Resilience is a static state of being, preparedness is the alert verb that underpins that state of readiness. The world is changing and fast. According to a blogpost from the European Investment Bank (EIB), preparedness is key to transformation in a socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable manner. One of their three principles for boosting their own resilience is:
“not to confuse short-term fixes with longer term solutions or to mistake the cause of our problems with their solutions.”
European Investment Bank
This is key.
Many tools exist for a comprehensive and structure look at innovation opportunities. So I introduce some diagnostic tools here with a few comments on why we need them for our current operating conditions.
Our Tools
We expand ways of knowing outside the box of what is called the “western knowledge system” and its subjective claims to objectivity. This is a form of ethnomethodology that captures a fuller sense of what an event or a concept means. For instance, if we look at the recent and ongoing pandemic, it has primarily been described in terms of quantifiable metrics – number of mortalities, number of infections, etc. But this does not give the sense of an epidemic that I know as a body sense through life experience in India and other still developing countries. One is hygienically on alert when this body sense is activated by the knowledge that invisible disease vectors are abroad.
We incorporate all the human factors by layering on Indigenous ways of knowing (Kimmerer, 2021) and ways of thinking (Yunkaporta, 2019). Yunkaporta’s 5 minds was only conceptually derived. I have data from rural Java that allows for a validation of using these indigenous ways of thinking as a bridge between disaster science and DRR frameworks and the implementation plans and preparedness strategies for the communities at risk during the first few hours after an eruption of the volcano whose slopes they live on.
This puts cognitive justice into practice and opens the doorway to creating a third space or a commons where facilitators as boundary spanners build bridges between disparate and often incommensurate knowledge systems. The empirical evidence for this experimental practice includes longitudinal data from one year afterwards that shows innovation tools adoption remained at 65.6% of a representative set of responders to our survey. We design implementation plans for local agency to take the lead.
Design of autonomous yet interoperable microsystems is how the informal trade ecosystem can be described at the borderlands of Kenya and Uganda. This is key to resilience.
Diagnosis may use the same tools and methods as design research and user research but its aims are very different. Here, user research and observations can focus on a particular critical path in the corporation’s project pipeline to evaluate whether this microsystem is future-proof, that is, is it resilient? Can it endure?
Solutions will emerge from applying product development strategy and innovation planning tools for resilience, preparedness, and thus transformation. Redesigning internal systems is a massive project. And, a transdisciplinary exercise that must weave and blend together multiple perspectives and knowledges in a coherent and seamless manner for action and impact.
There is a risk of severe blind-spots if assumptions are not questioned at the foundational level. This is our starting point.
