Just a Little Patience
Sometimes the “build-measure-learn” loop takes years
By Jim Fox, Director
Here at NEMAC, we’re currently working with the State of North Carolina on its Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan. Even though this project kicked off a few months ago, it’s been over a decade in the making.
During that time, we’ve learned that handling long-term business cycles takes patience, a good data model, and investment across multiple stakeholders.
The “build-measure-learn” loop comes from the Lean Startup approach, but I don’t think that even the most generous critic would call 10 years of development a short product development cycle. When you look at what’s happened, though, you can see that it’s really been a learning loop that builds on lessons gained from interacting with a variety of customers who are all looking at the same problem, but from different scales. It’s also required patience in the face of conflicting political views and the evolving needs of the municipal and regional governmental staff with whom we partner.
The problem we’re trying to address is:
“How can our society (particularly in the U.S.) address building resilience to a changing climate at a variety of scales, from national to state to regional to local?”
One of the reasons that addressing this problem has taken such a long time is that our customers and stakeholders have only gradually come to realize that a changing climate is a problem for them—and just how complex the resilience solution can be. Then they, too, need to have a little patience to work through that complexity.
A walk along the timeline
A look back along the timeline leading to the North Carolina project illuminates just what it sometimes takes to get ourselves where we need to be.
2006 When we started working on this issue, Asheville was experiencing a growing number of natural disasters, but didn’t have an easy way to deal with the vast amounts of data associated with the events or to visualize the results.
Over the next three to four years, two important realizations occurred: (1) there was a shortfall in standard approaches to risk assessment; and (2) there needed to be better ways to ingest large amounts of interrelated data and then display it in a way that allowed a large group of stakeholders to visualize the connections between different data types.
2009Around this time, two new players became prominent NEMAC partners: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) and the State of North Carolina. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is the nation’s repository of weather and climate data—and home to a group of talented climate scientists who know how to use this data to inform a variety of decisions. The State of North Carolina had just started a joint workgroup called the Interagency Leadership Team (ILT), which included representatives from both state and federal agencies.
2010In March 2010, the ILT hosted a conference called “Planning for North Carolina’s Future: Ask the Climate Question.” NCEI worked with the ILT and funded NEMAC to begin building a risk assessment process with an associated data model that would address how climate stressors (such as heat, precipitation, sea level, etc.) were affecting natural hazards (such as flooding, wildfire, etc.) that were, in turn, impacting assets (such as people, buildings, roads, etc.) across the state. This data model has evolved over time, but it is the foundational building block for risk assessments dealing with resilience and climate adaptation.
So from an applied research viewpoint, we were set! We had a risk assessment process, we had a data model, and we had science partners that could provide expertise. But then the reality of the issue came into focus:
“What does the customer really need to address their problem?”
Thus began 10 years of iteration.
2011We continued to work with the State of North Carolina to produce the state’s first Climate Resilience Plan in 2011–2012. The plan was very forward-thinking for the time, and was an effort that we were proud to be a part of. Unfortunately, state politics derailed the “taking action” part of the plan and our work was relegated to dusty bookshelves and seldom-visited websites. How do you employ a “build-measure-learn” loop when nobody even sees what you’ve built? *sigh*
But we didn’t give up.
People in western North Carolina did see the continuing value of the resilience approach, and we were asked to lead the technical committee for the State of North Carolina’s Mountain Resources Commission. During this project, we learned that regional decision makers did value having a foundational, quantified view of the complete system in the mountains. As a result, we created a foundational set of metrics on how the natural, human, built, and economic sectors function across our region. The resulting web product and related services gained national attention, particularly from NOAA.
2014 In early 2014, our preceding work and continued learning (the build-measure-learn loop in action!) led to NEMAC’s partnership with—and funding from—NOAA’s Climate Program Office (CPO) to create the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit:
While developing this resource, we also had a customer willing to partner with us to undertake a build-measure-learn loop to develop climate resilience solutions for local communities: the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network (SSDN), comprised of sustainability directors from 10 cities across the southeastern U.S. The SSDN team agreed to collaborate with us to develop a risk assessment framework that would work for each of the member cities. This framework, now known as the Steps to Resilience, is featured in the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit and was patterned on other similar frameworks developed both nationally and internationally. What made the difference was moving away from an academic or federal agency approach to a framework that can be used at the local scale to quantify the impacts of a changing climate on key assets valued by the community.
2015After the launch of the toolkit and our work with SSDN, our learning from working closely with our customers really began to gain traction. In 2015, we formed a public-private partnership with FernLeaf Interactive, known as NEMAC+FernLeaf, which allows us to work more directly with paying customers. We continued to collaborate with NOAA on the Climate Resilience Toolkit and other projects, and the SSDN, and began to build a learning network with other cities across the Southeast—and nationwide.
2020Over the past five years, the build-measure-learn loop cycle has accelerated and we’ve received great feedback from our growing customer base. We’ve worked with staff in Asheville, Tallahassee, West Palm Beach, and Charleston to create municipal resilience plans for those cities. We’ve also worked with two regional Councils of Government in North Carolina to create regional vulnerability assessments and resilience plans. And, bringing it back full circle, we’re once again working with the State of North Carolina on its updated Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan.
So…what have we learned?
After more than a decade iterating on these issues, we’ve learned that sometimes the most important part of tackling a big issue like climate change is to find customers who are willing to be active stakeholders in finding a solution. It’s only when you have active stakeholders as the core of your customer base that you can ask them, “What’s your specific pain point? What can we provide, as a combination of products and services, as a solution?”
We’ve also learned that our continuous build-measure-learn loops are all about building a growing network of customers and providers that are in a position to begin addressing the problem of building resilience to a changing climate. Only then we can share the lessons learned with a growing group of customers who can leverage the work done by the early adopters.
And we’ve learned to look at this journey as a series of nested build-measure-learn loops, all moving toward finding points of convergence that allow us to begin addressing one of today’s most pressing issues.
And we’ve learned to have a little patience. A decade is a long time—but we’re on our way.
My thanks to Dave Michelson and Nina Flagler Hall for reading the first drafts of this essay and providing astute suggestions and comments that helped shape the final result.
