Weeknote #686: antifragile
During the uncertain times, such as this with corona pandemic, we tend to search solace from various patterns; research, information and disinformation. Our brain tries to look for patterns also where those might not be seen, looking to make sense of the chaos.
One of the frequent terms thrown around to rescue at the uncertainty seems to be resilience. Dictionary definition for resilience is “returning to the original form or position after being bent, compressed, or stretched.” Bouncing back to normal is a good thing, right? Cities, people and societies bend under distress but fairly quickly return back to original, “normal” form of operations after the stress factors are removed.
But what if returning back to the original form isn’t really the point anymore? What if returning back to the original form actually means traveling backwards, to a point where the world around us has already moved on? In that case resilience isn’t enough.
Instead of resilience we should target for anti-fragility when coping with uncertainty. Anti-fragility is originally coined by Nicholas Nassim Taleb as “the antidote to Black Swans”. The Black Swan Theory (by Taleb as well) describes the events that comes as a surprise and has major effect in the world. As the nature of Black Swan events is “unknown unknowns” those cannot be predicted, but should be prepared for.
Whereas resilient things bounce back to the normal state anti-fragile things gain and grow from disorder as those are forced to restructure themselves. For example, a candle in the wind aims to resilience and relative normality until the wind blows too hard and the candle is put out. A campfire instead is an anti-fragile system, gaining more heat and spreading fire from the wind gusts.
What does this all have to do with organisations and pandemic? With uncertain times like these, there’s no going back to “normal”. During the pandemic our ways of working, social relationships and consumption habits have changed. For good. What needs to be found are the rules and restrictions of “new normal” and how should we operate in it.
In terms of global versus local reach of our work, I’ve had the privilege to participate in two events recently:
Virtual Regenerative Summit 2020 is a global series of talks and interviews with an exciting lineup of people from a wide variety of firms leading the charge for a better, more sustainable world. I had the pleasure to participate with along speakers from Sustainable Ocean Alliance, As You Sow.org, Nia Impact Capital, IDEO and many others. You have to sign up to access the whole series but it’s free and with no commitments. 👉🏼 Sign up here
z-topia is a webinar-format talk show where designers and artists are invited to muse, speculate and poke at articles and projects they’ve found on the internet. It’s an hour of asking questions and coming up with serious and silly ideas, hosted by Phil Balagtas of the Design Futures Initiative, also known as the nonprofit behind Primer Conferences.
I had the privilege to visit an episode with old friends from almost two decades ago — Ben Bashford and Ben Lowdon. The episode streamed this weekend is already available on Vimeo here. Have a look for a discussion about curated futures as a service from LOT 2046 to obscure Japanese micro-mobility from the 1980s to virtual influences. Again, have a look here for the show, along with many other episodes with a great list of visitors.
What happened at the studio this week
Shakti wrapped up 2 exciting projects and focused on something internal this week. Some new & exciting things lined up already in meantime.
Joska has been reviewing and interviewing to get the overview.
Satu has been conducting several customer interviews for a client project. What she learnt while at it was, that customer interviews are actually very good method for gathering signals and emerging patterns through which one can understand the behavioural change.
Kenneth is starting to wrap up a project and thinking about future directions for the client.
Teppo is amazed how fast the design industry can switch design tools when momentum starts. Sketch+Abstract is turning into Figma fast. Feeling bad for S+A, who are fighting an uphill battle against changing tides.
Topias has been streamlining the e-shopping experience.
many others seem to be quite occupied with many things,
and me, Sami, I’ve been neck deep in helping leaders to reach clarity of vision, visualising new business and ecosystems as well as developing my personal resilience toolkit. And putting the newfound wisdom into practice through oscillation of highs and lows.
Five things we read this week
1. Fresh out of Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland, Mari Suoheimo’s dissertation Approaching Wicked Problems in Service Design is worth a read. 👉🏼 Download the PDF here
2. In a highly unexpected turn of events, and under international pressure to do more to address global warming, Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission , and President of the People’s Republic of China has pledged China to be carbon neutral by 2060. 👉🏼 New York Times writes what this means.
3. Apple has designed a three-piece facemask for their internal use, addressing both protection and accessibility issues with tenacity only expected from Cupertino.
4. Speaking of Apple, two former employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno have raised $30m to build the next iPhone betting that the time is right for a new, less invasive way to interface with computers. “We’re tech optimists at heart,” says Bongiorno, who is Humane’s CEO. “But we believe it’s also time to question everything to build something better.” We concur, and applaud the effort.
5. Philosopher AI tells you one of the many reasons to wear a mask is to hide oneself from others in society. We for one welcome our new GPT-3 overlords.
Weeknotes are what happened at our studio this week. This week’s weeknote was curated by Sami Niemelä
Sami is a strategic designer at Nordkapp, who is practicing personal antifragility and social distancing through a holistic movement practice, riding bikes downhill and soon-to-come skiing season up north.
