When faced with the potential for international crisis, it’s one thing to focus on its causes. But what if we were able to proactively focus on what’s already working to prevent those crises and build on that more effectively?

That was the aim of Fund for Peace as it developed its new State Resilience Index and partnered with SAS to create a Crisis Sensitivity Simulator that allows peace-building organizations, policymakers and others to identify opportunities for nations to turn areas of fragility into ones of strength.

Since 2006, it has published its annual Fragile States Index, a critical resource for highlighting the normal pressures that all states experience and identifying when those pressures outweigh a state’s capacity to manage them.

The new State Resilience Index flips the lens to look at the extent to which countries can anticipate, manage and recover from a crisis relative to the severity of that crisis.

With data from both angles now in play, the question was how to bring the two indices together in one interactive tool – the Crisis Sensitivity Simulator – that could unlock comparative insights for organizations to put into action.

“We needed to come up with a tool that helped us to better identify what would allow countries to absorb and bounce back from a shock,” Haken says.

SMALLER DATA, BIG INSIGHTS

The challenge in developing the simulator was that the number of data points being pulled from the two indices were unusually few, even though each contained the robust information of its sources distilled down to a single point.

“It was a very interesting modeling problem because I feel like there’s so much conversation these days around big data and how do you deal with data sets that are very large,” says SAS Solutions Advisor Jackie Yanchuck. “I think it’s easy to forget that we’re often dealing with instances where you have some very rich informational data, but it’s still a relatively small number of data points. So that led us to really be creative with how we built out a solution. I think we set up a strong foundation, in such a way that we’ll be able to build on it and gather even more insights as we continue to expand on this work.”

The result is a tool that allows users to project likely future outcomes based on this smaller data – by exploring how varying degrees of shock to different “pillars” affect countries – and then incorporating domain-specific expertise to act on those predictions and increase preparedness.

The simulator doesn’t just draw on the data from the State Resilience Index and Fragile States Index. It serves as a complementary tool that allows users to take the insights gleaned using it and then revisit the indices to peel back layers of data to help inform where and how to focus their efforts.

“That’s where users can really start to play out different types of scenarios and identify key opportunities for promoting resilience, even in countries that are otherwise very fragile,” Haken says. The tool can also highlight where surprises lie in wait – for example, how even well-resourced countries might not be as resilient as expected in the face of something like a global pandemic.

THE DYNAMIC DUO

The Fragile States Index, which Fund for Peace has published for 17 years, is valued by peace-building organizations. But brain science and narrative research show that hope- and solutions-based messaging is more effective than fear-based messaging when communicating about social change.

Fear-based messaging triggers the “downstairs” half of the brain – the amygdala – causing people to focus on maintaining (supposed) security, often to the exclusion of empathy and inclusion. The “upstairs” of the brain, on the other hand, is triggered by confidence, hope, abundance and joy, increasing openness to other people and willingness to address complex problems.

Now that the Fragile States Index has a counterpart in the State Resilience Index – plus the simulator that brings them together – Fund for Peace hopes that future phases of this project can add more dynamic functionality for a deeper understanding of how fragility and resilience interact, and to identify levers of change.

“What I'm most excited about is the conversations that will come from using both indices in the simulator to understand a country's capacity to handle its pressures by identifying specific pain points,” says John Madden, Data Science Technology Associate at Fund for Peace. “Allowing the two indices to communicate with each other, and the more nuanced analysis and planning this can facilitate, will bring this evidence to policy and implementation in a dynamic way.”