If we see each problem - be it water shortages, climate change, or poverty - as separate, and approach each separately, the solutions we come up with will be short-term, often opportunistic quick fixes that do nothing to address deeper imbalances
Shawn, I really enjoyed this post. It's clear, logical, and begins to describe the kinds of changes that need to be made in any system, if it is to be resilient. Resilience often gets a bad wrap. I was hired once to engage with a group inside an organization to talk about resilience through a series of sessions. They had been deemed "essential" workers during Covid, and the management decided they needed this training.
I experienced alot of push back and anger in each session. At the end of the second session, I just asked what that was all about. They told me stories of how, throughout the Covid lockdown, and in the months during and after, the management had told them to just be more resilient and get back to work . . .as though their practices, expectations, goals, and learning were all that needed to shift in response to the upheaval and uncertainty of Covid.
Many people think resilience means a system can work like a rubber band: When it's stretched or stressed, it just relaxes eventually and goes back to its original state.
That's not possible in a complex system. And for that system to have the resilient to adapt, of course the people need to be resilience so they can adapt. When we work with an organization on system change, we talk about the "level" of change: Policy, Procedural, Practices, and (only then) Personnel. Personnel can do what they can do, but as long as the other three pieces remain static, Personnel actually can encounter greater stress in their efforts to change.
I'd love to chat with you sometime about your next steps to see where this all goes next. Thanks for sharing these ideas with the world!!! (and i'm sorry this got so long!)
Shawn, I really enjoyed this post. It's clear, logical, and begins to describe the kinds of changes that need to be made in any system, if it is to be resilient. Resilience often gets a bad wrap. I was hired once to engage with a group inside an organization to talk about resilience through a series of sessions. They had been deemed "essential" workers during Covid, and the management decided they needed this training.
I experienced alot of push back and anger in each session. At the end of the second session, I just asked what that was all about. They told me stories of how, throughout the Covid lockdown, and in the months during and after, the management had told them to just be more resilient and get back to work . . .as though their practices, expectations, goals, and learning were all that needed to shift in response to the upheaval and uncertainty of Covid.
Many people think resilience means a system can work like a rubber band: When it's stretched or stressed, it just relaxes eventually and goes back to its original state.
That's not possible in a complex system. And for that system to have the resilient to adapt, of course the people need to be resilience so they can adapt. When we work with an organization on system change, we talk about the "level" of change: Policy, Procedural, Practices, and (only then) Personnel. Personnel can do what they can do, but as long as the other three pieces remain static, Personnel actually can encounter greater stress in their efforts to change.
I'd love to chat with you sometime about your next steps to see where this all goes next. Thanks for sharing these ideas with the world!!! (and i'm sorry this got so long!)