What's your resilience capacity?

This week finds me in Boston for the 99th annual conference of the International City/County Management Association, where the executive leaders of the world's cities, counties and other local governments come to connect and to better lead the 50+% percent of the world's population that lives in cities into the future.

As the conference opened, an apropos theme song played: Ain't No Mountain High Enough...to keep us from our goal of a world that works for everyone.  And how aligned that theme is with the resurgent spirit of the city of Boston and Boston Strong, in rising out of the ashes of this year's Boston Marathon bombing.

The people of Boston have demonstrated a characteristic that is increasingly critical for our communities--resilience.  As noted on the website of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities Challenge, building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events, both natural and man made.  No tragedy of mass violence, no natural disaster, no "mountain" of economic devastation can defeat resilient people and resilient communities.  The core characteristics that resilient systems share, both in good times and in challenging times, are:

• Redundancy or use of spare capacity to insure a back-up or alternative when a vital system fails.
• Flexibility--the ability to change, evolve and adapt in the face of disaster.
• Limited or "safe" failure, which prevents failures from migrating or "rippling" across multiple systems.
• Rapid rebound--having the capacity to quickly re-establish functions and provide continuity of operations.
• Constant learning, with feedback loops that anticipate and implement new solutions as conditions change.

What's your resilience capacity?  What can you and your team be doing today and tomorrow to best provide the needed leadership that builds resilience, whether it's about food security, energy use, smart grid technology, floodplain management, or the establishment of partnerships with community organizations for business relocation if needed?  What should we all be doing to honor the spirit of Boston Strong?

Learn more at www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/building-resilient-cities.

Innovation + Action

As I write this, a shooter has fired on workers at the Navy Yard in Washington, DC. SWAT teams have mobilized, and victims have been rushed to area hospitals, with at least 12 dead.  Flooding still rages in Colorado, and heroic rescues have been watched by millions worldwide, while more than 17,000 homes have been lost or damaged.  And off the coast of Italy, the shipwrecked Costa Concordia is being righted in a first-of-its-kind salvage operation involving a ship two and one-half times the size of the Titanic, with only one chance to get it right.  Our thoughts are with all the courageous people dealing with these historic crises.

 

Each of these events grabs our hearts and our attention and each demands a level of disciplined execution that seems almost unimaginable.  Lives are at stake, and the world is watching as dedicated law enforcement officers, fire and rescue workers, engineers, and just plain compassionate citizens organize and take action to do extraordinary things...things that they would never have wished to be called upon to do.

 

These incidents and effective management of them illustrate some of the very same principles we know about innovation + action.

1. The greatest achievements come from shared purpose.
   Whether it's finding and neutralizing an active shooter, or organizing the logistics of a complicated and dangerous rescue, or simply finding a better process by which to meet our customers' and citizens' needs, a clear, shared purpose will focus and energize our actions.
2. Use and share data to make better decisions.
   We can't act effectively to move forward without objectively knowing where we are and what others around us require from us.  Making good decisions demands that we take the time to determine what we need to know, discovering it, and then sharing the information with those whose performance we rely on.
3. Communicate fully, timely, inclusively and regularly.
   Timely and thorough information to those affected is crucial when facing change or action, and is most effective when people are provided knowledge of what the problem or situation is, what you plan to do about it, how it will affect them, how regularly you will update them, and then what the results are once you've taken action.  This builds trust and confidence, and will help others to give you the benefit of the doubt when you need to move forward through uncertainty.
4. Have courage.
   In order to create something that does not yet exist or to take action toward creative solutions, we need to clarify the goal and purpose, use data strategically, communicate, and then demonstrate the courage to monitor results transparently, correct course if needed,  but keep moving forward to achieve the shared purpose.
   The future belongs to those who risk.

Katy Simon, ICMA Credentialed Manager
President, Simon and Associates Consulting
ksimon@simonandassociates.us
775.232.7077 (wireless)