Building “resilient” communities As an NGO that expressly seeks to see the building of resilient communities by bringing the best leadership development into the grassroots of those communities Emerging Leaders, like many organisations, has to keep asking “what actually is a resilient community?” Further, as an NGO that interfaces with the development agenda of building resilient communities and with retailers who seek to either build resilient communities or resilient supply chains in these communities – or both – the question once again needs asking “what is a resilient community?” This article is neither didactic or anything close to the final word on the topic, rather is designed to engage and further the discussion that is currently taking place between NGO’s, donors & retailers and anyone who is focused on community development at both formal or informal levels. Is “resilient” the right word? The most obvious meaning of the word “resilient” is bounce-­‐back. The dictionary speaks of the ability to recoil or spring back into shape after a period of being bent or stretched or pushed down. In development-­‐speak these are called “shocks”. So a resilient community is one that has the ability to recover from shocks, to get going again, to get back in shape, to return to how things were as quickly as possible. But is that enough? Is ‘bounce back’ a high enough aim in working with communities? Nassim Taleb has challenged the resilience agenda well in his latest book Anti Fragile1. He explores the question “what is the opposite of Fragile?“ The most common answer is ‘resilience is the opposite of fragile’. However he argues that actually that isn’t the case. Why? Because resilient just means ‘bounce back’, but the opposite of fragile is actually Anti Fragile. What is the difference? In Talebs’ words, “The resilient resist shocks & stays the same…..the anti fragile gets better”. So what would it mean for the aim of community development to be continually getting better, rather than simply preparing communities to survive? What would it look like for those involved in the development agenda to say ‘our aim is to build anti-­‐
fragile communities’ rather than resilient communities? One way of framing it is to say we want to build flourishing communities. Nobel development economist Amarta Sen2 used the word flourishing to describe the aim of development. A flourishing community is one where people are well nourished, free from avoidable morbidity, they live long, they take part in the life of the community, they appear in public without shame, they find worthwhile jobs, they keep themselves warm, they use their school education and they visit friends and relations if they choose. The key for Sen is the word 1 Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (6 Jun 2013) 2 Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (18 Jan 2001) Trevor Waldock 1 Emerging Leaders 2014 “choose”. Flourishing people and communities have choice or “capability’. They are able to make certain choices. Martha Nussbaum3 talks about flourishing in terms of having life (being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; bodily health; bodily integrity), to be secure against violent assault; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and a choice in matters of reproduction; practical reason (being able to form a conception of the good life); affiliation (being able to live with and towards others); play and control over ones environment. Tim Jackson4 says the same as them both when he talks of flourishing as “‘physical & mental health; education; democratic entitlements; trust; security; a sense of community; relationships; meaningful employment and the ability to participate in the life of society”. Jackson sums up the challenge of building a flourishing community as “how do we create the conditions in which these basic entitlements are possible?” (p 47). The issue of a community and the individuals in it having the choices and the capability to exercise those choices, sits at the heart of Oxfam’s definition of poverty. “Poverty is more than an issue of money…….it is a ‘state of relative powerlessness in which people are denied the ability to control crucial aspects of their lives’5 Anything that takes away the ability of the individual or the community to make choices about their fundamentals human rights is a blockage to building a flourishing community. Another word we might use rather than resilient or anti fragile or flourishing, is the word Prosperous. Building prosperous communities. In current usage the word would not work because it just focuses peoples minds on money, growth and wealth. But it isn’t what the word literally means. The original root of the word means ‘towards hope’. A truly prosperous society is one that has hope restored into the community. Anyone working with the worlds most challenged communities will tell you of all the symptoms of hopelessness. Hopelessness isn’t just an African slum, it is a community on the edge of a Western city or town. Adam Smith, one of the founders of modern economics outlined two important pillars that need to under gird wealth creation. The first is that we exist for each other not ourselves (A Theory Of Moral Sentiments) and the other is that the aim of the economy is so that people live a life without shame (The Wealth Of Nations). This was Smiths understanding of prosperity – a life without shame. A final word that we probably won’t use in the development agenda but which is possibly the best word of all, is the Bantu word Ubuntu. At its root the word means ‘humanness’ and more specifically it means, “I am because we are”. I can only become fully human to the extent that I see myself inextricably bound with my neighbor. Focusing on words like ‘development’ or even the sub agenda’s of ‘health’ or ‘education’ or ‘governance’ or ‘sanitation’ or ‘HIV/AID’s or ‘clean water’ or ‘income generating projects’ – all of these are about what it means for a person to become fully human and Ubuntu says that this only truly realised in the context of a 3 In Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson (18 Mar 2011) 4 Ibid 5 http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/rr-­‐exploring-­‐links-­‐ipl-­‐poverty-­‐footprint-­‐090513-­‐summ-­‐
en.pdf Trevor Waldock 2 Emerging Leaders 2014 community. It isn’t just my child who does not have shoes, it’s our children who don’t have shoes and if we focus on the needs of us then I will benefit. It isn’t just my family that doesn’t get clean water, it is our families that don’t get clean water and if we focus on the needs of us then I will benefit. So rather than focusing the agenda on building resilient communities maybe we should be focusing on how to build prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities. The tension of building resilient supply chains and resilient communities 64% of Sub Saharan Africa’s population is involved in agriculture in some form or other. Investing development dollars in agriculture has between 2-­‐4 times6 to 11 times7 more effectiveness on reducing poverty. It is therefore no surprise that donors are making agriculture, the agricultural value chain and the retailers supply chains who buy food and flowers, a major area of focus. Listening to the conversations of both donor and retailer, one hears these different statements:-­‐ -­‐ “we aim to build resilient supply chains” (we need to protect the supply chain of food and flowers against the shocks and risks of shocks in the coming decades) -­‐ or, “we aim to build resilient communities”, -­‐ or more precisely, “we aim to build resilient communities around our supply chain” (rather than fragile communities not fortunate enough to be within close proximity). There are a number of challenges this important agenda faces. The first challenge is to identify the honest aim. (I sense that sometimes the aim seems to move depending on the audience.) Are the retailers wanting to build resilient communities or just resilient communities that provide food and flowers to their shops? M&S’s excellent Plan A strategy has the strap line ‘doing the right thing’ but also makes it clear “we are working with our customers and our suppliers”8, suggesting that the focus is on the community of the supply chain rather than communities in general. This is absolutely fine, because we all need to start somewhere and their goal of becoming the world’s most sustainable retailer and to be able to influence the agenda of other global retailers is surely a great leadership commitment. To build a resilient supply chain by building a resilient community requires that we address six key issues. 1. Are we clear in our aim? Resilient communities in general or resilient communities in the supply chain? 2. Is the leadership of the organisation in the supply chain effective enough? 3. Are the individuals within that organisation being invested in, in-­‐terms of building resilient processes and ways of working? 6 Calestous Juma The New Harvest: Agricultural innovations in Africa Oxford University Press 2011 7 Poverty’s cruelest irony (and 3 ways to fight it) www.one.org 2014 8 https://plana.marksandspencer.com/about Trevor Waldock 3 Emerging Leaders 2014 4. Are the individuals within the organisation being invested in, to build resilient lives themselves? 5. Is the community these organisations draw labour or resource from being invested in – everyone, not just the employees of the organization – to become more resilient? 6. How is the community that the retailer draws labour from interdependent with the surrounding communities that the organization doesn’t draw labour from? The second challenge is to recognize that it is not only the supply chain that needs to develop a resilient community. Real resilience means that the community needs to develop resilience against the supply chain! History is full of stories of communities that were built up around a supply chain and when that organisation failed, or when the needs of the global market changed, that community was devastated. We only need to remember Consett and Steel; the NE of England or South Wales and Coal; Detroit and motorcars. A truly resilient community is one that has a healthy independence as well as interdependence from the retail supply chain organisations. The most vulnerable community is one that has become dependent on the local organisation that is part of the supply chain. To put it in concrete terms, a large vegetable and flower grower Emerging Leaders worked with in Kenya runs an excellent operation supplying food and flowers to the European markets. One of its larger farms draws its labour from a number of communities. One of them is slum on the edge of medium sized town. There are two questions. What does this organization need to do to make its supply chain secure in this region for the next few decades? This will involve answering the question ‘how do we keep our employee base strong in the slum?’. Does this mean keeping people in the slum? The people of this slum want to improve their lives in totality, including their income. If they become resilient people they are going to want to develop many effective services in this community; as their income rises many may want to move out of the slum; if the slum builds up a dependence on getting work from the organisation then what happens if that farm or its parent organisation has ineffective leadership? I was told on a number of occasions that one of the investments by the organization into the community was the maintenance and repair of a many-­‐kilometre dirt road. In fact whilst this road did eventually lead to other communities, its primary use was daily transporting food and flowers in large lorries and ferrying the workforce in large buses onto the farms. The community of the slum would almost never use this road for their own lives. The main beneficiary of this infrastructure investment was the supply chain organisation itself. The bottom line is this. If the supply chain organization is wanting to develop resilient communities, then part of that investment will be to give the tools into the heads and hearts of the collective and individual leadership of the community to become what I am calling ‘inter dependent’ to and from the supply chain organisation. The food and flower retail organisation would want to making sure that the community can stand on its own two feet in providing services and livelihoods and have the capability to flourish if the retailer is no longer there. If the model of the supply chain organisation developing a resilient community Trevor Waldock 4 Emerging Leaders 2014 starts out as one of parent-­‐child dependence, then is the organisation prepared to invest in the community becoming adolescent on its way to a mature interdependence? If not, then what the organisation defines as a ‘resilient community’ paradoxically becomes a ‘strongly dependent community’, which in reality is a very fragile community. Good African Coffee9 has provided a good model of changing the centre of gravity of the agricultural supply chain. They have done this by bringing the centre of gravity of the supply chain back to its roots – the out growers, the co-­‐operatives, the local buyers, the local processing, the local packaging, the marketing coming from the local to the global rather than the other way round. The local community is driving the supply chain rather than the other way round and the real value add is at the local level rather than at the global retailer level. The profits of this grassroots driven value chain is invested back into the community by the community leaders themselves. A wholehearted approach to building (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities So what might we need to look at in order to build (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities? My own view is that if we are truly going to ‘do the right thing’ – whether as a retailer, donor or NGO, -­‐ then we should focus on all fragile communities and not just those that seem connected to a particular retail agenda. Doing the right thing should come first and ensuring this is done in a sustainable, profitable way should support this. When we think of fragile then we need to recognize that there are different levels of fragility. Al Gore’s recent book The Future10 outlines six global trends that will put all of our communities at risk. All six need to be taken seriously because they impact the organisation as much as the community. Secondly, there is the national issues of fragility. As I write this I am sitting in Nairobi, knowing that there are certain areas of the country I need to keep away from, certain areas of the country my insurance wont cover me for, because of the levels of risk. Thirdly, there are local issues – the infrastructure, the effects of climate change in one area are different than another area (too much rain here, too little rain there, no predictability as to when it will rain or not rain, soil erosion here, soil accumulation there etc). Finally there are the Black Swan11 events. Events that happen, that none of can predict. The 9/11 or Tsunami type events. You can’t prepare for a Black Swan event -­‐ that’s what makes it a Black Swan -­‐ you can only develop the muscle set to be ready for anything that might happen. So what is the muscle set that we can invest in, that would better enable communities to respond to Taleb’s definition of an anti-­‐fragile community? (“The resilient resist shocks & stays the same…..the anti fragile gets better”) 9 A Good African Story – How a small company built a global coffee brand Andrew Rugasira Vintage Books 2014 10 The Future Al Gore W H Allen 2014 11 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Nicholas Taleb 2013) Trevor Waldock 5 Emerging Leaders 2014 I want to suggest 7 investments in any community, by any of the actors – retailers, NGO’s governments, donors – if we are to add anything to the building of (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities. Investment 1. A shared definition of leadership A community is not just part of a supply chain, or a project, or log frame, or a funding round or an ‘issue’, it is a living, breathing story of peoples lives, working together in a complicated mix of productive or unproductive mindsets and actions. All sustainable change requires effective leadership. There will be no (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities without effective leadership. We know this. But what is a definition of leadership that makes sense to the whole community? Howard Gardner says “leadership is the ability to create a story that effects the thoughts, feelings and actions of others”12 . Leadership is about writing the story of that community. History is simply looking back at the story that got written; leadership is looking forwards and creating the story you want to see. A leader is asking the community “what is the story we want to write in this community so we are all flourishing, prosperous, being truly and fully human?” And the key is not just one person’s idea of what they want the story to be, it is a shared story. It isn’t vision (story) that motivates people; it is a shared vision (story) that motivates everyone involved in the community to work towards writing the story. Investment 2. An Ubuntu minded focus of leadership Investment 2 safeguards the outcome of investment 1. The greatest barrier to effective leadership at any level of organisation or community is the individual’s ego. The building up of the ego of the individual leader is always at the expense of not only the community, but also, I would argue, that persons own humanity. Ubuntu captures the essence of community prosperity – I am because we are. As the community flourishes so do the individuals, as the whole community prospers so do the individuals, as the whole community honours the humanity of all, then all have the ‘soil’ to become more human. “None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human…… A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family...it speaks about our interconnectedness…… when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity….. 12 Leading Minds Howard E Gardner and Laskin 1999 Trevor Waldock 6 Emerging Leaders 2014 A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-­‐assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed….we would not have this huge gap between the rich and the poor…..the rich can make up what is lacking for others. You are powerful so that you can help the weak…”13 The late Nobel Laureate, Chinua Achebe, said, “Leadership is a sacred trust on behalf of others”14. Ubuntu puts the heart, ‘otherness’, the community, back into leadership. This is as true for the leadership of the supply chain organization as it is of the community leadership. How ‘Ubuntu’ minded is the local leadership? How ‘Ubuntu’ minded is the employers’ leadership? But this then leads us onto the third investment -­‐ How effective is the leadership of both? Investment 3. Local community leadership A leader is writing a story of anti fragility with the community, with Ubuntu as the leaders frame of reference, but they still need to be effective leaders. Effective leaders have a ruthless grasp of the reality of their communities current story and the story they all seek to write into the future, they have clear areas of focus to deliver that story, they have extensive stakeholders involved and they have a clear plan of action with everyone playing their part. It is sadly far too true of both community and organisational leadership that leaders get the senior roles, not because of their leadership efficacy, but for a whole host of other reasons. The bottom line is that leaders (those who hold that title or role) need to be very effective leaders. It is hard to find any effective leader who hasn’t made it a focus in their life to be one. Two contrasting examples show how the communities’ resilience is affected by the quality of its leadership. When Emerging Leaders delivered its flagship Leadership for Hope programme into the co-­‐
operatives of Rulindo district, Rwanda, we knew we were working within a larger leadership story. Rwanda has a story that it is writing in the nation – Vision 2020. The District leader within Rwanda is called a Mayor. All of Rwanda’s Mayor’s have got objectives and targets to deliver that national story into their District and they are responsible and accountable on a regular basis for the delivery of these objectives. When we were invited by the Mayor of Rulindo District to deliver a Leadership for Hope programme we were not being asked to just deliver a fragmented intervention, but rather a integrating strand of the story the Mayor and his team were writing in the whole District. Leadership for Hope wasn’t just an isolated intervention; it was an expression of local leadership in action within a national leadership. The opposite of this was recently delivering Leadership for Hope into a very desperate slum where the whole community is kept fragile because of the local leadership and the support of local ‘mafia’. The Chief and the ‘mafia’ ensure that there is no innovation in any area of the 13 Desmond Tutu including www.tutufoundationuk.org/ubuntu.php
14 Talk given Cambridge University October 8th 2010 Trevor Waldock 7 Emerging Leaders 2014 communities need, whether its clean water all the way through to youth entrepreneurship. The local leadership ensures everyone is kept pressed down, that no one gets ahead and no community change happens, because the dominant issue is how does the local leadership make money for themselves from the community, rather than helping the community to prosper and flourish. There is no discussion about what could this community look like if it prospered, if people flourish, if clean water was available to all seven days a week, if youth employment rose and the corollary of youth alcohol and drunkenness and hopelessness decreased, if children all had shoes, if the sewers weren’t open to spread infectious disease and the provision of ample toilets. This community remains fragile because of the use of power and self-­‐interest of its local leadership, not because it can’t change. Ineffective leadership is a central cause of community fragility. Harry Truman said, “you can achieve almost anything providing you don’t mind who gets the glory”. The same applies to what communities can achieve when effective leaders, with an Ubuntu focus, set out to write a story of flourishing and prosperity. Investment 4. A community vision of anti fragility A community is a living, dynamic whole; a system. Yes, it is made up of many parts but if you took a video of the community on any day you would see the issues of health, education, livelihoods, prosperity generation, sexual health, infant mortality, gender equality, sanitation, clean water, agriculture, youth unemployment, climate change etc – not as individual issues, but as a dynamic story taking place every minute of every day. Whilst there are obvious reasons to deconstruct the ‘drama’ of each day into the donor/development categories above and seek to invest in the ‘parts’, the reality is that the part is never the whole story and investing in the parts has a limited effect on changing the community story. No community allied to a retail supply chain is just a part of the supply chain, in fact very little of the community is. No community is ‘just’ any one of the above issues. When we fragment, compartmentalize, stream, these issues of the community, we may actually make the community less resilient because we fail to invest in the interconnections. I well remember a painful conversation with a major donor who insisted that they had five funding streams and everything had to fit into one of these five streams. Whilst they fully acknowledged that in the real world all five streams were not only interrelated, but that there were crucially dependent issues that needed to be met if their ‘streams’ were to succeed. Further, they acknowledged that if underlying mindsets were not changed then none of their projects would be sustainable – they still insisted that they could only discuss the five streams! Which leads us to the next investment. Investment 5. Everyone is a leader A truly effective investment into the building of (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities has to be personal and relational as well as local (and ideally national). If leadership is “the ability to create a story that affects the thoughts, feelings and actions of others”, then every individual and their set of relationships within a community can be storywriters. What is the communities’ story and what is my story within that? Resilient Trevor Waldock 8 Emerging Leaders 2014 communities must be interdependent. If we are stuck in hopelessness as individuals, if poverty has moved from our bellies into our mindsets as individuals then the community as a whole remains fragile. So to build (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities we need to invest in the leadership potential of every single individual. They need to see themselves as leaders, to know they have the pen; to develop all of the mindsets needed to write a story. All of the ways of thinking and the skills that leaders need at the local level can be developed very effectively at the personal and relational level. This is the focus of Emerging Leaders work and there is plenty of evidence to support the transformational effects at personal, relational and community levels. Local community leadership plus individual, personal leadership is an absolute requirement for building (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities. Investment 6. Mindset change sits underneath all skills and projects Thoughts control actions. Mindsets determine outcomes. Unproductive mindsets produce….very little; hopeless mindsets reinforce hopelessness; poverty mindsets keep people trapped in poverty. Resilient mindsets just focus on surviving. Antifragile mindsets focus on thriving. “As a person thinks, so a person is” goes the proverb. So, to invest in community flourishing and prosperity requires a major investment in mindset change. At the simplest level, when Emerging Leaders brought Leadership for Hope to the Buganga Islands in the middle of Lake Victoria, we were greeted by a community with three clean water wells….all of which were broken and idle. Why? Because the donors had kindly built the wells and the pumps and even taught people how to mend them…..but “they are the ‘donor’ pumps, not ours”. This is a mindset issue. Without the mindset shift the rest of the excellent interventions don’t stick. What kinds of mindsets are essential for building (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities? Everyone needs to see themselves as a leader, they need to walk with their heads up not down, they need to be proactive, they need to see and take responsibility for what they see, they need to practice the art of changing something if it isn’t working, they need to be focused and they need to develop appreciative thinking. On top of these mindsets are the mindsets and character where the person and community says to themselves ‘never give up’, ‘I have value’, ‘I have huge potential’, ‘ I have a story I want to write’; who love to learn the art of creative thinking and problem solving, who value everyone as equal, whose thinking is nimble and flexible, who know that the answer to income generation, clean water, HIV/AIDS testing for all, sanitation, education – lies with them. Beneath all of these is the strength of thinking that battles fear, since fear sits underneath much inertia, shame and non-­‐risk taking, Trevor Waldock 9 Emerging Leaders 2014 Investment 7. Practicing the future to keep the muscles fit Salman Rushdie said “Those who do not have the power of the story that dominates their lives – power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it and change it as times may change – truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts”15 Investment 7 means the constant encouragement to the individual and the community to get the pen, to get the power over the story. A fragile community is one that is constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by some other story – the story of outside ‘shocks’, the story of individuals who have the misuse of power and self interest as the pen with which they want to write that communities story. How do you get power over the story? How do you become so resilient, so growth focused, so pro – speros (prosperity = towards hope) focused, that you could constantly be thinking about the story the community is trying to write? By developing the agility, the nimble mindedness, the creative, problem solving, willingness to change and change again to make sure that the community continues to flourish…to be leaders at every level. “Adapt or die” is what Darwin said and needs to become the mantra of everyone in a community that is developing into (resilient) prosperous, flourishing, fully human communities. Resilience, anti fragility, prosperity, flourishing – whatever word we chose to use, needs people who are reality facers, story writers, horizon scanners, community focused, leaders at every level; people who are courageous and fearless and risk takers and change makers. People who are pursuing leadership at every level in order to get the power over the story that is seeking to dominate their lives, rather than letting these other stories get power over them. It is the interweaving of this agenda into the often streamed or fragmented development agenda that is the necessary glue for building resilient communities. 15 Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision, Skills and Development Peter Hawkins & Nick Smith 2013 Trevor Waldock 10 Emerging Leaders 2014