Meeting of Resilient Futures Custodians and Partners
On April 2 practitioners from diverse backgrounds came together from around the world to discuss the prospects of collaborating using resilience thinking.
Although the backgrounds of the participants were diverse, they did have one thing in common - they had all worked alongside Larry Quick in their respective fields and were struck by how the various versions of his resilient thinking models made sense in an increasingly complex and interlinked world.
The group agreed to form the Resilient Futures partnership with each of the members taking a key role as a stream leader for a particular body of work.
In three days of intense thinking a range of topics were discussed:
- Why the current urban and community planning models no longer work
- Why strategic risk asessment models are failing
- Why Larry couldn’t get anyone to attend an event predicting subprime and how to manage it in 2005 (2 years before the meltdown)
- Discontinuous change events
- Creative destruction events
- Interconnectivity and plexus of networked knowledge systems
- Why the current approach to running corporate entities is unsustainable
- Limits on infrastructure and infrastructure planning
- Catalytic events
- Potential for global commodity shortages in food, water, oil and power
- Why part of what students learn in year 1 of a course will be redundant by the time they reach year 3 of the same course
In amongst some very serious topics, there was also some light hearted discussion, including comments from Todd that he was enjoying the Black Swans book, but had never seen a white swan and therefore concluded that white swans didn’t exist. He was rebuffed with the proposition that West Australia’s indigenous population always knew about black swans, and it was only the white folks in the northern hemisphere who assumed that all swans were white. (Perth is the home of black swans and a black swan appears on the Western Australian flag).
It also emerged that all founding members are or have been musicians in some shape or form at some point in their lives, but the group was unable to conclude as to whether any insight can be gained from this piece of trivia.
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