also serve as mechanisms of creative destruction (to borrow Schumpeter’s famous phrase) that can clear a path for new arrangements—in our political system, our communities, our ecosystems, our infrastructure, and our economies alike. Modest, regular disruptions also amplify the internal diversity of the system—ensuring that some part of it is continuously seeding, growing, maturing, dying, and fertilizing the whole.
Over time, this messy cycle shapes the culture of resilient places and communities and the beliefs and values of the people who live in them. This may be one reason that social resilience is often found in places that have experienced deep challenges, like the Gulf Coast, the South Side of Chicago, or Detroit. Their all-too-routine, painful experiences of disruption build a deep cultural memory of resilience.
That’s the lesson of the last story in this book: the story of Hancock Bank and its remarkable response to Hurricane Katrina.
Thanks to a culture of extensive disaster planning, the 112-year-old bank, based in Gulfport, Mississippi, was able to get its essential computer operations back up and running just three days after the storm ransacked its gleaming seventeen-story headquarters.
But on the ground, in the wake of the storm, that scarcely seemed to matter. Ninety of the bank’s 103 branches had been either obliterated or severely damaged; electricity was wiped out over the entire region; police and firefighters were occupied with disaster recovery and unable to provide banking protection; and many customers had lost everything, including their IDs and checkbooks. Amid the chaos, it was impossible for Hancock’s staff even to know who their customers were, not to mention how much money they had on deposit with the bank. And yet, with credit-card systems offline, citizens needed cash more urgently than ever before, and all of the local sources—Hancock’s and its competitors’ alike—were devastated.
So what to do?
At the height of the calamity, the bank’s executives went back to the institution’s founding charter, more than a century old, and noticed that it focused entirely on serving people and taking care of communities.
The word “profit” never appeared.
So Hancock Bank’s executives did something remarkable—they enlarged the tribe. While the winds were still subsiding, Hancock employees stood in front of forty of the branches knocked offline, operating from card tables, under tarps, and out of mobile homes, and offered two hundred dollars in cash to anyone who would sign a slip of paper with his or her name, residence, and Social Security number. Not just Hancock customers—anyone. No ID, no problem. Much of this money was recovered from the ruins of local casinos and literally laundered and ironed by branch workers before being handed out.
By the time the disaster was over, the company had put more than $42 million into the hands of local residents—customers and noncustomers alike—with nothing more than Post-it Note IOUs as a record. This helped keep the local economy going at a time when it faced months of near-certain paralysis.
Hancock’s incredible act of trust paid off handsomely for the bank: Within months, thirteen thousand new accounts were opened at Hancock and deposits had risen by $1.5 billion; within three years, all but $200,000 worth of those initial $200 loans—99.5 percent—had been paid back.
At the center of this remarkable story was a clear, shared vision of the bank as a long-term social institution first, and a short-term profit-making institution second. The bank had obviously prepared for disasters, but no one had contemplated handing out millions to strangers, two hundred dollars at a time. It was Hancock’s extensive rehearsal for future disruption; its strong, shared social values; its trust in its community; and its empowered adhocracy of employees and stakeholders that fed its ability to rapidly flip, like the batfish or the WIR, into a completely new mode of behavior, in which the normal rules of operation were suspended and both the bank and the community could be restored.
And no regulator had to tell them to do it.
• • •
In so many of the stories we’ve explored about resilience, we see a great confluence of factors coming together—the right systems and structures, the right technologies and information, the right kinds of community empowerment, and the right values and habits of mind.
When these are joined, multiple victories ensue, no matter the scale or context. Neighbors who work together to design and plant an urban farm in a vacant lot, for example, will certainly go some of the way toward reversing urban blight and improving their food security, health, and nutrition. They’ll save a little money, get some exercise, and suck a little carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere all at the same time. While they’re at it, they may amplify their own sense of self-reliance and adaptive capacity and build the relationships that may ensure their community’s resilience in the face of some crisis yet to come.
Even our own thoughts play a role here, not only in our own resilience, but in others’ as well. The work of researchers like Richard Davidson, Elissa Epel, Clifford Saron, Amishi Jha, and others shows us paths to improving our own resilience through reflective practice and the discovery of greater meaning in our lives. And Gary Slutkin shows us how such habits of mind can be contagious, for good or ill. Tie these threads together, and you have the first links in a chain that connects your personal resilience to that of your social circle, your community, the place you work and live, and out across the world. What you choose to believe, the mental practices you cultivate, and how you respond to disruption truly shape the whole. Resilience can radiate out from within.
The journey toward resilience is the great moral quest of our age. It is the lens with which we must necessarily adjust our relationships to one another, to our communities and institutions, and to our planet. Even so, we must remember that there are no finish lines here and no silver bullets. Resilience is always, perhaps maddeningly, provisional, and its insistence toward holism, longer-term thinking, and less-than-peak efficiency represent real political challenges. Many efforts to achieve it will fail, and even a wildly successful effort to boost it will fade, as new forces of change are brought to bear on a system. Resilience must continuously be refreshed and recommitted to. Every effort at resilience buys us not certainty, but another day, another chance.
Every day is Day One.