Adapting Resilience Science to Community Well-Being, Part 2

Ten characteristics of a healthy network and community

Last time I introduced the idea of flow network science as a way to ground our understanding of community resilience and well-being in scientifically established principles of ecosystem health. To do that, I began exploring a paper¹ that applies those principles to communities.

The paper frames the life of a community as a self-renewing metabolic system whose vitality “rests … on the underlying human networks that do all the work and underlying environmental networks that feed and sustain all the work.” The focus is economic, but most of the principles they identify apply beyond the economic frame.

Those principles are built around 10 key characteristics that underlie a healthy network. They are grouped into four intertwined categories: circulation, structure, relationships and values, and collective learning.

Circulation

The authors identify four critical characteristics related to circulation:

1. robust, cross-scale circulation;

2. regenerative re-investment (self-nourishment);

3. reliable inputs;

4. healthy outputs.

Robust, cross-scale circulation essentially means that critical flows of energy, information, resources, money, etc., reach every part of the system. From an economic perspective, it harks back to the Keynesian view that if “money does not reach the broad-scale public, … economic depression ensues.” Thinking beyond money to any kind of resource, I would reframe this characteristic as full participation. The community should function in such a way that everyone is able to fully participate in the flows of economic and civic life.

Regenerative re-investment is about investing resources in the system’s “internal capacities, including its members’ skills and well-being; its institutions’ integrity and capacities; its commonwealth infrastructure …; and its supporting environment of ecosystem services.” Without such self-nourishing, a community can’t thrive long-term; it will lack the ability even to maintain itself, let alone adapt to changes in external context.

The last two characteristics, reliable inputs and healthy outputs, are complementary. They capture the ways a community is embedded in larger-scale systems that contribute to its overall renewal. Losing access to critical inputs can cause system collapse, as can fouling the local environment beyond what it can absorb.

Structure

Structure is what actually enables and enhances (or impedes) the circulation in the system and also provides the raw material for reconfiguration in the face of change. The authors identify three critical characteristics of healthy structure:

5. A balance and integration of small, medium, and large organizations

6. A balance of resilience and efficiency

7. Sufficient diversity

The balance and integration of small, medium, and large organizations is the fractal structure of systems for getting resources to people that I mentioned last time. After the hurricane, large organizations were able to serve large numbers of people efficiently through mass distribution sites, but those had to be augmented with smaller organizations in order to actually get supplies to everybody.

Outside disaster scenarios, the “Goldilocks Rule” in business states “that each scale needs organizations that are ‘just right’ to meet the needs of the actors and activity at that scale.” In banking, for example, serving the full range of very small to very large businesses “requires a proper mix of small, medium and large banks because small-scale needs are uneconomic for big banks to handle.”²

Next is a balance of resilience and efficiency. We live in a society that worships efficiency. However, this principle asserts that efficiency is a value, not the only value. The problem is that processes that squeeze out every last bit of redundancy or unutilized resources are brittle – if anything goes wrong, everything grinds to a halt. That’s exactly what happened when COVID19 disrupted supply chains.

A resilient system requires that there be a certain amount of unutilized capacity that is available if other sources are disrupted. Sustainable natural ecosystems invariably operate within a narrow range around an optimum balance point determined by the relationship between efficient delivery and potential capacity, a range known as the “window of vitality.” When a system falls outside that range, in either direction, problems arise.

The third structural characteristic is sufficient diversity. As the authors note, the “endless diversity found in human beings, enterprises, and communities increases resilience, and helps fill niches and find new ways.” In other words, the more different types of resources and pathways are available, the more ways a system can adapt to new or changing requirements. Once again, a lack of diversity makes systems more fragile in the face of change, whether it be an event like a disaster or just a shift in external circumstances, such as a new technology or a change in economic conditions.

Relationships and Values

The hallmark of a sustainable system is that its components produce more together than they could individually. But whether what’s produced is a good thing and whether a system can remain stable over the long term depends on the kinds of relationships and values that characterize the system. The paper identifies two critical characteristics:

8. Mutually beneficial relationships and common-cause values,

9. Dominance of constructive activity over extractive and speculative processes.

Mutually beneficial relationships and common-cause values are critical to a system’s ability to allow everyone to thrive and even to maintain its integrity over the long term. Shared values like fairness, trust, and justice are the bonds that hold communities together and give them a foundation for self-organization. When they are eroded, social systems become unstable.

Although the authors do not explicitly talk about it, I believe it is primarily here that the political enters into the framework and then is interwoven with the ways all the other characteristics are enacted. For example, I would argue that giving everyone a voice is critical to the long-term viability of all the other values, and hence to the long-term viability of the system itself.

The dominance of constructive over extractive and speculative activity is related. From a social perspective, an extractive or speculative mindset tends to lead to exploitation of people, which violates common-cause values. From an environmental one, as we see today, the viability of those “underlying environmental networks that feed and sustain all the work” is put at risk.

Collective Learning

The final characteristic is alone in its category:

10. Effective, adaptive, collective learning

This characteristic is at the heart of resilience; as the authors put it: “[a] society’s ability to learn as a whole is the most important regenerative principle.” The capacity for learning is what gives a community the ability to remain vibrant through the inevitable cycles of growth, conservation, collapse, and reorganization driven by external social and environmental changes.

In fact, I would argue that all the other characteristics above are essentially a combination of tools and preconditions needed to enable a community to learn and adapt and hence to survive. They themselves do not constitute that capacity for learning.

What does? I suspect it is more an orientation than anything else. It’s essentially what I wrote about in January, that we need an adaptive orientation, i.e., one that acknowledges that change inevitably happens and that remains humble about our ability to understand the impact of our interventions.

Of course, that orientation needs to be backed up by the commitment and discipline to take action in order to adjust as we learn. That leads us into the next article that Dr. Lengnick shared with me, Navigating the Adaptive Cycle: An approach to managing the resilience of social systems,³ which offers, if not a roadmap, at least a great compass to guide our actions. More on that one in the next issue.

One final note. I want to acknowledge that, as I’ve outlined the content of the first paper, I left out the parts about how we measure the ten characteristics. Partly I abandoned the effort when it became clear that this article would become uncomfortably long and overly technical. But I also chose not to dig into that aspect because some of the measures need to be adapted for use in a smaller community for purposes beyond just the economic. That is a project in itself, one that I’m looking forward to, but won’t try to undertake here and now.

This is the second article in a three-part series on network flow science and its application to improving community health, based on recent academic papers. The first article is here and the last is here.

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Links & Thoughts

• A World of Unintended Consequences. Speaking of humility about our ability to predict the results of our actions, my friend Edward Tenner has a nice piece in Project Syndicate on unintended consequences in the technology world. A leading expert on disasters and unintended consequences, he also has a whole new book out about it: Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences.

If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.

1. Fath, B. D., D. A. Fiscus, S. J. Goerner, A. Berea, and R. E. Ulanowicz. “Measuring Regenerative Economics: 10 Principles and Measures Undergirding Systemic Economic Health.” Global Transitions 1 (January 1, 2019): 15–27.

2. Goerner, S. J., D. A. Fiscus, and B. D. Fath. (2015). Using energy network science (ENS) to connect resilience with the larger story of systemic health and development. Emergence, 17 (3) (2015).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286876266_Using_energy_network_science_ENS_to_connect_resilience_with_the_larger_story_of_systemic_health_and_development.

3. Fath, B. D., C. A. Dean, and H. Katzmair. 2015. “Navigating the adaptive cycle: an approach to managing the resilience of social systems.” Ecology and Society 20(2): 24.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-07467-200224.