Straw and camels

DRAFT (updated 11/9/08)

The straw that breaks the camel's back is a phrase uttered far too often in everyday conversation. It should never be uttered in (post) disaster situations. For the rest of the post, I'm going to refer to "the straw that breaks the camel's back" as the phrase

Why do I have such a strong reaction against the phrase?

Words matter. The words that are available to us both shape and limit the ideas that we are capable of expressing. Repeated use of the phrase pushes us, even if unwillingly, toward a certain simplistic mode of thinking.  This particular phrase lends itself to oversimplificiation and almost immediately to a case of the "if only's".  If only the nylon strap was better constructed. If only the levees had been better constructed. If only banks ability to leverage their assets had been better regulated.  If only <insert pet cause here> then <horrible disaster> would have been prevented.

But isn't the "straw that breaks the camel's back” describing the tipping point?

Well, yes, it is. But ask yourself how many people will take that into consideration when you use the phrase. Ask yourself: in your most fatigued state, do you always look for the linkages of causation within an event of are you looking for the immediate fire to put out? Or do you sometimes let yourself lapse into intellectual laziness and catch a case of the if only's?

Alternative thinking and disaster applications

Disasters occur every minute of every day. The reason you don't hear about them is the scale and the connectivity of the person affected by the disaster to your informational network.  The disasters that you do hear about are the foam on the crest of the wave.  There was a massive decentralized effort to get that story or wave to you in its exact form that was, to your eyes, completely behind the scenes. All you know is that the disaster showed up on the front page of the New York Times.

Disasters that you hear about are extraordinary events.  While the New York Fire Deparmtment recieved 490, 767 calls in 2007 it's likely you only noticed the few big or tragicincidents that were deemed newsworthy.  These are the events where numerous things go wrong in sequence and relation to each other to cascade onto the front page.

In the ideal world, we would learn everyday from our failings and incorporate those lessons into mitigation or response strategies. New York City's revised building code is a good example of this effort. The combined lessons learned from decades of international engineering successes and failures was distilled into codification.  This is not, however, the end of the story.

Disasters are unique in that there are never enough of them, at least on the catastrophic scale, to allow an easy synopsis of the lessons learned that are portable to other types of disasters. Finding portable lessons learned is the tough part here. Instead of learning about New Orleans if only's and the failure of the levees, we should be learning about the command and control problems ineherent in creating a diverse coalition of competing interests.  Instead of hearing about the Failure of Initiativeif only we should be hearing about ways to encourage an organizational capacity to pursue and nuture unnoficial information sources. We should be hearing about how to instigate and encourage and yes, catalyze, community based organizations who will fight government at every step for the good of the community itself. We should have heard more about how to reduce the operational friction that prevents healthy response across disasters.

What am I describing? I'm describing a world where the actors are distributed and completed by those with the organizational capacity to do so, at the level closest to the community and the end users. Preferably, the end users themselves should be organizing and responsible for their own recovery. I'm thinking of an organization where “decisions” per se are not made and handed down but where the individual actual actors make the choices and the reprocussions and reporting filters up. I'm imagining and organization that approaches the problem looking for linkages, relationships, and the potentialities for negative and positive feedback loops rather than for assignation of blame or credit. I want a collection of organizations that pursue the quickest means to follow their mission and help the widest range of people.

This ideal agency should not waste their organizational capital, budgets, or time pursuing the fix for the phrase. Fixing that one thing would only increase the likelihood of some other type of disaster.  I am not suggesting that agencies not fix what they are able to fix - I am suggesting that agencies acquire an awareness that their decisions are part of a web of decisions being made all the time which may have uninented consequences. 

A minor example - increasing the number of building inspections increases the likelihood of bribery and corruption.