Chapter 6: Rigour through practical foresight

A framework for rethinking infrastructure and meeting the resilience challenge cannot be complete without addressing how we think about the future. Delivering resilience will require innovative systems-thinking skills of reflective practical wisdom that go beyond technique. Anthropologist Gillie Bolton (2010) says that reflection is a state of mind, an ongoing constituent of practice and not a technique. Reflective practice, she says, is a way of studying your own experiences. It is a way that can enable practitioners to learn about themselves, their work and the way they relate to others, including wider society. It can help us to (1) form searching questions; (2) challenge assumptions, biases and inequalities; (3) understand what we know but do not know we know, what we do not know and want to know, what we think, feel, believe, value, understand about our roles and boundaries, how our actions match up with what we believe, and how to value and take into account personal feelings; and (4) explore difficult issues such as what we can change and how to work with what we cannot change, how to value the perspective of others no matter how different they are to you, how others perceive you, and their feelings and thoughts about events, why you become stressed, and its impact on life and practice, and how to counteract seemingly given social, cultural and political structures.