Institute For The Future

In the pursuit of Well-Being, Resilience and Multigenerational Health

 

 

What's the point of systemic resilience if it doesn't make us well? What's the point of securing well-being and resilience in the next decade if life will suck even more a century from now? And how do we make all of that happen?

 

 

 

There were two sets of threes that came out of the conversation between Rod, Jamais and myself this week, and I'd like to expand on them here… essentially they are shorthand answers to the above question, and I think they need to be more elaborate to have a real chance of fitting into our narrative for HH.

 

 

 

The first set of three is an alignment with ten year forecast, and the larger framing of resilience at IFTF. Resilience is a beautiful thing, but in TYF they've decided to install it in a tryptic of mutually reinforcing (not exclusive or even competitive) goals: resilience, happiness, and legacy. Resilience: we should be able to withstand shocks, repair ourselves when damaged and improve ourselves when necessary. Happiness: I think this is meant in the broad "pursuit of happiness" sense--resilience should feel oppressive and all efforts should build on positive emotionality. Legacy: we should be good ancestors. Again, these aren't to be looked at as trade-offs, but as each is strengthened they all benefit, creating real good.

 

 

 

Now, I think this language (resilience, happiness, legacy) is good for TYF, if anything it fits a nice chord for the power-trio of Jamais, Jane and Kathi, respectively. But I don't think this is quite what we're looking for in health. For one thing, for us to make sense of our sales-word "well-being" we need to distinguish it from happiness, as a state larger than, encompassing and more diverse than happiness. But I think that in fact "well-being" is an excellent substitution for our purposes. Neither am I entirely happy with the word "legacy," I don't know really if this is a wholly personal or partly topical reaction but it seems that Rod shared some of my misgivings. However it stands in for the long-term, and I think that is important for us to insist upon. Well-being isn't synchronic, and we won't solve our problems if we focus on baby boomers to the exclusion of children. We're dealing with multi-generational issues. So I propose substituting, for our purposes, "multigenerational health." Wordier, but accurate--I'm very much still open to wordsmithing. So my translated parallel would be "resilience, well-being, and multigenerational health."

 

 

 

I think this kind of earlier harmonization with other programs is good for us, so we're synergizing and amplifying each other's core messages, rather than… hm, imitating or avoiding each other. It also gives us a framework for linking well-being with resilience in a way that doesn't outright diss our client's fascination with the term, but push it into a context of good-but-not-sufficient… our stock in trade. It also puts both right beside our institutional purpose: to inject future thinking into whatever topic we touch. Thinking about your employees' well-being in the next quarter is better than not, I suppose, but that effort will be fuller and more effective if that is done with an eye to them in the next decade, to their children, to our grandchildren. Not because they will still work for you then, although they might, but because even if they don't, their neighbor might, and their neighbor's health is linked to that current employee.

 

 

 

Something like that. I'm jonesing to hear more of the argument TYF will make about that mutual reinforcement, and listen for ways for us to make it more specific (that's also what our team does) and more relevant (our perpetual task).

 

 

 

The second triad was Jamais' three-part redux of the activities that increase resilience (apart from designing systems to include more of his principles). Reducing fragility, perceiving risk, and cushioning catastrophe. Again, his words, and I know Rod wants to smith them. Reducing fragility covers a stunning amount of ground, from treating existing ailments to prevention, choice architecture, etc. Perceiving risk is well-worn ground for us… much of health science discovery, especially the stuff that seems to fascinate us, is about perceiving risks to, within, around our bodies. Catastrophe again is maybe not quite the right word for our audiences, but emergencies need to be dealt with gracefully, systems need to fail gracefully, and the aforementioned risks need to be seriously acknowledged early.

 

 

 

But as Rod, Rachel, Vivian and I played with different answers to the question, "What does S & T do for us to transform bodies and lifestyles?" these are definitely large buckets of purposeful activity. Furthermore it illuminates some places to stretch ourselves, and go where we've really wanted to. See, MANY of our forecasts focus around perceiving risk. We've done whole projects on the subject. But we often get tripped up about how to represent fragility and the possibilities for reducing it (think of the struggle we had at harmonizing the doomy statistics on last year's map with the bright shiny intervention examples). We also have trouble fitting in unexpected calamities in the crush of all the expected calamities in our field. I think it would be worthwhile pushing ourselves in these directions, as a specific way of thinking about resilience as it relates to our forecasts.

 

 

 

I think a good approach to the "what does science do for us" axis would be to pull apart these three into more specific sub-categories… I started to do that but not yet happy enough with it to share. More on those later.