Resilience, Disruption, Reorganization

I had a great discussion recently with an environmental journalist and a corporate water expert — both of them spend a lot of time with technology firms working in the water space. I’ve noticed that one of their favorite terms is disruption, in the sense that sector X or group Y is ripe for disruption — which usually means positive change that updates assumptions, approaches, and thinking to better match current conditions. I think they mean something similar to the tech sentiment of “moving fast and breaking things.” Creating new markets, shaking up old ones.

Disruption is a word that feels very much embedded in this moment.

With these colleagues, I asked them about climate change. “Is that disruption?” We had been talking about the term resilience, which could really be interpreted as avoiding or minimizing disruption. They were quiet for a moment; they had only spoken about negative climate impacts. Were they seeing climate as a completely different type of disruption from tech innovation?

I’d like to think that what I mean by resilience and what they mean by disruption is reorganization, especially when big changes are occurring — what an economist might call externalities, like your glaciers going away or the occurrence of Pakistan-level flood events. The IPCC last year effectively recommended reorganization as an adaptation and resilience strategy given the imminent or even in-process signs of climate transformation now occurring.

What’s also interesting in this context is that from a tech community perspective disruption can trigger sudden and powerful change — definitely loss, but also building a new order, and one that we may be able to have some choice over. And that’s how I see resilience as well. Loss, even grief, and then embracing a different future.

Perhaps both in the world of my colleagues and in my world too, we may not want to be disrupted. But the lesson may be that we often do not have much choice in the matter about the losses that occur in the wake of major shifts. Our choices lay in the new order that is ascending. Choosing a more prosperous or equitable or healthy future.

And perhaps most relevant to the water community, disruption may sometimes be anticipated — and yet not occur. My sense of the UN Water Conference in New York this March, for instance, is that we will see only modest progress on a range of issues. Expectations through many sources seem quite high. What may be most important is simply having the full water community represented in a global policy setting for the first time in almost five decades and the gentle progress of coming to understand and know each other a little better and how to work together more coherently.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA