LEAH ZAIDI

Foresight lead at Accelerated By Design

What dangers has the pandemic revealed?

“When we think about what could potentially lie ahead, we have to think about the lessons that this is teaching us in terms of our own nature and what that means going forward for the systems that we designed and the kind of reality that we bring about. How do we design in such a way that we are minimizing harm so that we, in the face of future crises, are able to respond with the more positive versions of ourselves? We are seeing some examples of positive signals emerge and some examples of transformation taking place as well. For instance, in South Korea, they’re thinking about how to use the recovery around COVID-19 to create a more sustainable, more green-oriented society.”

How can we become more resilient?

“We need to think about how our reality is different from other people’s reality and how to reconcile that. How do we find ways to alleviate the pressures that others are experiencing so that we can ensure that they have a voice and we can empower them to design our futures together? COVID-19 has revealed why it’s so important for us to develop future-thinking capacities throughout our society. This includes strategic foresight, which at its core is about how we think about the many ways in which the world could evolve. Then we can start to think about how we can set up our society in a way where we’re flourishing, where we’re able to mitigate a crisis before it happens rather than react in a post-traumatic way where we’re dealing with the issue once the problem has already occurred.”