Zolli: Promote diversity, fight boredom, make small bets
Andrew Zolli was in town today.
He’s all about resilience. That means finding a way for people and communities to survive during disruptions.
The folks at the Des Moines Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, and partners, gave Zolli the stage at the State Historical Building at noon today to pass along a few lessons.
But first he chatted with me about some of his central ideas about making sure Greater Des Moines and other places thrive. A good start, he said, is to promote diversity — in people, culture, ideas, businesses — and to fight boredom by finding ways to teach, and interact, that take advantage of people’s individual talents and interests. Oh, yes, and make small bets, because for every Toyota manufacturing plant development that officials and state governments chase, there are hundreds of small operations that not only provide the most jobs but take less of a toll on the economy if one of them fails.
“Resilient systems don’t like to be dependent on a single thing,” said Zolli, a Brooklyn, N.Y., resident who is co-author of “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back.” He also directs the global innovation network PopTech and has worked as a National Geographic Society fellow.
“You want diversity of all kinds — people, businesses, skills, jobs,” he said. Creativity is high on the list, too. “What resilient systems thrive in is an environment in which there is a significant amount of dynamism. Too much becomes chaos. There is a warm zone” to seek, he added.
But it takes work. “Communities where you have people who do different kinds of work and are different types of people need things to bring them together. You need mirrors held up that say you belong here.
“For a community like this, it’s not about the particular ethnic or racial makeup. It’s about the degree we leverage the most from human potential. We have a lot of underused human capital. There are all kinds of smart people here.”
And how do you tap that underused capital? “You need a human capital strategy.” (Shades of Capital Crossroads …)
Zolli delayed our interview because he was busy talking to someone at the United Nations who is using satellite imagery from Planet Labs — an operation that includes Zolli — that tracks deforestation, urban sprawl, agricultural changes and other things. He’s an interesting guy.
We live in a different world, Zolli observed.
The amount of information that one person generates in a day is equal to all information created on the globe everywhere through the 1970s, Zolli said. And 90 percent of what is out there arrived in the past 18 months. “It’s an explosion,” he said. “Every element of this great explosion of information is an opportunity.”
And changes sometimes come with the territory.
One time, Zolli studied a Philadelphia school that had all the usual urban problems — poverty, drugs, gangs.
He told the story of science teacher Simon Hauger, who now runs the school, who created a challenge-based learning model that led to the Workshop School down the street. He started by working with students to build an electric vehicle from scratch, learning algebra, physics and engineering along the way. It was so successful — the project finished second in a worldwide competition that included professional engineers from Detroit’s automakers, as well as brains from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — that Hauger changed courses to focus on curricula that teach the basic lessons, but through capitalizing on the students’ interests and talents.
Some parting lessons from Zolli:
- “Have the ability to fail graciously.”
- Build regenerative capacity focusing on creative capital and cultural offerings that restore themselves much as cells in the human body.
- Listen for change. “Not every disruption can be heard. Not every tornado announces itself. Who is listening for the next thing?”
- “Responding to disruption required a lot of agility and a lot of creative improvisation.”
- Learn from transformation. “Do we strengthen, or abandon?”