How fast can you adapt — Reluctant resilience in a global crises

Have you ever opened the fridge and before you even notice you catch a jar that was falling off a shelf? For a moment, you feel like a superhero, like a super-sense has just kicked in and you have a responsibility to humanity to use it for good!

Our amazing brains absorb more information than we will ever know. Our brains are wired to identify patterns. Once a pattern has been identified and filed away, it no longer needs our mental resources, and it fades from our conscious thought.

What happens when there is a fundamental change to the patterns we have adjusted to, like a global pandemic that removes almost all of the normality from our lives? We experience cognitive overload, or we freak out, our anxiety spikes, we feel overwhelmed and panicked.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the biggest crisis we’ve faced in a generation. In times of uncertainty, how do we make constant change part of our lives, how fast can we adapt?

Owning the grey

Sir David Attenborough has dedicated his life to making sure we understand the scale, depth fragility, and beauty of our planet. Thanks to him we know that animals live in some of the most inhospitable places on earth, from the searing heat of the Sahara to the freezing arctic and even the nuclear disaster zone of Chernobyl.

What attracts species to inhospitable places, why did penguins, for example, decide an arctic wasteland was the right place to make their home? Whatever their reasons, they’ve been rewarded for their adaptability and resilience.

As an Experience Designer, my industry exists in a state of constant flux; change is the job. Adaptability is at the heart of every action, and teams are designed to move fast and work together. We do it because timelines are short, details are thin, expectations are high, and the next project will be the same.

It took penguins 3 million years to evolve into masters of their landscape. They had to learn how to survive cold winters and raise their young. Like those hardly little birds, we need to develop the tools to help us adapt to uncertainty now and in the future.

Superhumans

The Replacements is your typical sports movie; a bunch of no-hopers is given a second chance at a Football career. Their success depends on their hero (Keanu Reeves) overcoming his demons and leading them to victory, and after a mild stumble, he does just that with a last-minute touchdown…oh and he gets the girl too.

This is what you start watching when you are locked in your house for too long.

Someone smart once said that you should never meet your heroes because you’ll discover they’re human beings. Steve Jobs the hero of modern business was a deeply flawed human who failed completely and publically. Hero’s didn’t become hero’s because their path was clear and obvious. They owned the greyness of their situation and made the best decision they could and It worked out most of the time. The stories that are told after the fact and leave out the gory details, this make us think that heroes are born not made.

Maybe we have been trained to wait for a hero to come and lead us through the grey times when there is no clear answer, someone smarter, luckier, or more talented than us. COVID has been a trigger for people to own the grey. They are finding ways of using their skills and resources to help out, distilleries are producing hand sanitizer and farmers are donating their unused crops to feeding schemes. They are using their skills to help out and this makes a complex problem a little less complex.

Quiet the noise

When a cardiologist tells you to sort out your life there is very little room for negotiation. I was 23, and my blood pressure of 110/180, my diet of beer, and Fontana’s Chicken had caught up with me and I needed a drastic change.

What followed was a diet where rice was the highlight, but 3 months and 17 kgs later I was back on track. My carefree approach to my health was however incinerated, I couldn’t think of myself as indestructible anymore. The experience changed my habits and gave me a little scare, but it also made me realise that I was capable of change.

We are facing a crisis on a global scale and in a crisis options, shrink and apathy melts away, we’re forced to focus. There is no fighting the change, all we are needed to figure out is how we will respond.

Overnight our countries had to rethink their economic and healthcare strategies. The private and public sectors united under a single purpose. Our houses became offices, schools, and gyms. Need stimulated innovation, concepts to repurpose public spaces like turning FNB Soccer City into a 1500 bed field hospital were unthinkable a few weeks ago.

A Small World

We are more interconnected than we thought. In South Africa, we watched Corona slowly creep closer, China, then Italy, Europe, and eventually South Africa. It didn’t take much notice of borders, distance, wealth, or power. It wasn’t an abstract disease that existed online or in the news, something that happened to those people over there, it’s happened here and now, and threatens us and the people we care about.

Corona has been a reminder of the fragility and the importance of our humanity. Take care of yourself and everyone around you was the message from world leaders including our President Cyril Ramaphosa. The magnitude of Corona made us shift our collective attention to the health and wellbeing of our entire society.

Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s — Nathan Hill, The Nix

Momentum

When I was 11 I slid into a tackle during a soccer game and dislocated my knee. I was young and my knee healed in a few months, but it took years for me to have the confidence to throw myself into a tackle again.

Recovering from Corona is going to take time, we still don’t know what the personal and economic cost of this crisis will be. Families have lost loved ones, business have closed their doors and people have lost their jobs. This pandemic will pass, but the scars will be left behind.

In South Africa, the second wave of COVID-19 is going to be an exacerbation of preexisting social vulnerabilities. The crisis has given us a blueprint for fighting big complex issues:

• Owning the grey. Owning change will make us resilient to future crises.
• Superhumans. Using your skills to help out makes a complex problem a little less complex.
• Quiet the noise. Everyone working together with a common purpose.
• A small world. We are more interconnected than we thought, take care of yourself and everyone around you.

Momentum has been created and the contrast between where we were, where we are, and where we would like to be is present in everyone’s mind. Now more than ever people have the focus, support, and confidence to contribute to the health of society. By building on the ideas of others we can scale social innovation and strengthen our society.

A devastating crisis has given us the opportunity to rethink and reshape our world.

Time to get to work.

Find out more about Pique and the work we’re doing at www.pique.africa