Systems Thinking for New Zealand

For my first assignment I decided to focus on New Zealand to demonstrate my understanding of the things we learned in our first courses.  For this I made my first Prezi, and a report.

When like minds come together to discuss resilience in Auckland

Last night I attended the Hikurangi Foundation’s first Open Space Forum ‘New Zealand & the Next Industrial Age’ with Rowan Douglas (Willis Research Network) who gave a rough overview of his impression of New Zealand and the Insurance Industries take on how we have managed the Christchurch earthquake and what this new age of extremes will be like to operate in.  By extremes he means the ever increasing rate of natural disasters, economic instability, new technology, etc.

He pointed out that our Institutions were set up with the aim of achieving ‘efficiency’ but that the time has now come where we need ‘resilience’ (a.k.a. sustainability).  According to him, the Insurance Industry is in a state of rediscovery and has the challenge of learning about and deciding how to manage extremes, e.g. do we acquire the funds to assist societies after extreme turmoil using local or international schemes, and do they come from public or private sources?

Apparently, the Industry bases most of its operational guidelines (e.g. how much money to have on standby) on scientific data (good to hear!) acquired through computer modeling.  He didn’t spend too much time on this point, but went on to say that the Industry is currently in restructuring mode and outlined all of the reasons why New Zealand could be a model for the rest of the world in more ways than one. 

The Open Space Forum created 6 topics of conversation and after we had 30 minutes to chat amongst ourselves the groups shared a short summary.  The topics were:

·         Building resilient (proactive) communities: Main points were that we have to get more community engagement.  NZers lack knowledge of their local assets and attributes, which is a scary thought.  They also lack a conscience of how bad overseas conditions are and we also lack it on regional matters because we read the low-quality national news more than local newspapers.  

·         The use of legislation for resilience:  Some have realized that economic growth is not the same as wellbeing, but the conscious paradigm shift needs to occur both for public and private sectors.

·         The role data could play in communities and the ethics about its openness and source: organizations become sustainable and resilient only slowly, so they need to be able to measure that they are heading in the right direction along the way.  Seeing how data responds and organizes is very powerful and communities should have this ability (e.g. Whistler does it!).  At the moment government and business uses this tactic, and all the data that’s collected is framed for their use only.  Data and models are only useful when they are applicable.  Also, do we use their outputs to inform us or blindly?  Quite quietly, one woman spoke and not many picked up this gem: she said, ‘there is value in collecting data on peoples values to inform us’ and it just made me think back to the my favourite concept of ‘we should be voting on issues, not a popularity contest’ and the idea that probably founded our current political system i.e. we do not need to vote on issues if we know peoples values.  I bet there hasn’t been a hell of a lot of research (good and recent research I mean) into what NZers values are.  NZers are quite a diverse bunch you know?!  I must look into this.

·         Effective public-private-partnerships:  We often have public sector trying to do the private sector thing and failing but the private sector probably has to have its paradigm shift first i.e. what’s the purpose of business (hint: not just to make money like a greedy bugger anymore! Come up with something better!)

·         The national security of New Zealand and its clean green brand: this is the one I went to, and met a bunch of really interesting people. The main points that really resonated with me were: NZ’s long skinny shape needs to be considered for security and resilience reasons.  What industries do we need to be self-sufficient and resilient?  Would we be better off investing in new spread out infrastructure than upgrading our old one?  It’s vital that our current top-down heavy approach is matched with bottom-up approaches.  A collective fund (such as the EQ levy) would be helpful to finance after extreme events.  The one question we didn’t get to but I wanted to discuss was: What needs to happen to speed up adoption of good ideas?

What I took from the evening was the following:

·         Great conversations can happen when you put people who are interested in the same things in a room and let them choose which topics to discuss and contribute to.

·         A first glimpse into the perspective that the Insurance Industry has in regards to the future and its place in it.

·         Industries are all gagging to have indicators or tools to measure progress.  I am quite sure that we can still do better to develop an applicable measuring tool for how sustainable something is yet, and I’m keener than ever to dedicate some time into the subject.

Reflections after the second Block Course

I have just returned home after spending 3 days in Raglan for the second sustainable practice block course.  I really enjoyed staying at Solscape - its fantastic views over the harbour (with gorgeous colours at sunrise and sunset) and voluptuous greenery made me feel as relaxed as if I were on holiday.  The learning was good fun and the people made it even better.  The first day and a half was spent on the community/business paper we are embarking on, and the latter half was used to teach us more about the power of social media... so in the next set of posts will likely feature these two topics predominantly.  However, I've noticed its turned into an info-dump at times, so I'll start popping in a few more purely reflective posts (like this one) to get more out of it.

What are the predominant thoughts I'm coming away with from this block course?  I'm definitely feeling more confident!  Steve's 'anything-is-fantastic, the-more-spontaneous-the-better and learn-your-own-way' thinking pattern is rubbing off on me more an more and I feel all the better all the time.  I can feel my true creativity coming back too, which I realise now is one of my strongest assets.  I've identified my 3 month goal (the length of these next papers) is to pretty much finish up all my assignment requirements, but they are the minor detail in the intention I'm putting forward to just practice applying all the things I have learned (whether they fit into the modules or not).  A reoccurring theme that has come up when I've dedicated time to thinking about what I want, and that is to have my fingers in a lot of pies.  Any time in my life - if there were literally(!) many flavours of pies in front of me - all I wanted was to have a taste of each.  I can confidently confess that I am a generalist who loves the big picture overview and its variety! So, what I'm going to do - apart from my assignments - is aim to help out all the other people in my class (and honorary members beyond) in lots of little ways.  A usual classroom wouldn't reward that, and that's probably why it took me so long to figure out.

Little extra comment:  On Sunday morning, whilst I was out at golf, I received a txt from mum to call her, and she told me that her dad passed away over night (daytime 5/5/12 in germany).  Fortunately, he had had a nice day with her sister (lunch and a visit to Oma's grave), and went to sleep just 5 minutes after returning to his room.  I was a little surprised at the news, but mum was so good about it that I didn't feel horrible.  We knew he wanted to go.  Oma passed away just under a year ago after battling cancer, and they had been together for over 60 years!  Later in the day I spent some time processing it, and the cliche feelings of appreciating time on this earth came on.  Mark and I went out for dinner to toast Opa and got talking about our future options.  Afterwards, when we were home, I showed him a really interesting video I thought would be quite fitting for him to see (sustainability focussed of course haha!) - and the experience was amazing... I had always shown him this-or-that video, but in this one the message was so that things really clicked into place for him.  We are on the same page now more so than ever before.  Thank you Opa for kicking it off! Prost!