Resilience & Adaptation

Why do some communities, organizations, and institutions adapt while others struggle?

Every community and organization will experience disruption. Natural disasters. Public health emergencies. Economic shocks. Environmental change. Technological transformation. Institutional transitions. Breakdowns in infrastructure, information, or trust.

The central question is not simply whether disruption will occur. It is what allows people and institutions to respond effectively when conditions change.

Why do some communities reorganize, learn, and recover while others remain vulnerable? Why do some organizations incorporate lessons from disruption while others reproduce the same weaknesses? Why are some institutions able to coordinate across boundaries and act under uncertainty while others become fragmented?

My research examines these questions through the interconnected lenses of communication, design, institutional relationships, environmental systems, and human behavior. I am particularly interested in adaptive capacity: the ability of people, organizations, and communities to recognize changing conditions, access and interpret useful information, coordinate action, learn from experience, and adjust their behavior or systems accordingly. From this perspective, resilience is not simply an outcome after something goes wrong.

It is a capacity that is built—or weakened—long before a crisis occurs.

A Design Ecology Perspective

Resilience is often described as the ability to withstand disruption or return to a previous state. That definition captures only part of what interests me. A resilient system does not merely absorb disturbance. It can learn, reorganize, communicate, and adapt as circumstances change. Physical infrastructure matters. Roads, buildings, electrical systems, communications networks, healthcare facilities, and technologies can dramatically influence outcomes. But resilience also depends on less visible forms of infrastructure:

Trust. Relationships. Information flows. Institutional memory. Leadership. Shared understanding. Professional networks. Community knowledge.

From a Design Ecology perspective, resilience emerges through interactions among these elements rather than from any one component alone. The systems we create establish possibilities and constraints for future action. Communication structures determine who receives information and whose knowledge enters decision-making. Technologies make some choices easier than others. Institutional arrangements encourage—or inhibit—collaboration. Physical environments affect behavior. Cultural narratives influence what communities recognize as threats, resources, and acceptable responses.

The systems we design today shape how effectively people will be able to adapt tomorrow.

Communication as Adaptive Infrastructure

Communication is one of the mechanisms through which resilience is created. During disruption, communities need accurate information. But information alone is insufficient. People must know which sources to trust. Institutions must communicate across organizational boundaries. Experts must translate complex evidence into usable guidance. Leaders must acknowledge uncertainty while maintaining credibility. Communities must integrate formal expertise with local knowledge and lived experience. These capabilities depend upon relationships and communication practices that frequently predate the crisis itself.

This is why I approach communication as a form of adaptive infrastructure.

A community in which institutions routinely share information, organizations collaborate across sectors, residents know where to find credible guidance, and stakeholders have opportunities to participate in decision-making enters a crisis differently from one in which those relationships must be created after the emergency begins. Strategic communication therefore contributes to resilience not merely by producing emergency messages, but by helping develop the trust, relationships, knowledge pathways, and shared understanding that make coordinated action possible.

From Risk Reduction to Adaptive Capacity

My research in environmental health and biosecurity provides an important empirical foundation for this work. My doctoral research examined how everyday environments, tools, equipment, and human behavior create potential pathways for pathogen transmission. Using a simulated tracing agent and process-based analysis, I identified recurring points of transfer that were not necessarily apparent to the people moving through those environments. That research demonstrates a broader resilience principle:

Systems become more adaptive when people can recognize vulnerabilities before those vulnerabilities become crises.

My subsequent research pipeline extends this idea through communication – investigating how unseen risks become understandable, how scientific guidance encounters everyday behavior, and how communication and design can create more feasible opportunities for protective action. These studies connect risk communication with resilience because preparedness ultimately depends upon more than awareness. People must be able to translate information into action within the environments and systems they actually inhabit. This moves resilience research upstream—from recovery after disruption toward the design of systems that can anticipate, learn, adjust, and reduce vulnerability beforehand.

Adaptive Capacity

Adaptive capacity is the ability of individuals, organizations, and communities to respond effectively as conditions change. I find the concept particularly useful because it directs attention away from resilience as a fixed characteristic and toward the processes that make resilience possible.

Adaptive capacity develops through:

• strong relationships and social networks;
• trusted and accessible communication;
• effective and legitimate institutions;
• shared learning and institutional memory;
• flexible leadership and decision-making;
• access to useful knowledge;
• inclusive participation;
• interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration;
• opportunities for feedback and reflection; and
• the ability to translate lessons into changes in practice.

None of these capacities can be created instantly during an emergency. They must be cultivated through everyday institutional and community life. This is one reason my research interests extend beyond conventional disaster communication. The same processes that help a community respond to a hurricane may influence whether an organization adapts to technological change, whether a food system responds to disease threats, whether a university incorporates new knowledge, or whether public institutions retain trust during periods of uncertainty.

Organizational Learning & Resilience

Resilience also operates at the organizational level. Organizations continuously encounter changes in technology, workforce expectations, regulations, markets, information systems, and public expectations. Their ability to adapt depends partly on whether knowledge can move through the organization and whether that knowledge produces learning.

My earlier scholarship on professional commitment, intercultural competence, cultural intelligence, learning environments, and technology-mediated education contributes to this dimension of my research program. Across these contexts, I have examined how people learn within institutional systems and how deliberately designed interventions can influence professional development, engagement, and behavior. My applied work has also involved designing and improving organizational systems in higher education, private enterprise, local government, workforce development, nonprofits, and community-serving organizations. These experiences reinforce a central principle of my research:

Resilient organizations do not simply possess information. They create systems that allow information to become shared knowledge and shared knowledge to become coordinated action.

This makes organizational communication, knowledge management, leadership, and institutional learning important components of resilience.

Cross-Sector Collaboration

Many contemporary challenges cannot be addressed by a single profession, institution, or sector. Environmental hazards intersect with public health. Public health intersects with housing and transportation. Food systems connect agriculture, economics, ecology, health, regulation, and community development. Emerging technologies create simultaneous challenges for education, employment, governance, communication, and public trust.

Resilience therefore depends increasingly on the ability of organizations to work across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. This has been a recurring feature of my research and professional work. I have contributed substantively to 23 grants, contracts, and awards totaling more than $1.52 million, frequently within interdisciplinary and applied contexts. My research collaborations have crossed design, forestry, public health, animal health, education, technology, community engagement, and environmental systems.

That work has strengthened my interest in the communication processes that make interdisciplinary collaboration succeed or fail:

• How is expertise translated across professional boundaries?
• Whose knowledge is treated as authoritative?
• How are competing priorities negotiated?
• How are responsibilities coordinated?
• How do teams develop enough shared understanding to act?

These are communication questions, but they are also resilience questions because complex systems become vulnerable when the organizations within them cannot coordinate.

Research Themes

My work in resilience and adaptation explores questions such as:

• What enables communities and organizations to adapt under conditions of uncertainty?
• How does communication contribute to preparedness before crises occur?
• How does institutional trust influence collective action?
• How do communities recognize vulnerabilities before they become emergencies?
• How do organizations learn from disruption and incorporate lessons into future practice?
• How can scientific and technical knowledge become usable during consequential decisions?
• What communication structures support coordination across organizations and sectors?
• How do environmental, social, technological, and institutional systems influence one another?
• How can designed systems reduce vulnerability rather than simply respond to its consequences?
• What allows interdisciplinary teams to develop shared understanding?
• How do institutional memory and knowledge management affect resilience?
• How can participation and stakeholder engagement strengthen adaptive capacity?
• How can organizations balance efficiency, specialization, and redundancy with the flexibility required for adaptation?

These questions draw together strategic communication, risk and crisis communication, environmental communication, organizational communication, systems thinking, community resilience, human-centered design, research translation, and Design Ecology.

Beyond Physical Infrastructure

Resilience planning understandably places substantial emphasis on physical infrastructure. Stronger buildings, redundant utilities, improved transportation networks, robust communications technology, and effective emergency-response systems save lives and reduce losses.

But physical infrastructure operates within human systems.

Two communities with comparable physical resources can experience very different outcomes depending upon whether institutions communicate effectively, residents trust public guidance, organizations have established working relationships, leaders share information, and communities possess the knowledge required to use available resources.

These less visible systems constitute a form of human and communicative infrastructure. Questions such as these therefore matter:

• How quickly can credible information move?
• Who is connected to whom?
• Where are the gaps between formal institutions and community networks?
• Can organizations coordinate outside their normal jurisdictions?
• Do residents know where to seek trustworthy information?
• Can scientific uncertainty be communicated without paralyzing decision-making?
• Do systems capture lessons after a disruption and incorporate them into future practice?

Resilience is partly determined by the answers.

Resilience, Risk & Community Preparedness

My work on resilience is closely connected to my research in environmental health and risk communication. Preparedness depends upon people’s ability to understand threats before those threats become immediate. That requires communication capable of making complex, probabilistic, or invisible risks meaningful without exaggerating them. It also requires attention to feasibility.

A recommendation that cannot reasonably be implemented within a person’s physical, economic, social, or institutional circumstances has limited protective value regardless of its scientific accuracy. This insight from my biosecurity research has broader implications for disaster preparedness, public health, environmental stewardship, and community adaptation.

Effective resilience communication therefore asks not only: Do people know what they should do?

It also asks: Do they understand why? Do they trust the source? Can they recognize when action is necessary? Do their environments make the action possible? And have institutions created the relationships and resources required to support it?

Research Translation & Institutional Learning

Research translation is another important component of adaptive capacity. Communities and organizations continually encounter new scientific findings, emerging technologies, changing regulations, and lessons from previous events. Their resilience depends partly on whether they can identify useful knowledge and incorporate it into decisions.

This is not an automatic process. Evidence must move across disciplinary languages, organizational boundaries, professional cultures, and different levels of technical expertise. My research therefore treats research translation as both a communication function and an adaptation mechanism. When evidence becomes accessible, credible, contextually relevant, and actionable, it can help institutions adjust before failures occur. When knowledge remains isolated within disciplinary or organizational silos, systems lose opportunities to learn.

Why This Matters

The challenges facing communities are becoming increasingly interconnected. Climate and environmental hazards affect public health. Public health disruptions affect schools, workplaces, transportation, and local economies. Food systems connect human health, animal health, environmental sustainability, and economic security. Technological change affects employment, education, institutions, and social trust. Communication systems influence how people understand every one of these issues.

No single organization can manage such complexity alone.

Success increasingly depends upon whether people, institutions, and communities can share knowledge, coordinate across boundaries, learn from experience, and revise their systems as circumstances change. Resilience therefore becomes less about resisting change than about developing the capacity to navigate it intelligently and ethically.

Current Areas of Inquiry

My current work approaches resilience through several interconnected areas:

Community resilience and adaptive capacity
Examining the communication, relationships, knowledge systems, and institutional conditions that allow communities to anticipate, respond to, and learn from disruption.

Risk and crisis communication
Studying how people interpret threats and uncertainty and how institutions communicate before, during, and after consequential events.

Environmental health and One Health
Investigating resilience at the intersections of human, animal, and environmental systems.

Organizational resilience and institutional learning
Examining how organizations retain knowledge, learn from experience, communicate internally, and adapt their structures and practices.

Research translation and decision support
Exploring how scientific and technical evidence becomes actionable knowledge for practitioners, organizations, policymakers, and communities.

Cross-sector and interdisciplinary collaboration
Studying the communication processes that enable people with different expertise, institutional responsibilities, and priorities to coordinate effectively.

Food systems and agricultural resilience
Examining how environmental risk, biological systems, human behavior, communication, and everyday agricultural practice interact.

Strategic communication and stakeholder engagement
Investigating how institutions build relationships, establish legitimacy, communicate uncertainty, and engage publics before trust is urgently needed.

Technology and adaptive systems
Exploring how interfaces, information systems, and emerging technologies can strengthen—or undermine—the ability of people and organizations to learn and respond to change.

Together, these areas contribute to my broader Design Ecology framework for understanding adaptation across interconnected human, organizational, technological, and ecological systems.

Looking Forward

The future will almost certainly involve greater uncertainty, faster technological change, environmental disruption, and increasingly interconnected public challenges. Preparing for that future requires more than stronger infrastructure. It requires strengthening the systems that allow people to recognize change, communicate across boundaries, evaluate evidence, maintain trust, coordinate resources, learn from experience, and adapt.

My research seeks to understand how communication, design, leadership, knowledge systems, and institutional relationships can help communities move beyond merely recovering from disruption toward becoming more capable of navigating change. Ultimately, I do not view resilience as something a community or organization either possesses or lacks. Resilience is a capacity continually cultivated through the ways we communicate, design our systems, strengthen relationships, learn from experience, and prepare together for what comes next.