Chapter 7: Making the most of our learning journeys

In this chapter we will see the future as a learning journey. We will explore doing it differently by ‘learning together’ our way through complex problems. Then, in Chapter 8 we will explore the importance of leadership.

Let us start by briefly recapping why we need to think about learning journeys. In Chapter 1 we said that we need to increase our resilience against unknown future shocks. More than ever before in the history of the human race we need to collaborate and learn from experience and from each other. We said that, while we do some great things very successfully, we have deficiencies. For example, it seems that silos are endemic – we find them in organisations as varied as Sony, the BBC and the professions (Tett, 2015). We have problems in ‘joining up’ our systems. Interdependencies between infrastructure systems are creating vulnerabilities to disruptions of service and the increased possibility of cascading failures. Data and information about interconnectivities at organisational, commercial and policy levels is poor. Disjointed approaches to governance and policy create perverse incentives and conflicting actions. There are limitations on capacity, inefficiencies, poor reliability, low adaptability and missed opportunities. More insidiously, Rose (2015) has investigated why there is a disproportionate number of science, medical and engineering graduates recruited into terrorist extremism in the Middle East and North Africa. He postulates that it is because of three traits that characterise the engineering mindset: monism, simplism and preservatism. Monism is that there exists one best solution. Simplism is the idea that if only people were rational remedies would be simple. Preservatism is an underlying craving for a lost order. Needless to say not one of those traits has any place in our thinking about infrastructure.