Presenter: John Maeda, Chief Technology Officer, Everbridge 


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: The Secret Relationship Between Resilience And Design

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Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk

Brainstorm Design 2022 - Design Talk: The Secret Relationship Between Resilience And Design


until very recently, most corporations were run with a focus on efficiency, meaning there's not a lot of slack in the system when the world is stable, this is a system that works, but rapid or large changes can reveal risks and vulnerabilities as we saw in the pandemic organizations found themselves on the back foot in the face of unprecedented change and the leaders of those organizations had to react as quickly as possible. Technologist and designer, john Maeda suggests, the answer is to leverage design to build resilience, the ability to bounce back and transform the bad news. You can't build resilience without facing and experiencing adversity. The good news Design has a central role to play in building resilience because of its ability to guide us through change in a way that minimizes fear to share his insight into the relationship between resilience and design. Please welcome john Maeda, Chief technology Officer ever bridge. Hi, I uh, we all went through the val Casey moment just now. I'm very moved by it because I've known valve for quite a while when you think about people who have been in design, who have fought for design as a good force, looking for design for good over here, Benedict. Um, but also someone who saw the SDG goals before they came, that's about Casey. So just so we're all aware, I'm not sure of those of you who've known her work. Uh, the fact that she's doing it at the scale of walmart is such a big deal and I say that because when you think about this idea of resilience, it isn't an easy topic because it means that you have had to go through adversity. So que my slide up there. I'm not on a zoom so I can't hit share. Um So for the resilience tech report, what I did is I invited a calligrapher uh to take the word adversity and make it into an am a gram. So if you see it one way it reads adversity and the other way it reads resilience in many senses. Resilient leaders that you meet have gotten there unfortunately through the through the journey of adversity. And one thing I've been thinking a lot about is how design relates to resilience in a very simple way. Um I call this my F. Word thing. Don't worry. It's okay. It's safe for work. But design as we know it is this sort of function and form thing. You know function form. Who had a hard time understanding what the heck form was. Can you raise your hand man. That was hard to understand, wasn't it? Um So function and form together intersection you know baby is designed but when it comes to resilience there's also two other F words. One is flight and the other is fight uh flight is that McGill a the lizard brain saying run away. Bad. Um But there's another response that we have of runaway band but can we kill it instead also not great too. But we know it's built into our system flight or fight and it's how we respond to fear. So we all know, remember when this drawing was created, it made us pretty scary, right? And was like, what is that? I don't like that worked really well. Willie Dunn cbc uh remember when we went out, we put on these masks and like, oh my gosh, what's going to happen? I don't know, right? Let's do it. Right? So we sit too fight instead of sort of hiding. And so flight versus fight is interesting because um, emotional response of us humans, uh, fits into six boxes according to Eichmann's early model. Um, and what I find interesting is there's fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, anger and enjoyment. And if you wonder why you're not happy that much, It's because enjoyment is just 1/6 of the wheels. So it is kind of precious and important in that way, Right? And when you think about it, you know how we love Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Um, I love this a lot because if you think about 56 of the wheel, it goes to the bottom is the safety level and at the very top, uh, is the hedonistic level. But mortality lives at the bottom. Whereas at the very top, we have the fun stuff that what's called Mattering like, hey, I matter kind of thing. And so this very top of the pyramid is where most of design usually gets to sit. Um, but what I wanted to do was go down to this level. The mortality level. It's why I switched into the world of first responder communications and its physical security management to understand what happens at this level. Because you can't be happy if you're not well as we all experience ourselves. So one phrase that I came into by going deep into supply chain, which also val brought up is this phrase by Yosi Shefi at M. I. T. Supply chain center. It's really good. Once you hear it, it like sticks it's be risk averse, not risk averse on a positive for a second. You know be risk versus if you understand risk it becomes less scary, right? Um And so risk averse just means I'm not gonna engage risk first means I'm going to try to understand this and take it on. It's a more courageous ability Now in my looking back at this lower level of mortality pandemic turns out to be a theme that a lot of experts have been talking about. If you look at the World Economic Forum's risk index for the last 25 years. Um pandemic was really big in 2007 and then it went away. Um so for the last 25 years pandemic hasn't gotten to that top level. And as an illustration HBR had a special issue in 2006 on the pandemic at the time early stars and Approed said should a pandemic emerge, it would become the single greatest threat to business continuity and could remain so for up to 18 months pretty good. Huh? Um But the cover story of Hbr Harvard Business review was not the pandemic, It was how to be a great number two because as you know to some that's a little more important. Um but it goes to show how being risk averse made a difference for many companies who were essentially ready now for those of you who are in the risk world or who aren't. Um the risk vocabulary is changing because of the pandemic. It used to be that there's this idea called boom boom occurs and there's what happens before it and after it you have before boom and after boom and what happens is with boom is a boom usually lasts a certain amount of time, how many of you have gone through an earthquake before earthquake, right, earthquake occurs and then a few, it goes away right, Hopefully correct. Um The pandemic is interesting because it came and you were thinking like an earthquake is gonna go away. Um but it turns out that it didn't go away the next day or the next week or the next month and so it lasted as we know for years and so t was very long and then there's the decay constant to that bad thing, it's usually like stomps immediately, but tao keeps sloping on and on and on. And so the idea of being risk averse, it means being aware that there is left of boom and right of boom and you're not sure when boom might end and the pandemic has given us this vocabulary. So I've gone deep into natural hazards because I'm in this field and I'm trying to understand, you know, what should I be afraid of and what should you not? Uh And by being risk averse, I'm much less afraid of all the terrible things that occur. So I hope to give you that knowledge in this short amount of time we are together. First of all, when experts talk about the pandemic, they'll always talk about millions of people dying. It turns out that millions of people die don't die all the time. It's a very rare thing, so if you think about in the last 20 years people didn't die at the scale of millions, Do you know of an earthquake or volcano eruption or something bad occurring a flood, hurricane, whatever. Most times people haven't died that often. Um they die underneath the million dollar mark. But this line is the pandemic, we shot up two million The roughly seven events In the last century that involved people dying in millions. And it turns out that the famous H1N1, what we call the Spanish flu is when 50 million people died. Now, I don't know if you know this, but the flu shot that we get every year is still in place because of that spanish flu, they're all connected And so we're gonna be experiencing this you were experiencing right now and perpetuity in a similar way. Um, but this pandemic is still very odd and it's why wearing a mask makes a good idea because in reality when I took this graph, it was, it was in february or it was in March. That was where the mark was and then, um, one and then it just bumped up in the last three months we lost another million people. So it's a very unusual event, this pandemic, but similar to the spanish flu. Now I'm bringing depressing stuff. I know, but design loves interesting problems. Right? Um, so by understanding hazards, I came to realize something that may be obvious to some of you, but again, I'm giving you things that like, oh my gosh, I knew that, but I didn't know it at all. Uh, first of all, there are six kinds of bad things that happen on earth. Five of them are related to the climate. It's an interesting, so there's the biological stuff, climate, logical stuff that involves hot and cold, geophysical land stuff, neurological stuff. Air stuff and hydrological water stuff. These all are impacted by the climate that's like remember the fear, the kind of emotion thing that's like 56 are to do with the climate, there's also extraterrestrial, which is kind of cool. That doesn't involve aliens. I loved asteroids that's natural hazards nature does that then there is what happens because we're people and we do dumb things to other people or to other things like monuments and things like that. And so this is the sort of the human human caused hazards category. Now I have good news about dying. Um, again, after looking at all this dying stuff, um, this is how we die in general. These are top global causes of death. Do you see these red ones here that are cardiovascular cancer, respiratory, that's like the top four? Um, on the right here, I plotted out how often you die of a car accident. So don't worry, you're not gonna die from that most likely you can die from your heart feeling. So why is that positive? It lets you think of life a little differently? Right. Um, so stepping back whether it's your body or whether it's your your your company or industry, the thing to keep in mind is that um, the before boom and after boom is how you become much more risk averse. And there's a great piece by BCG martin Reeves on the topic. You can like QR code that if you like, It's about a concept called the all weather company. It companies like it's like an all weather tire, it goes through bad things or good things and it sort of still is okay, it's robust and the whole thesis is similar. It's a fact of knowing what happens before during and after and that becomes possible because of course data is available and data in large quantities and to be able to process at high speeds and that's why I'm involved in technology of how do you mitigate disasters, predict them and things like that? Which is I believe it's an important thing to do. Okay. Um so one of the favorite things I've found in my journey of understanding resilience and recognizing that we do all die, remember Heart number one, right. I gotta go jogging. Okay everyone um Heart I found this great piece from London School of Economics on the thing that people say before they die that they wish. And so um you know this this this is a phrase I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself. Not the life others expected of me. That's pretty good. Huh? I have four more of these things that said there. I'd like us to read each one of them together when that shows up. Okay, ready for that? It's really easy. Go. Mm hmm. Mhm, mm hmm. And the last one. So think of that. Well that was 16 of that happy expression. So I think resilience is a topic that is tied to adversity and adversity can be overcome if a little bit happier it turns out. So I wish you all happiness for the rest of this event and thanks for attention. Someone's playing