Homeland Security Watch

Yesterday several DHS officials and others were on the Hill giving testimony related to the new National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security.  Please see: http://homeland.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-hearing-balancing-maritime-security-and-trade-facilitation-protecting-our-ports

Three quick impressions:

1. Constructive example of “stovepipes” being brought together around a supposedly stovepipe-busting strategy.

2. The tension between security and resilience is real, persistent, and difficult to effectively engage.   Security is tough enough.  Resilience requires even more creativity.

3. It is striking to have a hearing on this topic without hearing directly from the private sector as well.

This is an early step in rolling-out the new strategy.  Much more to come.

On February 7, 1812 President Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson:

“The re-iterations of the Earthquakes continue to be reported from various quarters. They have slightly reached the State of N. Y. and been severely felt W. & S. Westwardly. There was one here [Washington, D. C.] this morning at 5 or 6 minutes after 4 OC. It was rather stronger than any preceding one, & lasted several minutes, with sensible tho very slight repetitions throughout the succeeding hour.”

According to a good piece recently published in the Washington Post,

The New Madrid quakes started nine days before Christmas in 1811 and culminated in a massive shock on Feb. 7, 1812, which some experts believe was one of the largest quakes ever to strike the center of a continent.

In the then thinly populated mid-Mississippi Valley it seemed the end-of-the-world had arrived.  The ground split open, geysers of sand covered forests, the Mississippi river reversed course.  After-shocks continued for months.

A few years ago a friend was named head of strategic planning for a major healthcare system with most of its hospitals in St. Louis and nearby.  After he had been there awhile I asked about the status of their earthquake plans.  He was not from the region and had never heard about the New Madrid fault.  After my question, he asked about pre-existing plans.  There were none.

On this day in 1904 a great fire engulfed Baltimore, then the sixth largest American city.  It started at mid-morning on a Sunday. The cause has never been confirmed, but is assumed to have been accidental.  Over the next thirty hours the fire consumed over 1500 buildings and most of the central business district. There are several online resources, I especially recommend: The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.

Three of many lessons learned:

Interoperability – Since at least the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 many had encouraged standardization of fire equipment, and especially hose couplings.  Despite the recognized vulnerability very little progress had been made.  As a result, when firefighters and their equipment arrived in Baltimore from Washington, Philadelphia, Wilmington, New York and elsewhere their effectiveness was seriously undermined.  For more see: Major U.S. Cities Using National Standard Fire Hydrants, One Century After the Great Baltimore Fire (National Institute of Standards and Technology)

Mutual Aid –  Twenty-one cities and over 1000 firefighters provided mutual aid as Baltimore burned, most arriving Sunday afternoon.   The speed of this response was made possible by the B&O railway providing special trains at no cost.  The first reinforcements arrived from Washington D.C. only 38 minutes after the request was made (!). The U.S. Navy, Maryland State Militia, and police from several cities, especially Philadelphia and New York, also responded.   But the mutual aid — both private and public — so generously and quickly extended was often under-utilized through lack of technical and strategic preparedness.

Recovery –  A few years after the fire a survivor wrote, “The boldness with which Baltimore in the very moment of its devastation, planned and put into execution a great scheme of public improvements, seemed to act as a charm to dissolve the spell of ultra-conservatism, and to inspire the people with confidence in themselves and in the future of the city.”  Throughout the late 19th Century there had been many efforts to re-conceive the old port as a modern metropolis.  The fire opened the space that provided the opportunity to implement those plans. (An early example of Advance Recovery Planning.) Within two years Baltimore newspapers were claiming the city had been reborn much better than before.

The Facebook motto — “Done is better than perfect” — may be a fair summary of how Baltimore was rebuilt so quickly.   From this distance it’s tough to say what may have been lost along the way, but for the first time a sewer system was laid, parks were created, streets were substantially widened, and electrical and telephone lines were put underground.  Personally, I’m infatuated with much of the post-fire architecture that still graces Baltimore.

The survivor quoted above, longtime insurance executive C.C. Hall, also wrote, “A splendid audacity, resting upon a basis of intelligent comprehension, replaced the old-time hesitancy with which large projects had been received. To create rather than be created became the dominant impulse of the community.”

On February 7, 1995 Pakistani and U.S. authorities captured Ramzi Yousef. He was later found guilty for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  During his U.S. trial Yousef told the court, “Yes, I am a terrorist, and proud of it as long as it is against the U.S. government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.”  When arrested in Islamabad Youself was in possession of Delta and United airline tickets and was in the process of converting children’s toys into bombs.  He is currently serving a 240 year term in a federal penitentiary.

“What’s past is prologue,” is from Act 2, Scene 1 of The Tempest.  Shakespeare continues, “what to come, in yours and my discharge.”

The Boston Globe recently ran a very interesting, if short, editorial on the benefits of disaster tourism:

The residents of Joplin, Missouri suffered unspeakable tragedy when the May, 2011, tornado left the small city in ruins and 161 people dead. Today, Joplin is in the midst of a new crisis as city leaders, under fire, backed down from proposals to market the devastation and recovery as “tornado tourism.’’ While every effort should be made to respect the solemn nature of Joplin’s history, the city should reconsider: Disaster tourism is a natural part of any tragedy that engages, and sometimes enrages, a nation.

An interesting perspective I hadn’t thought of before.  Usually, such activities are easily cast as predatory or manipulative.  However, the editors of the Globe make the good point that disasters are learning experiences, not just for those directly impacted but for society in general.  For every person who goes and tours a former disaster site, a few might go home and perhaps not only prepare for the unthinkable themselves, but share that message with others.

Wednesday the White House released a new National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security.   This is an issue easy to underestimate.  Like the plumbing in your house, it tends not to be at the forefront until something goes wrong: leaking, freezing, breaking, bursting, or when the well goes dry. Below is a quick take on context and potential implications.

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On June 26, 1974 at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio, a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum became the first retail product sold using a scanner and Universal Product Code symbol.  Our lives would never be the same.

The use of the UPC and other “bar codes” allows the supply chain to be digitally monitored, mapped, and managed as never before. Logistics became one aspect of a supply and demand chain.

Working through a private international standards-setting process a variety of bar codes provide a framework that pulls many products, services, and information about them across the network.

In effect, this information moves the supply chain itself.

Increasingly these standards – and the rich information and management resources they make possible – ensure effective, timely, and comparatively friction-free transactions between companies and nations. The ability to share this digital information in very close to real-time has transformed the modern supply chain from supply-push to demand-pull.

Farmers, miners, and fishermen still matter. Processors, truckers, wholesalers, and retailers still play a crucial part. Ports, railways, and highways are still required. Physical stuff of all sorts still has to move from point A to B (and usually on to points C, D, and Z). But at least in the United States, Europe, Pacific Rim and increasingly around the world, the digital signals that are sent along largely determine when and where product arrives.

When this strategic capacity for generating demand-pull information persists, the supply chain is very resilient. Demand-pull is an attractor around which the system self-organizes.

But if the digital stream dries up the supply chain goes blind, deaf, and immobile. This has important – and largely unprecedented – implications for catastrophe preparedness.

Given this strategic context we are clearly beyond the typical approach to Mass Care (ESF-6) or Logistics (ESF-7). The Emergency Support Functions are just as dependent on supply chain resilience as any other aspect of modern life.

Supply chain resilience is a matter of systemic strategic capacity. If the capacity is resilient, local capability will be restored sooner rather than later. If the capacity is lost, it may be very late indeed until local capability is restored. Moreover, as the supply chain has evolved into a scale-free network – a network where relatively few hubs concentrate the preponderance of connections – the supply chain has incorporated the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of such a network.

With particular attention to the weaknesses, Ted Lewis explains:

A scale-free network containing a highly linked hub and many sparsely linked nodes is more organized than a random network… When a highly organized system reaches its critical point, insignificant incidents become significant because they can collapse the entire system… As self-organization increases, typically in the form of larger hubs or nodes with high betweeness properties, the complex system also becomes more vulnerable to targeted attacks and normal accidents. The extreme case of self-organization is SOC (self-organized criticality) – a state in which small changes are likely to create large effects… As a system nears its critical point, consequences grow exponentially in size. As SOC grows, so does the multiplier effect on the overall system. (Lewis, Ted G., Bak’s Sand Pile: Strategies for a Catastrophic World, Agile (2011), Page 340)

For the last twenty years the modern supply chain has generated extraordinary benefits. Efficiencies have multiplied across the global network. But the same networked behaviors that multiply good outcomes can – especially in an unexpected context – multiply bad outcomes.

Surprisingly, optimizations and improved efficiencies have been shown to increase self-organized criticality, making optimized networks less resilient. There are a number of reasons for this non-intuitive result, but one obvious reason is that efficiencies often mean less redundancy and less (expensive) surge capacity.

Most owners and operators of supply chains will find this claim incredible. They will point to several years of data and experience demonstrating increasing stability, effectiveness and predictability. They are right, and it is the system’s predictability that is of particular concern.

The modern supply chain – at its best – is good at predicting market patterns. It recognizes early shifts in consumer behavior, signals these subtle changes across the network, and stimulates appropriate responses in terms of production, transportation, distribution and other functions. Nearly everyone operates on tight deadlines and scramble to meet shareholder profit expectations, but the overall volume is sufficient to keep cash, credit, and goods flowing just ahead of demand. A miniscule profit margin multiplied over millions of consumers is good business.

A big part of the magic is deferring to the expertise of others. Costs – and therefore the consumers’ price – are driven down by abandoning any function where there is not a clear comparative advantage. Increasingly dense network hubs are the result. Searching for comparative advantage has created “cylinders of excellence.”

The producer is very expert in producing, and depends on another expert to transport, and another expert to process, and another expert to package and so on across the network.

No one owns the supply chain. Very few even try to visualize more than their piece of the supply chain, the piece where they have comparative advantage. The level of risk-informed engagement with each piece ranges widely. Risk-informed engagement with other hubs in the network is uncommon.

V.G. Narayanan and Ananth Raman explain,

Most companies don’t worry about the behavior of their partners while building supply chains to deliver goods and services to consumers. Engineers – not psychologists – build supply networks. Every firm behaves in ways that maximize its own interests, but companies assume, wrongly, that when they do so, they also maximize the supply chain’s interests… That finding isn’t shocking when you consider that supply chains extend across several functions and many companies, each of which has its own priorities and goals. Yet all those functions and firms must pull in the same direction to ensure that supply chains deliver goods and services quickly and cost-effectively. Executives tackle intraorganizational problems but overlook cross-company problems because the latter are difficult to detect. They also find it tedious and time-consuming to define roles, responsibilities, and accountability for a string of businesses they don’t manage directly. Besides, coordinating action across firms is tough because organizations have different cultures and companies can’t count on shared beliefs or loyalty to motivate their partners. (Narayanan, V.G. and Raman, Ananth, Aligning Incentives in Supply Chains, Harvard Business Review on Supply Chain Management (2006), Pages 174-175))

The local grocer does not own his or her source of supply. Even the large grocery company does not usually own the trucking firm that delivers product to its loading docks. The distribution center does not own the means of producing what it distributes. The food supply chain is – and most supply chains are – a disaggregated set of functional specialties in tight relationship and mutually dependent, but much more a team of rivals than a true partnership.

The ubiquitous use of outsourcing in search of comparative advantage is widely thought to transfer risk down or across the network. The assumption is suspect.

Outsourcing more likely obscures the actual level of risk. For the reasons outlined by Narayanan and Arnanth the risk is not known, but it almost certainly exists. Wall Street rewards this behavior because it keeps inventory costs low across the supply chain and creates the impression of risk distribution.

Risk distribution can be illusory, especially in scale-free networks. Rather, risk is almost certainly being concentrated in those low-end operators most vulnerable to any major shift in the risk environment.Given the nature of the modern supply chain, this supposedly transferred risk is actually accumulating and will, probably (my judgment), be unleashed across the supply chain by some future event with catastrophic consequences.

The greatest value of the new Strategy is to create a window-of-opportunity before such an event when creative and collaborative attention can be focused on these issues, especially to mitigate systemic vulnerabilities and enhance the resilience of strategic capacity.

The chart is taken from a December edition of Fortune Magazine.  These estimated costs — almost certainly underestimated — reflect a record-setting $380 billion in global economic losses; nearly two-thirds higher than in 2005, the previous record year. (See more from Munich RE.)

This week’s leader in The Economist is entitled, “The Rising Cost of Catastrophes” (see below and for a link to a more detailed article).  In the run-up to the 2012 Davos Summit the World Economic Forum has identified key global risks and gives special attention to the implications of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear emergency in Japan.  They warn about “seeds of dystopia” being planted worldwide.  Fortune, The Economist, and WEF… in the business world this is a thoughtleader trifecta.

The unprecedented scale and recurrence of these losses may — but I emphasize, may — have begun to influence strategic decisions by some major players.  A once-upon-a-time client lost nearly $1 billion as a result of the floods in Thailand. They are certainly learning from hard-knocks what a decade-ago I tried to communicate as a competitive opportunity as well as competitive risk.

So attention must be paid, either now through thoughtful mitigation or at some future point through even higher declared losses.

And yet, last week I was with three serious, practical business leaders who seemed unaware of the triple-header in Japan or the epic flooding in Thailand or the eventual shift in the San Andreas and New Madrid faults.   They have not personally experienced anything analogous.  Accordingly such high impact risks are only “theoretical”, which being serious, practical men they cannot allow to distract from what they know and know how to manage.

To ponder the experience of a peer from Sendai or Bangkok would require a kind of empathy, imagination and vulnerability that does not typically earn seven-figure bonuses.  Will the criteria for bonus payments shift to reflect a shifting context?  Hiring criteria?

The potentially catastrophic risks that I use as examples currently tend to be dismissed as either “ancient history” or “fanciful futures.”   It is helpful when Fortune and The Economist and the World Economic Forum begin to sing a similar tune.

Over the last year, Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, has argued, “In the past the decisive factor in success was productivity, the efficiency with which you used resources.  Today the most important success factor is to recognize risks and mitigate those risks.”  If the pace of global economic growth continues to slow, risk-mitigation will become even more critical to bottom-line success… even survival.

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The following was published in The Economist on January 14

COMMERCE has long been at the mercy of the elements. The British East India Company was almost strangled at birth when it lost several of its ships in a storm. But the toll is rising. The world has been so preoccupied with the man-made catastrophes of subprime mortgages and sovereign debt that it may not have noticed how much economic mayhem nature has wreaked. With earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, floods in Thailand and Australia and tornadoes in America, last year was the costliest on record for natural disasters.

This trend is not, as is often thought, a result of climate change. There is little evidence that big hurricanes come ashore any more often than, say, a century ago. But disasters now extract a far higher price, for the simple reason that the world’s population and output are becoming concentrated in vulnerable cities near earthquake faults, on river deltas or along tropical coasts (see article). Those risks will rise as the wealth of Shanghai and Kolkata comes to rival that of London and New York. Meanwhile, interconnected supply chains guarantee that when one region is knocked out by an earthquake or flood, the reverberations are global.

This may sound grim, but the truth is more encouraging. When poor people leave the countryside for shantytowns on hillsides or river banks they are exposed to mudslides and floods, but also have access to better-paying, more productive work. Richer societies may lose more property to disaster but they are also better able to protect their people. Indeed, although the economic toll from disasters has risen, the death toll has not, despite the world’s growing population.

Preparing for the worst

The right role for government, then, is not to resist urbanisation but to minimise the consequences when disaster strikes. This means, first, getting priorities right. At present, too large a slice of disaster budgets goes on rescue and repair after a tragedy, and not enough on beefing up defences beforehand. Cyclone shelters are useless if they fall into disrepair. A World Bank study recommends using schools and other bits of normal public infrastructure in disaster-protection plans, so that the kit and buildings are properly maintained.

Second, government should be fiercer when private individuals and firms, left to pursue their own self-interest, put all of society at risk. For example, in their quest for growth, developers and local governments have eradicated sand dunes, mangrove swamps, reefs and flood plains that formed natural buffers between people and nature. Preserving or restoring more of this natural capital would make cities more resilient, much as increased financial capital does for the banking system. In the Netherlands dykes have been pushed out and flood plains restored to give rivers more room to flood.

Third, governments must eliminate the perverse incentives their own policies produce. Politicians are often under pressure to limit the premiums insurance companies can charge. The result is to underprice the risk of living in dangerous areas—which is one reason that so many expensive homes await the next hurricane on Florida’s coast. When governments rebuild homes repeatedly struck by floods and wildfires, they are subsidising people to live in hazardous places.

For their part companies need to operate on the assumption that a disaster will strike at some point. This means preparing contingency plans, reinforcing supply chains and even, costly though this might be, having reserve suppliers lined up: there is no point in having a perfectly efficient supply chain if it can be snapped whenever nature takes a turn for the worst. Disasters are inevitable; their consequences need not be.

Monday the independent panel appointed to investigate the Fukushima nuclear accident released a 507 page interim report.  Most of the document focuses on specific operational decisions and tactical choices.

Several specific failures are highlighted: insufficient planning, poor regulation and oversight, inadequate training and exercising, a breakdown in communications within the government and between the government and the operator of the nuclear power plant.

The previous paragraph could be quickly edited to apply to nearly every serious industrial accident: Bhopal, TMI, Deepwater Horizon, various large-scale blackouts and others.   The same failures are referenced in most after-actions for events large and small.

Also typical has been most of the media coverage focusing on personal failures by political, regulatory and corporate leaders.

But toward the end of the report — and the 22 page English-language executive summary — are several atypical bits of analysis worth much more attention than given so far.

It is not easy to admit an absolute safety never exists and to learn to live with risks.  But it is necessary to make effort toward realizing a society where risk information is shared and people are allowed to make reasonable choices.

A quarter century ago I made some extra Yen editing Japanese-to-English translations.  This time I will mostly leave the first draft as it is. There is a kind of clarity in the slightly awkward but more literal rendering.

Even for an accident of low probabilities so long as extremely large scale damages are anticipated once it occurs… due consideration should be given to the risks involved and precautionary measures should be taken.

It was a major shortcoming for the safety of both nuclear power plants and surrounding communities that a nuclear accident had not been assumed to occur as a complex disaster.  Disaster prevention programs should be formulated by assuming complex disasters, which will be the major point in reviewing nuclear power plant safety for the future.

It cannot be denied that the viewpoint of looking at a whole picture of an accident was not adequately reflected in nuclear disaster prevention programs in the past.

The nuclear disaster prevention program had serious shortfalls. It cannot be excused that nuclear accidents could not be managed because of an extraordinary situation that… exceeded the assumption.

The Investigation Committee is convinced of the need of paradigm shift in the basic principles of disaster prevention programs for such a huge system, which may result in serious damage once it has an accident.

Whatever to plan, design and execute, nothing can be done without setting assumptions. At the same time, however, it must be recognized that things beyond assumptions may take place. The accidents this time present us crucial lessons on how we should be prepared for such incidents beyond assumptions.

Low probability, high consequence events deserve our sustained attention.

Reasonable assumptions will be exceeded.

The chairman of the investigation panel, Yotaro Hatamura, has been especially critical of the tendency to blame the crisis on soteigai. This is often translated as “unforseeable events,” but is probably closer to “unimaginable events.”  (Echoes of a “failure of imagination” in the 911 Commission report.)

Hatamura is an engineer.  His best known work is probably Learning from Design Failures in which he examines more than 100 cases to “uncover the root cause, reveal the scenario that led to the unwanted event, describe what happened so readers can clearly repeat the steps in their mind, and propose ways to avoid those mistakes in the future.”   It is a very detailed, case-by-case, engineering oriented approach to disciplined thinking.  He is a solution-oriented guy.

But Hatamura  has also become an advocate for clearly distinguishing between complexity and non-complexity and what can — and, even more important, cannot — be done to manage complexity.  With a little effort we can foresee complex events.  We have a much more difficult time imagining how our strategy for the complex must differ from our strategy for the merely complicated or novel or known.

The Japanese for complexity (see above) includes kanji a classically minded literalist might read as “a surprising recurrence of miscellaneous elephants.”  If you can imagine how you would manage that, you are on your way to being able to manage the cascade of a complex event.

The final report is expected in June.

The Strategic National Risk Assessment was written to support the National Preparedness Goal.  You can download an unclassified summary of the National Risk Assessment at this link. (Thank you to the person who sent me the link.)

The seven page summary includes these sections:

1. Overview
2. Strategic National Risk Assessment Scope
3. Overarching Themes to an All-Hazards Approach
4. Analytic Approach
5. Limitations
6. Impacts and Future Uses
7. Conclusion

Here is an excerpt from the Overview:

The Strategic National Risk Assessment (SNRA) was executed in support of Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8), which calls for creation of a National Preparedness Goal, a National Preparedness System, and a National Preparedness Report.

Specifically, national preparedness is to be based on core capabilities that support “strengthening the security and resilience of the United States through systematic preparation for the threats that pose the greatest risk to the security of the Nation, including acts of terrorism, cyber attacks, pandemics, and catastrophic natural disasters.”

… The assessment was used:

• To identify high risk factors that supported development of the core capabilities and capability targets in the National Preparedness Goal;
• To support the development of collaborative thinking about strategic needs across prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery requirements, and;
• To promote the ability for all levels of Government to share common understanding and awareness of National threats and hazards and resulting risks so that they are ready to act and can do so independently but collaboratively.

The subsequent pages provide an overview of the unclassified findings and the analytic approach used to conduct the SNRA. It should be emphasized, however, that although the initial version of the SNRA is a significant step toward the establishment of a new homeland security risk baseline, it contains data limitations and assumptions that will require additional study, review, and revision as the National Preparedness System is developed. These limitations are discussed below, and future iterations of the assessment are expected to reflect an enhanced methodology and improved data sets.

Below is a chart (taken from the Assessment) that summarizes:

… a series of national-level events with the potential to test the Nation’s preparedness….

For the purposes of the assessment, DHS identified thresholds of consequence necessary to create a national-level event. These thresholds were informed by subject matter expertise and available data. For some events, economic consequences were used as thresholds, while for others, fatalities or injuries/illnesses were deemed more appropriate as the threshold to determine a national-level incident.  In no case, however, were economic and casualty thresholds treated as equivalent to one another (i.e., dollar values were not assigned to fatalities). Event descriptions in [the table below] that do not explicitly identify a threshold signify that no minimum consequence threshold was employed. This allows the assessment to include events for which the psychological impact of an event could cause it to become a national-level event even though it may result in a low number of casualties or a small economic loss. Only events that have a distinct beginning and end and those with an explicit nexus to homeland security missions were included.

This approach excluded:

• Chronic societal concerns, such as immigration and border violations, and those that are generally not related to homeland security national preparedness, such as cancer or car accidents, and;
• Political, economic, environmental, and societal trends that may contribute to a changing risk environment but are not explicitly homeland security national-level events (e.g., demographic shifts, economic trends).

These trends will be important to include in future iterations of a national risk assessment, however.

If you have questions or comments about this initial effort to share the results of the national risk assessments, please let me know (in the comments section of this post) and I will ask around for answers.

Can homeland security be measured? Consider a couple of possibilities:

One current project is concerned with supply chain resilience.  What is a resilient supply chain?  How does it behave?  How does it deal with threats and vulnerabilities?  According to interviews with senior supply chain owners, operators, and various experts no one has visibility over any single supply chain, much less the entire Supply Chain (like God, capitalized).  A supply chain seems to work best when it is widely distributed among several sometimes-competing, sometimes-collaborating players  who may or may not share what they know.  The Supply Chain is a complex adaptive system beyond measuring or managing in anything like a traditional understanding of these terms.

A second project is concerned with deterrence.  Is deterrence a short-term or long-term outcome? How is it achieved?  It seems to be the outcome of how positive and negative sanctions are applied to a well-defined audience for a specific purpose, often at a particular time-and-place.   Is there any way to accurately predict what mix of positive-and-negative, time-and-place will be most effective?  How do you measure absence? Isn’t this what deterrence means, the absence of something unwanted?  Almost everyone agrees that deterrence is an affective outcome, it is most effective when it influences motivations and unconscious tendencies.  How do you measure progress toward such a goal?  What does success look like?

It is reasonably clear and widely accepted that supply chain resilience and deterrence are each sub-elements of homeland security. Yet I am not at all sure how any of the three,  including homeland security, are to be defined — to be made finite — and thereby measurable (as traditionally understood).

I believe homeland security (as a practice, perhaps even a weird sort of verb), if effective, produces a public good called homeland security (a noun).  How do we assess such effectiveness?

Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics writes,

The task of measuring performance in the production of public goods will not yield to simple calculations.  Performance measurement depends instead on estimates in which indicators or proxy measure are used as estimates of performance.  By utilizing multiple indicators, weak measures of performance can be developed even though direct measures of output are not feasible. Private goods are easier to measure, account for, and relate to cost-accounting procedures and management controls.

Private goods are easier to measure because we can exclude potential users from consumption.  The private good of shelter is measured by, in part, the number of homeless… those excluded from shelter.  How would we exclude consumption of effective deterrence? How would we exclude free-riding on effective supply chain resilience?  How would we exclude effective homeland security? Why would we exclude?

Despite the complications, Congress wants better performance measures. GAO is a principled and persistent advocate of performance measures.   Any senior official with the temerity to quote Dr. Ostrom would, I expect, be received rather skeptically in most Hill hearing rooms. Most “masters of disaster” would, in any case, welcome meaningful measures.  So we keep looking.

Recently a senior FEMA official pointed to a possible relationship between mid-term sales-tax revenues, long-term recovery, and resilience.   This made some intuitive sense. We were encouraged.

After a disaster sales-tax revenue almost always shows an immediate spike. For example,  according to the Tuscaloosa News in the month following the April 27 tornado, local sales tax revenue of $2.5 million was about $160,000 higher than the same period in 2010 and about $300,000 more than in 2009.

What about one year or more later?  Sales tax revenue is a leading indicator, the FEMA official argued, for a whole host of other indicators: population, recovery of the retail sector, sustainable government services, overall economic activity, and more.  If following the immediate spike there is a long-term slide in sales-tax receipts this is almost always evidence of non-resilience. The reverse is also true he suggested: stable or higher sales tax revenues signals a range of resilience.

According to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, “City of New Orleans sales tax collections for the first six months of 2011 are at $78.5 million — higher than any other six–month period post–Katrina, and only 2 percent lower than the same months in 2005.”  Taken alone this could seem a sign of extraordinary resilience, especially for a city with a considerably reduced population and in the midst of a deep national recession.

Other indicators are mixed:  New Orleans school enrollment is 63 percent pre-Katrina numbers and the rate of violent crime is 80 percent higher than the national average.  New Orleans has not seen the collapse in employment of other places in the nation, but the biggest employment sectors — energy, tourism, and shipping — are all in decline.

Is New Orleans struggling or strong?  Resilient or just hanging on until the next big one?

Greensburg, Kansas is widely celebrated as a premier example of resilience in its creative, courageous response to the May 2007 tornado that devastated the community.  Between 2009 and 2010 Kiowa County — Greensburg is the county seat — saw sales tax revenue grow about 3 percent.   Does this quantity fairly capture the resilience of Greensburg?

How do we measure homeland security?  As input or output, might be the next question.

There is a Hebrew word — transliterated as ‘esher — that is usually translated as happy or blessed. This is the noun form of a verb — transliterated as ‘asher — that means to advance, go straight, make progress.

Do we achieve the noun by experiencing the verb or is experiencing the noun what motivates the action?

“How blessed (‘esher) is the man who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding. For her profit is better than the profit of silver and her gain better than fine gold. “(Proverbs 3:13-14)

Gold and silver can be precisely measured, valued, and excluded.  Wisdom is worth even more,  but resists unambiguous measurement.  I don’t think wisdom can be excluded (in the economic sense of the term), but it can certainly be elusive.

Today the German government is hosting an emergency summit to consider an alleged neo-Nazi threat.  Federal and state police, prosecutors, intelligence agencies and others are gathering in Berlin to share information and, perhaps, undo the perception of lax attention to radical German nationalists.  (Der Spiegel has aggregated several stories.)

A three-member cell of the “National Socialist Underground” was recently uncovered by German authorities.  At least ten murders have been traced to the cell. Nine of those murdered were of Turkish or Greek descent.  Eighty-eight political and civic leaders were apparently targeted for assassination. (88 is a bit of neo-Nazi numerology.)  Two of the cell members have committed suicide.  The third is in custody.

But according to Deutsche Welle, the chairman of the German parliament’s oversight committee, Thomas Oppermann, said that “there is evidence of more helpers.” A report in the daily Berliner Zeitung on Wednesday said investigators had a handful of suspects.

Earlier this week Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer appeared in court and made his first public statement.  ”I am a military commander in the Norwegian resistance movement and Knights Templar Norway,” Breivik told the court. “I acknowledge the acts, but I do not plead guilty,” Breivik said, adding that he rejected the jurisdiction of the court because it “supports multiculturalism.”

In a manifesto released coincident with his deadly bombing of central Oslo and massacre of 69 on Utoeya Island, Breivik claimed to be part of a pan-European movement to save Western Civilization from Islam.  Norwegian police have been criticized for underestimating the threat of nationalist violence.

Brevik has been denounced by every major European political party, left, center, right, and even ultra-right. But many of his belief’s — if not his behavior — are more widely held.  Several neo-Nazi (difficult to define) and ultra-nationalist (ditto) movements show signs of attracting more support. According to Sarah Webb writing for Reuters, “As the euro zone shudders, Europe’s populist politicians from the Netherlands to Austria and Finland are exploiting its woes to build up support and even threaten some governments.”

Early this month Demos, the British think-tank, released a new study of “online populism” in Europe.  The study was conducted by reaching out to the Facebook communities associated with fourteen widely recognized – and often self-defined – right-wing political movements. (See brief profiles of each group compiled by The Guardian.)

Based on volunteer answers to a series of questions, Demos found:

• Online supporters are primarily young men: an average of 63 per cent are under 30, and 75 per cent are male.
• Those responding are motivated by positive identification with the party’s values and the desire to protect national and cultural identity.
• Younger supporters are more likely to cite immigration than older supporters as a reason for joining.
• Supporters display low levels of trust in both national and European political institutions compared with national population averages.
• Online supporters are disgruntled democrats: they overwhelmingly believe that voting matters, and disavow violence, but do not believe that politics is an effective way to respond to their concerns.
• A shift by the respondents from online activism to voting is motivated by concerns over immigration, and Islamic extremism.
• The right-wing European respondents are not more inclined to violence than other elements of the general population

Meanwhile in North Georgia (USA), on Wednesday a federal magistrate denied bond to four elderly men accused in a plot to bomb federal buildings and disperse the toxin ricin.  According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Federal authorities, who began infiltrating the group’s meetings in March with the help of an informant, said the men discussed dispersing ricin throughout Atlanta and other major U.S. cities. In Atlanta, the documents said, the plan was to unleash the powdery substance on I-285, I-75 and U.S. 41. They also talked about assassinating state and federal officials, blowing up federal buildings and buying enough explosives to do it, FBI affidavits said. Some of the men said in secretly recorded conversations that they were willing to die for their cause, the affidavits said.

According to court documents filed following their arrest on November 1, one of those charged, Frederick Thomas, age 73, of Cleveland, Georgia told the informant, “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder… When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people have got to die.”

These are only a few of several similar stories that made it to my web browser this week.  Coincidences happen.  Three proximate angles do not necessarily share any particular point.  But the proliferation did catch my attention.

In a soon-to-be-published paper a multinational academic team that was in Japan at the time of the earthquake-and-tsunami credits “a handful of trucking/distribution companies” for saving thousands of lives.  ”Without their timely intervention, the situation in Tohoku would have taken the path of Haiti, where the lack of help from the local business class contributed to a crisis of huge proportions.”

Pause over this finding for just a moment: Without action by five or six key players in the supply chain, a major swath of the third largest economy in the world would have “taken the path of Haiti.”

The academic specialists in transportation, urban management, and civil engineering conclude the Japanese firms took the initiative because they “were in a position to know that the private sector supply chains had been severely disrupted, and that that the public sector was not ready to fill the gap.” (my italics)

Based on my own observations, in the first week after the earthquake-and-tsunami the Japanese government was not fully aware of its incapacity to fill the gap.  During the first five to six days, the government’s perimeter control was actually suppressing supply chain resilience.  A first step in restoring essential services to survivors was persuading the government they were incapable of doing so and to get out of the way.

This week Tesco,  the British — but international — grocery opened a new distribution center in Bangkok supplementing two existing DCs that have been impacted by the massive and ongoing floods.  This new site will focus on necessities such as water, instant noodles, and canned fish, importing these and other commodities from Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere.   Since the flooding began Tesco has increased its distribution capacity in Thailand by about 40 percent.

Friends in Thailand complain the government’s response to the epic flooding has been totally incompetent.  A Bangkok expat who happened to be Japan during the earthquake-and-tsunami adds, “But the incompetence is so complete the government at least does not get in the way.”

Last week I was in a meeting with a senior officer of a major US food distribution company.   He shared one story after another from the Northridge earthquake, to wildfires in Southern California, to Katrina and more where grocery wholesalers and retailers were ready with product and transport, but were kept away… just as in Japan.

A factoid: the tonnage of food shipped into the typical US metropolitan census area each week exceeds what the US military shipped into Afghanistan during the first year of the war.  The US military’s effort is considered a marvel of modern logistics.  But even the US military does not have the logistics capability to fill the food, pharma, and other essential needs of a major urban area in case of a catastrophe.

Recognizing the challenge there are increasing efforts to facilitate private-public collaboration in advance of a catastrophe.  The FEMA Private Sector Office is hosting meetings, brokering relationships and pushing each state to establish effective public-private partnerships.  So far twenty-two states are in the process of doing so.

Over the last few years several cities (such as Los Angeles)  regions (such as the Bay Area) or states (such as New Jersey) have established Business Operations Centers (BOCs) or Business Emergency Operations Centers (BEOCs) or even Virtual Business Operations Center (VBOCs) to facilitate collaboration during emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes.

In some places a BOC is little more than some business seats in the government’s  Emergency Operations Center.  Several BOCs involve exchanging information and  facilitating resource management. Only a few seem to include common risk assessments, joint training and private-public exercises.

Yesterday (and continuing today) I am at a national conference focusing on the private-public interface in emergencies and establishing BOCs.  Some fly-on-the-wall impressions:

• Lots of good will all around, reflecting a very practical sense of private-public mutual dependence.
• Everyone recognizes that personal trust-building is essential and — given American mobility — not entirely sufficient.
• The common value proposition seems to be information sharing for situational awareness and, if possible, situational analysis.
• Lots of different technological approaches to achieving information sharing, situational awareness, and more.  Reminds me of the online learning market before BlackBoard emerged as the dominant player.  At some point there will be — needs to be — convergence.
• Most innovative, forward-leaning solutions seem to involve some sort of mediator between public and private sectors, such as an educational institution or a not-for-profit operating as host, active party, or actual entity.  This seems to defuse a variety of legal, political, and perhaps command-and-control issues.
• There is an implicit expectation by the public sector involved that when push comes to shove they are in charge.  This is unchallenged by private sector because they know when push comes to shove they will do (or not do) what seems best to them at the time.

In many respects it is amazing this kind of explicit and sustained private-public collaboration is such a recent phenomenon.

A leader of one the BOC’s reported that in his major city the private sector has welcomed the invitation to be involved and quickly taken the initiative to be more involved.

“They seem to think disasters are recurring faster and faster and getting bigger and bad-er.  They are trying to get ahead of the wave,” he explained.

The new National Preparedness Goal is “a secure and resilient Nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk.”

The upgrade given mitigation is arguably the most important policy shift represented in the NPG.   Mitigate now joins Prevent, Protect, Respond, and Recover as “Mission Areas.”  Once the red-headed stepchild of preparedness, mitigate has — at least intellectually — been fully accepted as a strategic priority.

According to the NPG several “core capabilities” are necessary to achieve the mitigation mission area, including:

• Community Resilience
• Long-term Vulnerability Reduction
• Risk and Disaster Resilience Assessment
• Threats and Hazard Identification

The details of these capabilities are not — yet — specified.  The forthcoming National Preparedness System is likely to provide much more.  All of these capabilities have significant pedigrees in both research and practice.

There has tended to be an engineering orientation to mitigation.   Fifty-four of 77 examples in the FEMA Mitigation Best Practices Portfolio relate to flooding.  A specific threat is identified, vulnerabilities related to the threat are assessed, risk is reduced usually through some change in the built environment.  You can see this same logic embedded in the capability list.  All of this is helpful and works for earthquakes, wildfires, industrial accidents, and terrorism too.

According to the NPG mitigation is, “The capabilities necessary to reduce loss of life and property by lessening the impact of disasters.”  Unpacking the definition, this suggests that community resilience (see capability list above) contributes to mitigation.

As a strategic principle I would turn this around: mitigation contributes to community resilience.  Resilience and mitigation can be complementary.  But they are also quite distinct. The very best mitigation cannot ensure resilience.  Nor does less-than-full mitigation negate the possibility of significant resilience.   If I had to choose, I would choose resilience over mitigation.

Fortunately, we don’t have to choose.  Attention to both mitigation and resilience is helpful.

The NPG defines resilience as, “The ability to adapt to changing conditions and withstand and rapidly recover from disruption due to emergencies.”

The use of steel reinforcement to allow buildings to sway with an earthquake is an example of both mitigation and resilience.  The ability of the Internet to allow information-packets to find multiple open channels and opportunistically use whatever is available is another example of resilient design that can mitigate the impact of a threat.

But resilience and especially community resilience is much more than mitigating impact.

Last Thursday I was driving a narrow road through rural Virginia when the radio sounded a tornado warning.  The rain and wind were already strong.  At the first opportunity I pulled off at a convenience store to allow the tornado, about five miles ahead, to finish its run Northeast.

Paying for coffee and a cookie I asked the sales clerk if she had heard the tornado warning.  Glancing at the rain lashing the windows she replied, “Nope.  No radio.  Grew up in Oklahoma thought I’d gotten away from ‘em. ”

I showed her the tornado’s track on my smartphone’s screen.

“Funny thing.  Both my grands (grandparents) had storm cellars, purpose built in the backyard,” she said. “We never did and no basement neither.  Just a ranch house on a slab.  Was like we don’t believe in tornadas no more.”

The storm cellars — my mother’s parents in Oklahoma also had one — are examples of mitigation.   But as the sales clerk observed, before mitigation there was something the authors of the NPG would no doubt call “Threat and Hazard Identification” (this is tornado alley) and “Risk and Disaster Resilience Assessment”  (I need a place to be protected from a tornado) which leads to “Long-term Vulnerability Reduction” (I will build a storm cellar).  In other words, our grandparents actively acknowledged a realistic threat.

On May 22 the residents of Joplin, Missouri were alerted to a Tornado Watch at 1:30 PM local time.   A Tornado Warning was br0adcast at 5:09.  Sirens were sounded at 5:11.  The killer tornado touched down southwest of Joplin at 5:34.  According to a study conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),  ”The majority of surveyed Joplin residents did not immediately go to shelter upon hearing the initial warning.”  There were 159 deaths and several hundred injuries.

“Was like we don’t believe in tornadas no more.”

I was never in a storm cellar during a storm.  Several times I was in the cellar to retrieve a sack of potatoes or a jar of preserves.  Most storm cellars were also used to store what was harvested from the garden.  Every storm cellar I can remember was dug next to the garden.

You can argue that gardening is also a mitigation measure (against hunger).  But that would squeeze all the joy out of it.  My father’s parents owned grocery stores, but were also gardeners.  I have never had such luscious tomatoes, fresh or canned, since they stopped gardening.

Here’s my hypothesis:  As gardening declined and home refrigeration increased, storm (root) cellars fell into disuse, eventual disrepair, became a hazard themselves, and were filled in. The prospect of tornadoes was not sufficient  to sustain the mitigation activity.  The need for a cool dark place to store vegetables was a crucial indirect motivation for the mitigation.

We never really believed in “tornadas”, but once upon a time we believed in tomatoes (and green beans and peas and potatoes) and retrieving the taste of an August garden deep into February.

Resilience is the outcome of positive behaviors regularly practiced.  Resilience is being aware and appreciative of your environment. Resilience is being enmeshed in a dense network of human relationships.  Resilience is caring for yourself and others.

Resilience is about tomatoes.  Mitigation is about tornadoes.

–+–

For a more technical take on resilience:

Resilience: Five principles of good practice

A Super-cell outbreak is one kind of complex threat: Do the principles of good practice apply?

Principles of good practice for advancing resilience: Awareness of complex context and connections

The Washington Post Editorial Board took time off from calling for further U.S. involvement in Middle East quagmires to bring some attention to the continuing problems of coordination and cooperation in the National Capital Region (i.e. Washington, DC and all the surrounding areas located in various states where much of the population has ties to the Capital):

The D.C. Council and a House transportation and infrastructure subcommittee held separate hearings that reviewed the response to the earthquake that shook the region in August. “Everyone did the wrong thing,” council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large) said of the gridlock that occurred when workers, ill advisedly exiting buildings, tried to get home. In a separate hearing on Capitol Hill, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) said that federal workers “literally had no idea what to do.” Sadly, the earthquake, which Ms. Norton aptly called “a perfect proxy for a terrorist attack,” was not the first time weaknesses have been revealed in the area’s response to an unexpected, rapidly developing situation.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time such sentiments have been expressed nor is it likely the last. The issue is not a simple one:

The mayor has the authority to order an evacuation from the city, but beyond that there is no single entity with authority to advise the public in a fast-moving emergency. Instead, there are 17 local jurisdictions and the federal government sharing information (to be sure, a good thing) but each able to call its own shots.

Identified as a concern following 9/11 (and I’m sure an issue raised before that event provided a bullhorn), there are officials, committees, papers, and government offices focused on finding solutions.  One could argue that despite the attention paid there has not been enough attention paid.  Or is it a question of quality and not quantity? The fact that particular aspects have to be addressed makes one’s head hurt:

The first message alert about the earthquake came nearly a half-hour after it occurred, and the message about what to do was mixed. Officials with the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency said they’ve taken steps to refine the messages and get them out sooner. In particular, they say, it’s likely they will advise people to stay put rather than to drive home because it’s clear that an area so congested on a routine day can’t manage a mass exodus.

(That last sentence indicates that maybe someone is listening to Phil who has made that exact point…). The notion of a regional authority able to make “the call” is not a bad one, but is it viable if modeled on incompatible systems?

A more sensible system, as we’ve pointed out before, is one in which there are designated, trained staff people to collect information, make decisions and inform the public. New York City has such a system. So does London.

The political and geographic terrain of the National Capital Region greatly differs from that of New York and London.  Expected evacuation route destinations and decision-making authorities must be taken into account not only in tactical decisions of why, when, who, and how but also strategic constructions of why, when, who, and how. It is easier to repeat “regional working group!” and “cooperation!” and “New York City is awesome!” than wrestle with the reality of a city that does not have control over much of it’s real estate, budget, or even public safety authority.

Considering that even the National Capital Region frame of the issue is such a tough nut to crack, what can be reasonably expected when the problem is expanded to include municipalities further out which should expect to be affected by a truly catastrophic event? This applies not just for the greater Washington, DC region but for all major urban areas where the biggest players must ask “will you jump, and if so, how high are you able or willing to go” rather than simply bark orders.

Regional planning: too hard or too necessary?

Today concludes the federal fiscal year.  The new year begins tomorrow.  The United States finishes the current year deep in debt. We do not yet have a budget for the new year.

The Senate has adopted a continuing resolution to provide funding through November 18. Late Thursday morning a small rump of the House adopted a CR to provide through October 4 by which time  the full House is expected to concur with the November 18 date.

Another CR will probably be required by November 18… and a bitter fight can be anticipated.

On November 23 the so-called super committee is scheduled to report out on how to slash $1.5 trillion over ten years.  This process was put in place in early August as a compromise to increase the debt ceiling and avert a government shut-down.  If the super committee cannot meet statutory debt reduction targets (and such agreement would be little short of miraculous) a series of triggers will “automatically” reduce expenditures beginning in January 2013.

The mandated reductions — or sequestrations — are designed as fundamentally unacceptable to practically everyone, essentially threatening to pull-the-trigger on a gun pointed at the head of every political clique’s favorite offspring.   Ancient enemies guaranteed peace by exchanging royal heirs as mutual hostages.  This is the modern version.

The original intent of this hostage taking was, I think (hope), to encourage compromise.   Because effective compromise is almost impossible in the current political climate, the actual consequence will be to cause nearly everyone to point toward the prospect of profound disaster. Along the way the 2012 budget is likely to join the hostages.

The triggers threaten national security, social security, medicare, and economic recovery among other fair-haired heirs of our various political interests. (Although in the reading of many budget experts, DHS would not be seriously impacted by pulling-the-triggers.)  The triggers justify an apocalyptic vision of what will happen if the other side wins in November 2012 (whichever other). Only a clear victory by the righteous (whichever righteous) can save the nation.  Winner takes all.

Yet total victory is unlikely, despite visions of political sugar-plums dancing in the heads of opposing partisans.  Further, given the context, total victory by any particular partisan perspective would only confirm the apocalyptic expectations of the other side, leading to even worse social and political confrontation. (If you haven’t, it is worth reading 1861 for breath-taking analogies to our current circumstance.)

Yesterday was the first day of the Jewish New Year. The ten days between Rosh Hashana (New Years) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) are sometimes called the Days of Awe.   It is a time set aside for introspection, repentance, and reconciliation.

One time Rebbe Yissachar Dov of Belz was asked to give an example of true remorse for one’s sins and errors. He explained with the following parable:

During a market day it was raining very hard. Many merchants had gathered at the market with their wares to sell, but as it continued to rain each one decided to pack up and go.

Only one merchant decided to stick it out offering his goods. Soon there were a lot of people around him since he was the only one selling anything. The value of his goods rose higher and higher, but he didn’t want to sell them as he wanted to wait until the price went higher still.

Even though the people were begging him to sell, and offering large amounts of money he still held his own and said he would wait until the price would get even higher.

Suddenly the rain stopped and the sun came out. In a short time all the other merchants came to the marketplace. Then the stubborn merchant saw the foolishness of his actions as the prices dropped precipitously in a few minutes. His heart was full of remorse for not selling his goods when he could have gotten for them a high price.

The Rebbe offered, “Remorse like that is what one should have in his heart when one wants to do repentance and return (t’shuva) regarding many sins.” (Teachings of the Rebbe of Belz)

When we seek to maximize our own interest without regard for the interests of others we undermine both ourselves and our whole community.  This is true whatever our interest: commercial, political, spiritual…  Remorse is appropriate, so is learning and reconciliation.

Some meaningful expressions of remorse, learning and reconciliation by next Friday (Yom Kippur) would be truly awe inspiring.

On Wednesday, November 7, 2012 we will — almost certainly — need to talk with each other, listen to each other, respect each other, and adapt to each other if we are going to move forward together as a nation.  If we are unable to do this today, it will be even more difficult 403 days from now.

Increasingly homeland security gives priority to engaging the whole community in collaborative efforts to enhance resilience.  These broader issues are relevant to our work… and vice-versa.

Even in the relatively staid emergency management sector, which has become rather doctrinaire in recent years as we have attempted to consolidate the lessons of 9/11 and the investments in response capabilities made possible through federal grants, someone comes along from time-to-time that surprises me with their passion, insight and ability to integrate lessons from other disciplines. That happened to me again today at the Washington State Emergency Management Association‘s annual conference.

Shelby Edwards, a corporate business continuity professional with Seattle-based PEMCO Insurance, gave a presentation today that really challenges conventional thinking about what it takes to engage people with the work of improving their own resilience and that of the people around them. Her approach is positive, thoughtful and grounded in cutting-edge research on what makes people tick. It’s also informed by experience in combat zones as an Army Reserve major who serves as a civil-military affairs officer attached to special forces units. And the process she uses couldn’t be much simpler or more powerful.

In a nutshell, Edwards asks people to do little more than shake up their routines by varying their activities, becoming more action-oriented, really engaging others on a personal level and keeping the emphasis and focus of their actions positive. Her individual resilience checklist consists of 10 items, and displays some really savvy thinking and showcases her wry sense of humor:

1. Do at least one new thing every day — EVERY DAY.
2. Drive a different route to/from work.
3. Get honest about those emergency kits.
4. Park in a different spot every day.
5. Get some exercise.
6. Can you really walk in those shoes?
7. When was the last time you talked to your insurance agent?
8. Do you know where your IT guy lives?
9. Where’s your kid? Right now, at this moment.
10. Go to lunch.

Developing a sense of curiosity and reengaging our sense of wonder through experimentation is a great way to test our capacity to change. Even if we don’t choose particularly challenging adventures, the simple act of favoring variety over sameness gives us a greater sense of what’s possible and exposes us to new ways of doing things.

Varying our route of travel not only helps us expand options for getting from point A to B when things go wrong, it makes us more aware of our surroundings and less apt to operate on autopilot when we’re behind the wheel. Making our brain engage in this way makes us not only more aware of alternatives but more attentive to differences and how they relate to what we think we already know.

Even dedicated emergency managers with a deep-seated geek-streak take their preparedness for granted. How many of us have really looked hard at the provisions we’ve put aside in the event of an emergency? What’s more, who really wants to eat MREs or rehydrated spaghetti or Spam after struggling to get through the trauma of dealing with a natural disaster or even an extended power outage? The smell of this stuff alone is disheartening. Are the arrangements we’re making realistic? Do they reflect our needs as human beings to not only survive a disaster, but to revive ourselves so we can reengage the work required to advance our recovery?

Parking in a different spot, like driving a different route, has the advantage of mixing it up and keeping our senses engaged. But it also has the advantage of sharing the love with others. How many people where you work think they own a parking space even when none of them are reserved to individuals? Forcing them to modify their routines may not only prove irritating but also very worthwhile when they have to face bigger challenges to the status quo.

We all know about the benefits to our physical health that we can derive from exercise. This is equally if not more true though for our psychological health; our brains work better when we get regular, moderate exercise. So, why not have walking meetings? Nothing says you have to conduct every bit of business sitting down or in a conference room. Humans are well adapted to communicating while walking; in fact considerable evidence suggests this capacity helped us achieve a degree of evolutionary superiority well beyond that warranted by our relatively modest stature, speed and strength.

Many, if not most of us — and not just women it’s worth noting — wear totally impractical footwear to work. Imagine having to trudge home or any significant distance in the shoes you’re wearing right now. Image too how you would feel if you became stranded and separated from your loved ones simply because you couldn’t navigate one more step because you were wearing great-looking but totally impractical shoes.

Let’s face it, talking to our insurance agent is right up there with getting root canal surgery for most of us. As Edwards noted, many of us only to our agent only when we want to complain about the latest rate increase or we need help removing a Douglas fir from our living room after a windstorm. In either event, it’s probably too late. Most agents can help us manage our risk if they know our needs.

These days very few businesses and almost all individuals depend on information technology of some sort or another to do their jobs. When our computers and phones don’t work, we don’t work. How many of us know our IT guy well enough to help him help us when we really, really need back online. Right. Now. If you’re allergic to your insurance agent’s personality, you may need help with this one too.

Even if we don’t have kids ourselves, but especially if we do, their needs or those of others who depend on us in any way tend to weigh heavily on us in a crisis. If we don’t know they’re OK, then we’re not OK. People have difficulty doing their jobs when the are worried about others. Telling people to have a personal communication plan or picking a family assembly point is simply not as personal or as apt to get their attention and turn it into positive action as asking them how they would know or find the information they need to know at any given minute to give them peace of mind about their loves ones’ welfare.

We all need to eat. And what we eat can make a major difference in our mood and our capacity to make good decisions in a crisis. But sharing a meal with someone new or at least someone we haven’t connected with in awhile at least once a week can multiply these benefits many times over by fostering positive relationships with an ever-widening circle of friends and acquaintances.

None of these things alone will ensure we will live through a disaster. But together these simple actions can make living and living well both more likely and more lively.

Sunday evening at the Kennedy Center, President Obama said,

These past 10 years underscores the bonds between all Americans.  We have not succumbed to suspicion, nor have we succumbed to mistrust.  After 9/11, to his great credit, President Bush made clear what we reaffirm today:  The United States will never wage war against Islam or any other religion.  Immigrants come here from all parts of the globe.  And in the biggest cities and the smallest towns, in schools and workplaces, you still see people of every conceivable race and religion and ethnicity -– all of them pledging allegiance to the flag, all of them reaching for the same American dream –- e pluribus unum, out of many, we are one.

These past 10 years tell a story of our resilience. The Pentagon is repaired, and filled with patriots working in common purpose.  Shanksville is the scene of friendships forged between residents of that town, and families who lost loved ones there.  New York — New York remains the most vibrant of capitals of arts and industry and fashion and commerce.  Where the World Trade Center once stood, the sun glistens off a new tower that reaches towards the sky.

Our people still work in skyscrapers.  Our stadiums are still filled with fans, and our parks full of children playing ball.  Our airports hum with travel, and our buses and subways take millions where they need to go.  And families sit down to Sunday dinner, and students prepare for school.  This land pulses with the optimism of those who set out for distant shores, and the courage of those who died for human freedom.

Saturday in his weekly radio address, speaking of the continuing threat of terrorism, the President said, “no matter what comes our way, as a resilient nation, we will carry on.”

–+–

We may be a resilient people, but after huge wildfires in Texas,  killer tornadoes in Joplin and Tuscaloosa, extraordinary flooding caused by Hurricane Irene and much more, the Disaster Relief Fund is just about depleted.  The worst of hurricane season is probably still ahead.  California’s wildfire season is just ramping up.  I wonder when the San Andreas, New Madrid, or another past-due fault will shift.

While we may be resilient, so — we are told — is our adversary.  Testifying Tuesday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Matt Olsen, the new Director of the National Counter Terrorism Center said,

Al-Qaida, its affiliates and adherents around the world, as well as other terrorist organizations, continue to pose a significant threat to our country. This threat is resilient and adaptive and will persist for the foreseeable future. America‘s campaign against terrorism did not end with the mission at Bin Ladin‘s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May. A decade after the September 11th attacks, we remain at war with al-Qaida and face an evolving threat from its affiliates and adherents.

A variety of reports tell us there has been no resolution of the “credible” threat to Washington DC and New York announced in the days just before 9/11.   But on Sunday we did evidently kill Abu Hafs al-Shahri, a Saudi Arabian national who was chief of operations for al-Qaeda inside Pakistan.

–+–

According to Wednesday’s Report Regarding the Causes of the April 20, 2010 Macondo Well Blowout, resiliency was not readily found in the design, operations, or response to last years explosion, fire, and oil spill.

The loss of life at the Macondo site on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent pollution of the Gulf of Mexico through the summer of 2010 were the result of poor risk management, last minute changes to plans, failure to observe andrespond to critical indicators, inadequate well control response, and insufficient emergency bridge response training by companies and individuals responsible for drilling at the Macondo well and for the operation of the Deepwater Horizon.

Well… at least the BP stock price has been resilient.  Transocean and Haliburton too.

–+–

Resilience was once a radical reframing of homeland security strategy. Less than five years ago, a colleague passionately critiqued resilience as a dangerous, defeatist concept.  I argued resilience is how we productively work with uncertainty.

Arguments over definition (and implications) can still be heard, but resilience is — already — making the transition from provocation to platitude.    In too many speeches, editorials, memos, and blogs resilience has joined freedom, equality, love, and courage as meaning whatever the author wishes it to mean, especially if the author is advocating rigid, inflexible, and non-resilient notions.

I am reminded of Orwell’s essay on political language, “In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

When authors of platitudes are allowed to persist, their audience shares responsibility. Meaningful principles devolve into platitudes through unquestioning, self-indulgent, unthinking consumption. Orwell again, “Our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

As an antidote for foolish thinking about resilience, please give careful and critical attention to three recent considerations of resilience.  Each includes its own platitudes or worse, but when thoughtfully consumed each promises greater precision in how we think about and practice resilience.

Community Resilience Task Force Recommendations (2011), Homeland Security Advisory Council, Department of Homeland Security. “The  Task Force identified an urgent need for clear articulation of the relationships and dependencies between resilience and other homeland security  efforts—particularly preparedness and risk reduction.   Clarification of these relationships is crucial both to build shared understanding across diverse stakeholder communities and to motivate action throughout the Nation.”

Building Community Resilience to Disasters (2011) RAND and the US Department of Health and Human Services. “Community resilience entails the ongoing and developing capacity of the community to account for its vulnerabilities and develop capabilities that aid that community in (1) preventing, withstanding, and mitigating the stress of a health incident; (2) recovering in a way that restores the community to a state of self-sufficiency and at least the same level of health and social functioning after a health incident; and (3) using knowledge from a past response to strengthen the community’s ability to withstand the next health incident.”

Key Trends Driving Global Business Resilience and Risk (2011) IBM Global Technology Services. “Business resilience refers to the ability of enterprises to adapt to a continuously changing business environment. Resilient organizations are able to maintain continuous operations and protect their market share in the face of disruptions such as natural or man-made disasters. Business resilience planning is distinguished from enterprise risk management (ERM) in that it is more likely to build capacity to seize opportunities created by unexpected events. Another difference is that while ERM can be implemented as a management capability, an integrated business resilience strategy requires the engagement of everyone in the organization, and often means a change in corporate culture to instill awareness of risk.”

Bureaucratic writing is innately banal.  Authors — including yours truly — try to gin up with length or style an authority not achieved in substance.  Often we are busy trying to paper over unresolved conflicts and complexities.   This results, Orwell explains, in two recurring faults: “First, staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.”

The three documents listed above are not the worst examples of bureaucratic writing, but they share the sins of their species.  To nurture your critical reading with rich imagery and exacting precision, I suggest, You Think That’s Bad, a recent collection of Jim Shepard’s fiction.  Between each of the bureaucratic reports read at least one of the ten short stories.  Many in this collection struggle with issues of resilience.  I especially recommend, The Netherlands Lives with Water.

Midnight tonight is the deadline for your comments on the current draft of the National Preparedness Goal.  The downloaded document provides instructions on how to make your comments.

At the end of March Presidential Policy Decision 8 included the following:

I hereby direct the development of a national preparedness goal that identifies the core capabilities necessary for preparedness and a national preparedness system to guide activities that will enable the Nation to achieve the goal… The national preparedness goal shall be informed by the risk of specific threats and vulnerabilities – taking into account regional variations – and include concrete, measurable, and prioritized objectives to mitigate that risk. The national preparedness goal shall define the core capabilities necessary to prepare for the specific types of incidents that pose the greatest risk to the security of the Nation, and shall emphasize actions aimed at achieving an integrated, layered, and all-of-Nation preparedness approach that optimizes the use of available resources. The national preparedness goal shall reflect the policy direction outlined in the National Security Strategy (May 2010), applicable Presidential Policy Directives, Homeland Security Presidential Directives, National Security Presidential Directives, and national strategies, as well as guidance from the Interagency Policy Committee process. The goal shall be reviewed regularly to evaluate consistency with these policies, evolving conditions, and the National Incident Management System.

The draft document offers a succinct statement of the goal:

Our National Preparedness Goal is a secure and resilient Nation that has created the capacity for the organized commitment of the whole community, in the shortest possible time and under all conditions, to successfully prevent, protect, mitigate, respond, or recover from the threats that pose the greatest risk to the Nation.

A secure nation is not a new goal.  A resilient nation, while not a new goal, has seldom (ever?) been accorded strategic equivalency with security.  The emphasis on the whole community is also not precisely new, but it is given heightened priority in this statement.  Focusing on the capacity of the organized commitment of the whole community to prevent, protect, mitigate, respond, and recover is a potentially helpful strategic differentiation.  (The “capacity of organized commitment” is, however, something worth unpacking a bit more. I have a sense the attention to speed and condition also has more meaning embedded than is immediately apparent.)

Consistent with the President’s instructions, the draft National Preparedness Goal gives attention to core capabilities.  The definition offered by the draft is:

A “capability” is the ability to provide the means to accomplish one or more tasks under specific conditions and to specific performance standards. A capability may be achieved with any combination of properly planned, organized, equipped, trained, and exercised personnel that  achieves the intended outcome. “Core capabilities” are those that are central to the Nation’s  ability to achieve our National Preparedness Goal. Their availability is essential and  indispensable for the execution of the mission, and therefore, they are subject to continuous  monitoring and management at all levels.

The draft offers forty-two core capabilities, as outlined in this graphic (a larger version will open if you click on the graphic):

The draft document provides considerable detail on each of the core capabilities.  There is a particular effort to identify meaningful performance measures for each capability.

Three critiques intended to be constructive:

1. Despite the draft regularly invoking an all-hazards perspective, do the prevent and protect focus areas strike you as tilting heavily to counter-terrorism? They do to me.  When I look at the individual core capabilities “prevent” might be better entitled “preempt”.   Looks like these core capabilities are mostly practiced when bad guys/gals have a clear intention to cause harm.  There’s not much (any?) attention to forestalling bad intentions.

2. Taken together the proposed preparedness architecture seems mostly a matter of preparing-to-respond.  The protect collection strikes me as focused on potential terrorist threats and a kind of strategic agility similar to the Great Wall of China or the Maginot Line.   Mitigate  provides a few proactive, positive steps to increase actual strength and resilience.  We might be able to conceive a couple of recover’s core capabilities as offering constructive opportunities.   But the overall approach seems, at least to me, quite defensive in stance.  I want to be prepared to engage opportunities, as well as deal with problems.

3.  The draft National Preparedness Goal gives considerable attention to security.  In this the NPG is consistent with previous priorities.  The new draft goal gives equal priority to resilience. I regret that I do not see how the core capabilities and performance measures as currently articulated substantially advance resilience.  This new goal seeks to more fully involve the whole community.  I do not see how the core capabilities and performance measures as currently articulated would substantially enhance the commitment of the whole community to the preparedness mission.

First drafts are usually more expansive — and unwieldy — than subsequent drafts. Producing a reasonable first draft in a timely fashion is helpful to public consideration and comment. In final draft effective goal-setting will probably involve a tightened focus, clarification, and crystallization.  It will be interesting to see what is sent to the President on September 25.