Crisis = Opportunity

Here in Australia (and around the world) we have seen crisis after crisis recently. In the last 6 months or so we have seen a horrific fire season that flattened whole towns and vast areas of wilderness. We have seen a global pandemic that has devastated lives around the world. We have seen the Black Lives Matter movement sparked by events overseas, but now shining a long overdue light on the lives of our Indigenous people and their often horrific treatment by law enforcement, and society in general. So far, 2020 has been a year of constant crisis. 

It's an old cliche that every crisis is an opportunity in disguise. It usually pops up on awful inspirational posters or the social media posts of people who look insufferably smug. Sadly, it seems that those posters and smug social media folks are right. A crisis provides a shock to the system. It breaks the existing order. It forces a rebuilding and that rebuilding is where the opportunity is, if we can seize it.

In the midst of each of these crises you hear the voices - people calling for things to go back to normal. People looking to rebuild their homes and communities just the way they were before the fires. People wanting their pre-Covid lives back, just the way they were. This is perfectly understandable and natural. People have been battered beyond belief by what has happened. People have lost homes, jobs, everything. The fact that they want time to run backwards and this terrible event not to have happened is natural. Seeing someone standing in the smoking wreckage of their home and wishing it was back the way it was is totally understandable.

But just rebuilding, comforting though it is, does not allow us to seize the opportunity that the crisis presents us. To do that we need to do something courageous. In fact we need to do two courageous things. First, we need to look back at what we had before in an objective way. When we look back we tend to see only the good things. When we look back at the house we lost, we see the happy memories we formed there. When we look back at the way we used to work, we remember the good things - the conversations in the office kitchen, the trips out for lunch with colleagues.

What we don't remember so much are the things we didn't like. The way the layout of the house was never quite right. The way its design allowed embers to enter the roof cavity and fire to take hold. The way we used to spend hours of our lives commuting and had poor work/life balance. The way systemic racism permeates pretty much every aspect of of our society.

When we look back, we need to see the bad as well as the good, so when we build again, we can emphasise the things that we liked, and try to reduce the things we didn't. Maybe our building standards need to change to make houses less prone to fire. Maybe we need to rebuild in a different place that is less fire prone. Maybe we need to work closer to home or even partially from home so we can maintain our lovely short commute. Maybe we need to deal with systemic racism in our institutions.

We need to learn from what did and didn't work in the past so we can learn those lessons and build something better, not just rebuild exactly the way it was before.

The second courageous thing we need to do is even harder. We need to look at the crisis that we have just lived through and learn from it. We can't just put it behind us and move on. Our response to the crisis can teach us a lot about the sort of world we want to build.

In the fire crisis we lived through earlier this year, we saw how communities came together to support each other. We saw people volunteer to help each other. We saw amazing generosity. We saw the absolute best of humanity. And some of the worst as well, with scammers defrauding fire victims. What can we learn from our response to the crisis? What can we build into the towns and communities as we rebuild, to encourage the best in people? How do we encourage that sense of community and looking out for each other?

The Black Lives Matter movement is forcing white people like me to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and how that has impacted on people of colour around the world. In confronting these truths, how do we build a future that is free of the systemic racism of the past? How do we build a future where voices of colour are encouraged and respected?

In the current Covid crisis, we are learning a lot as well - that remote working works, for a start. That we maybe don’t need to be in the office such long hours to be a productive member of the team. That not commuting hours each day gives us more time to spend with our families. And, on the other hand, that working from home blurs the line between work and home and encourages us to be always at work. That we need social contact to be really happy, and so on.

Every crisis does present an opportunity, but in order to seize that opportunity, we must be courageous. We must look back at where we were before the crisis and try to identify what was working well, and what was not. We also need to make the really courageous step and see what the crisis and our response to that crisis tells us. Did we learn anything that we want to keep with us in the future? Did we discover something about what really mattered to us during the crisis that we would like to retain?

As we rebuild from the crises we have faced so far this year (and the ones that will come in the future), will we be courageous and seize the opportunity to build something better? Or will we take the easy path and simply rebuild, just the way things were?