Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Prevention : Resilience as Problems : Dilemmas (ver. 1)
As promised, I'll be posting bits of works-in-progress about the framing Rod and I are tasked with. This was the result of our conversations and investigations this morning. I'll post some other things that came out of today separately.
Fundamentally this is an expansion of Jake's proposition, prevention:resilience as problems:dilemmas. For me it also defines honestly a position on wellbeing and it's relation to resilience. Please respond in comments!
Science and technology will open up a world of new possibilities and offer us much over the next decade. It will solve some problems that trouble us and make us aware of yet new ones. But science and technology cannot solve the challenge of transforming our bodies and lifestyles. For transforming bodies and lifestyles is not a problem, it is a dilemma—multiple nested dilemmas. Dilemmas cannot be solved by definitions ; they persist and need to be managed. We can however look to science and technology to give us tools to help manage these dilemmas for ourselves, our families, our organizations, our healthcare systems, and our society. Utlimately, science and technology may produce new tools that enable us to manage this dilemma in new ways. The tide of chronic disease, of diseases of aging exacerbated by inequality, are not something that we will prevent. Our collective health profile and burden of disease will persist through the decade. We can try, but in the next decade we will have formidable consequences to reckon with even in the healthiest futures we can plausibly imagine. In the face of the inevitable, resilience is a critical extension of the struggles that abound today around prevention and behavior change. We can build the capacity individually, organizationally and socially to be resilient in the face of this challenge—in fact doing so is a path to genuine wellbeing.
Wellbeing is a central topic of our day. We encounter it everywhere—at work, at the grocery store, on billboard, on television, in conversation. But what does it mean to be well? People experience wellbeing even in the presence of disease—under the right circumstances people can avoid the feelings of “illness” even in the presence of disease. But there are dangers in focusing on this in a vacuum, without the larger picture of all of our bodies, sick and well, individual and collective, living side by side. A colleague of ours once said, "If you're not building capacity, you're building incapacity." Are wellbeing offerings building resilience at multiple levels? Or are they offering band-aids: short-sighted fixes that do not address the underlying causality of illness or disease? The question we should be asking, the question that we are asking in Health Horizons over the next year is, "How can the systems that support our health and manage our undeniable illness be resilient, and how can individuals, networks and communities foster the personal resilience to experience well-being despite the tide of chronic disease?"
The focus on multi-level systems AND people (individual and collective) I think is one of the most critical points for our stake-in-the-ground perspective. Individual empowerment (and its attendant burden) is different—included but not sufficient for effecting resilient transformations of our bodies and lifestyles.