The DF Resilience Lab
The DF Resilience Lab studies the physical, social, emotional, environmental and financial factors affecting the well-being of people and their communities. We are working on creating solutions to help people and communities proactively face the challenges that threaten our future, so that we can grow stronger together.
We are applying our research to develop personal success strategies and community resilience through special projects, meetups, writing, and mentorship.
The DF Resilience Lab was founded by Decision Fish LLC at the Impact Hub, 394 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York City. Impact Hub is an international network of coworking spaces for social enterprises. Our lab is currently based in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
The Future We are Building
People and communities that work together to strengthen and support each other through discussion, preparation, mentoring and recovery, so that they can bounce back from setbacks.
How We Track Our Progress
Currently, we are collecting and analyzing data and reports on resilience in wellness (including financial, physical and mental health) and safety, (including cybersecurity and crisis/emergency management). Many, like the Distressed Communities Index from EIG, report grim futures. We are also looking for points of light and are aggregating research that shows positive impact through behavioral change programs (nudges), mental health awareness campaigns and economic opportunities for women, veterans and the underserved.
We track our progress by looking at how many people attend our events and workshops, read our articles and use our web app. We can also measure usage rates, improvements in behavior measures and, potentially, financial gain.
We are also looking at the impact of the services we create that build resilience in wider communities. One of our programs measures the value of geographic information systems in one NYS community in terms of human lives saved. Another project we consulted on with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies could have an immeasurable effect on the lives of stateless refugees by providing them with identification for the first time. We didn’t create the IDs, but we helped them figure out how to get people to understand and trust them. In other words, some of our work can get very abstract, but we like to think we are making a difference.
How Are We Doing So Far?
We have developed a number of programs around financial wellness, crisis/emergency management, Smart Cities, cybersecurity and mentoring. Individually, Lab Director, Noreen Whysel’s career focus has been studying the human impact of environmental and cyber threats, focusing on technologies that not only keep communities safe but also help to mitigate impacts on people. We are interested in closing the loop by adding studies of physical and mental health and how they impact economic and community health.
Financial Wellness
Community resilience begins with its citizens. Research has shown that an individual’s physical and mental health have significant impact on their own economic resilience and in turn that of their communities. Decision Fish, where lab director Noreen Whysel is COO, has developed a financial wellness framework based on the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau’s definition of financial wellness, which encompasses four states:
- Being in control of your finances, for example by effectively and routinely budgeting and planning.
- Being able to handle a large, unexpected expense (think medical and repair bills) or job loss.
- Making progress toward big goals like retirement, home purchase and higher education.
- Having the financial freedom to make choices that allow you to enjoy life, such as the occasional “splurge.”
We released a private beta of a suite of online financial wellness tools and are seeking pilot partners to bring the tools to a larger audience.
In tandem with our corporate efforts, we founded the Behavioral Economics NYC Meetup as a forum for people interested in how human behavior affects choices. We have presented free, monthly meetups since February 2016 with a variety of speakers from bestselling authors to social scientists.
Presenters ranged from research leaders at ideas42 and Ethical Systems to behavioral strategists at Betterment and Morningstar. We have interviewed world poker champion Annie Duke on making decisions with limited information. We learned about scarcity from Michael Barbera of Clicksuasion and making effective and ethical donor pitches from Howard Levy of The Red Rooster Group and how to time all of the above from Dan Pink author of When.
At a well-attended session, we presented a hands-on Stormwater Challenge workshop with The Nature Conservancy. Five teams competed for the best idea for engaging private owners to impact stormwater mitigation. We’ve even learned about risk-taking culture in Kurdistan from Australian behavioral scientist, Kris White. Our January 2019 event featured behavioral science lessons from the Great Barrier Reef, with John Pickering. Our past lineup and links to videostreams are available at https://www.meetup.com/Behavioral-Economics-NYC/ and https://www.facebook.com/decisionfish/videos/.
Crisis and Emergency Management
Noreen has a background in research using geographic information systems and has been involved with several initiatives involving geographical and geodata science. In 2011, she presented a ten-year retrospective of emergency response technologies in New York City at the Geospatial Technology in NYC 2001–2011–2021 conference. Her interviews of personnel involved in mapping for 9/11 rescue and recovery operations and those working ten years later resulted in a poster and interactive map. Noreen has collected 650 artifacts, interviews, datasets and paper documents from the 9/11 response for a proposed Center for Geospatial Innovation.
Noreen participates in MUDDI: a Model for Underground Data Definition and Integration. MUDDI is collaborating on grants to address public safety of underground infrastructure. The Open Geospatial Consortium published initial programming and research (PDF), and is researching grant funding such the NSF programs: Prediction of and Resilience against Extreme Events (PREEVENTS), a model for responding to higher storm surges, estimating extreme weather events, understanding the boundaries of extreme events, describing shoreline changes, etc. and Algorithms for Threat Detection (ATD).
Emergency management doesn’t stop at communities. It’s personal, too. Noreen has researched and spoken on maintaining personal resilience, tackling mental health crises, healthcare reform, and the importance of maintaining an emergency fund.
Identity and Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity and trust are increasingly important, and difficult, topics in resilience, as they affect everything from individual privacy and safety to elections and national security. Noreen has been working with the Identity Ecosystem Steering Group, now a part of the Kantara Initiative, to develop a framework for trusted, online identity. The ID Ecosystem Framework (IDEF) addresses the 2011 National Strategy for Trusted Identity in Cyberspace. Her research formed the basis of the usability guidelines for a 177 point standard for cyber-identity.
Noreen also has provided service design training to International Red Cross contractors developing secure identity to stateless refugees. She is currently the editor and Secretary of Kantara’s Resilient Identifiers for Underserved Populations Work Group (RIUP-WG), which merged the legacy IDESG Federated Identifiers for Resilient Ecosystems and Health IT Assurance work groups. We would like to build on these experiences to create frameworks for online resilience.
Mentoring and Community Outreach
Mentoring is a key point of access for underrepresented groups. We have built and promoted mentoring and outreach programs for many communities. Noreen is a program advisor to Technology Transfer Days (TTD) a multi-week, annual program introducing local businesses to Science and Technology officers at Federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, NASA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Part of TTD’s goal to match innovative, emerging technologies and tech startups with the needs of our Federal government is to provide training for women, minorities and US Veterans to learn, network and develop their economic impact in their communities.
TTD partners with the Brooklyn Law School, the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, Brooklyn and NJ SBDCs, Veterans’ Futures Lab and the US Department of Defense to provide opportunities for mentoring and coaching individuals and small businesses as they create proposals and prepare for one on one meetings with agency tech scouts. We continue our efforts in coaching and mentoring women and minorities in STEM careers, cybersecurity and through our financial wellness workshops, startup networks and alumni associations.
What We Aren’t Doing
We are seeking partners and conversation spaces at this time, not funding.
2018 activities focused on awareness: describing and sharing materials. We have not focused much on physical and mental health to date, though it impacts us personally, and we have written about some impacts on personal finance and the economic health of communities. We would like to focus more on mental health and health coverage in 2019 as a key pillar to resilience.
“Why does economic resurgence not reach everyone? Data increasingly points to trauma: In the midst of a long and steady recovery that pushed the national unemployment rate to 50-year lows, why are some American communities stuck in persistent economic distress?”
Source: The Gather Lab, Transform Series
We are not giving up hope. We realize that many resilience problems are exacerbated by a growing economic and political divide and that only effective leadership emphasizing open communication and empathy can remove these divisions. For example, The Gather Lab recently reported on how trauma leads to persistent economic stress, a pattern found in in both inner cities and rural areas that lack access to affordable mental health services. These two populations often have widely different political views that color their opinions on how to solve very similar problems, and whose responsibility it is to do so.
We do our part by creating spaces for these conversations to happen and tools for developing empathy. It is our hope that these discussions can influence those who have the power to create effective strategies to solve these and other so-called “wicked problems.” In the meantime, we will continue to offer tools to individuals to have these discussions.
What We Have Learned So Far
We are forming thoughts on Pillars to Resilience. Economics, education, and health (both physical and mental) are key. And each of these factors impact the other.
- Without money, your access to education and health services are reduced.
- Without good physical and mental health, you are less likely to seek education or make better financial decisions as you focus on basic survival.
- Without education, you won’t even know where to start.
Geography plays a supporting role: the closer you are to family, friends, opportunities and resources, the better your health, wealth and knowledge.
We have also learned that a key to resilience is recognizing that an individual’s personal needs may not be a perfect match to whatever society prescribes. Standard patterns of development and response to crises may not work for one person or community the way they do for others. But communities of resilience can be trained to recognize people and situations that are unique or unfamiliar and create awareness and inclusion strategies to help build the well-being of all stakeholders.
We have learned that to grow you need to innovate. We advocate looking at the past to identify patterns that lead to success and those that lead to failure. We understand that not every success is repeatable and neither is every failure insurmountable. This is due to the many external factors that make any situation unique. Data from the past gives clues to how to behave in the future, but resilience requires understanding how factors in past episodes differ from the current situation. The OODA Loop provides a useful framework. With this reminder, one can view current challenges objectively (perhaps mitigate them) and select a course of action that stands a better chance of success.
Most importantly, we have learned that resilience is weakest at the seams. These are places where one community of people or practice is blocked off from another often through inaccessible language and industry jargon, conflicts of interest, conflicting goals, and posturing or territorial battles. Yet, the most interesting conversations and synergies happen where these communities meet. We are resilient when we break down these barriers and engage openly and sincerely. If you use a word or framework we are unaware of, we want to learn it. We may translate it to lay terms or structures, but we will always cite sources and refer the curious to the rightful authors of an idea. We are certainly more enabled to have our work make a difference when we leave our ivory towers and share our knowledge with the world.
How We Can Help You
We would like to bring our unique perspective to people and organizations working on tough, economic and wellness problems. Through Decision Fish, we can offer financial wellness training, decision coaching, quantitative analysis and modeling.
We can also develop collaborative design solutions that incorporate behavioral economics methods to improve outcomes for you or the people and communities you serve. We have loads of research and a library of articles on personal finance, healthcare, emergency management and learning methods as well as an extensive network of social impact and education leaders and startups. We welcome thoughtful feedback, suggestions and challenges to anything we do or post.
How You Can Help Us
We would like to expand our practice to the study of mental health concerns among Millennials and the aging, both of whom are experiencing epidemic levels of crisis. Please share any resources and studies and let us have an open discussion of how addressing mental health challenges is critical to resilient communities. If you are interested in speaking on behavioral strategies for improving empathy and resilience, you are welcome to propose a topic.
For More Information
Contact the DF Resilience Lab Director, Noreen Whysel at nwhysel@gmail.com. To follow our progress, look for our lab reports here or read the Decision Fish Blog at http://www.decisionfish.com/blog/ or Noreen’s personal blog at https://nwhysel.medium.com/. You can follow Noreen at @nwhysel on Twitter and Medium.
