Why 12 Factors?

Resilience cannot be achieved through attending to only one aspect of living. It not only requires multiple aspects, it also requires and recognition and understanding of how these factors connect and interact. As we consider more factors their interconnections increase rapidly. For example, four factors have six connections but nine factors have thirty six connections.

We need to strike a balance between too much complexity and being too simple. Twelve nodes have been chosen to cover the main aspects of community resilience. We can use the familiar visual image of the clock face to help us hold twelve factors in mind at the same time.

The twelve factors in the World System Model have been chosen as essential to understanding what is needed to develop viable and sustainable societies at every level from the local to the global. The common catch-all terms of economy, technology, politics, environment and society have deliberately been avoided. The test for inclusion is that removal of any one of the factors destroys the viability of the whole system.

With twelve factors, any one of which might have an effect on or be affected by another, there are sixty six possible interconnections. The connections can be mutually supportive in the human ecological system; they can be absent and weaken the system; or they can be negative connections, throwing the system into imbalance and non-sustainability.