Helping Hand Mirror Mirror
String Theory
Gold COAST
Bainbridge Prepares Goes BANI WHAT IFS
Scott James is obsessed with something most people would rather steer clear of: The worst-case scenario.
BY AUDREY NELSON
PHOTOS COURTESY BAINBRIDGE PREPARES
James is the founder of Bainbridge Prepares, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that works to ready the island for various emergencies. Over the years, James has considered it all: fires, floods, earthquakes and more.
An interest in permaculture farming and sustainability led James—a social entrepreneur—down a roundabout path into emergency preparedness. He realized that the disaster response community tended to emphasize either individual or federal preparedness. That excluded a major middleman: neighborhoods.
“Post-natural disaster, life gets local very quickly,” James said. “If it’s a major bio-regional disaster—like the earthquake that’s going to hit Seattle sooner or later—then you are really relying on those neighbors not just for days, but for weeks to months and beyond.”
In 2011, James founded Bainbridge Prepares, intending to fill that neighborhood-sized gap. Since its founding, the organization has partnered with the city of Bainbridge, accumulated more than 750 volunteers and earned recognition from the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
In recent years, Bainbridge Prepares has gained a new advocate. Island resident Bob Johansen—a futurist and distinguished fellow
with the nonprofit Institute for the Future—serves as the organization’s informal foresight advisor. Shortly after moving to Bainbridge in 2020, Johansen met James through the community initiative, Imagine Bainbridge 2035.
James laughed as he recalled taking rambling, conversation-filled walks with Johansen. “It’s a good thing we live in a small town,” he said. “Otherwise, we would have been lost and our wives would have had to come track us down.”
One of the models that Johansen offered James on those walks was the BANI (pronounced “bonnie”) future.
The term BANI—Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible—was coined by futurist Jamais Cascio, who co-authored Johansen’s forthcoming book.
Artificial intelligence, sudden global power shifts and vulnerabilities in systems, such as healthcare, have paved the way to a BANI future characterized by unpredictable change. At some level, Johansen explained, such a future “just doesn’t make sense.”
Still, that doesn’t mean we should stop preparing for what might be coming. In his book,
“Navigating the Age of Chaos,” Johansen lays out a “BANI Positive” leadership model. Upending BANI’s four tenets, “BANI+” urges people to be “Bendable, Attentive, Neuroflexible and Interconnected” when responding to uncertainty.
“We can’t understand what’s going on, but we’ve got to act anyway,” is how Johansen summarized the model.
By the time James and Johansen met, Bainbridge Prepares was already unknowingly modeling parts of the BANI+ framework. During the COVID pandemic, “if we were really brittle and rigid in thinking, ‘No, we can only use our volunteer corps just for earthquake
response and nothing else,’…we would have lost the opportunity to be of service to all of Kitsap County,” James said. Instead, volunteers’ “bendability” allowed Bainbridge Prepares to host vaccine clinics and fill supply shortages.
Pre-Johansen, Bainbridge Prepares also practiced both neuroflexibility—the ability to improvise—and interconnectedness. Volunteers often conducted tabletop exercises, running through emergency situations and potential responses. (Bainbridge Prepares still conducts these exercises, sometimes bringing them off the tabletop and into live simulations.) Meanwhile, through
connecting volunteers from diverse organizations, Bainbridge Prepares recently passed United Way to become Kitsap’s largest service organization.
Johansen’s guidance provided a vocabulary for what Bainbridge Prepares was already doing. It also gave rise to new collaborations. Bainbridge Prepares, the city and the fire department work closely together, but have long had separate strategic five-year plans. Johansen’s emphasis on interconnectedness helped coordinate those plans.
“Much of that has been inspired by conversations with Bob,” James said. “That’s exciting.”
These days, Johansen is consulting on James’ new venture, a nonprofit called Prepare Your Community that would bring Bainbridge Prepares’ organizational model to towns across the country.
Collectively and separately, Johansen and James have imagined and worked toward a more prepared Bainbridge. But both men emphasize that preparedness is more than just war games and forecasting. In Johansen’s words, it’s about “flipping the negative to positive.”
“If we approach building community resilience through love, we end up creating a town that’s more enjoyable to live in,” James added. “Even if the earthquake doesn’t happen.”
