Chapter Three – Teams Thrive on Purpose

…In a crisis, when chaos or confusion threatens to take over, somehow human beings often reveal their best selves, usually by joining together in common cause. Daniel Aldrich, a political scientist at Purdue University in Indiana, saw this first-hand during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Though flooding was imminent, officials had not yet ordered evacuation, but local communities, neighbors helping neighbors, immediately took up the task of telling people they should leave and helping those who needed help. Aldrich later conducted research at disasters all around the world and discovered it is almost always ad-hoc teams of neighbors who do the most good after a calamity, saving and helping more people than paramedics, fire fighters, police and soldiers. As Aldrich observed, “It’s this passion for a local community and granular knowledge about who needs what that makes large-scale government interventions…