Nice article! There’s a lot of things to unpack here, as it goes over quite a lot, but I wanted to focus on something that caught my attention in section 4.
It appeared to me that you discuss two types of resiliency without—to my mind—making much of a distinction between them. The first is that of institutional resiliency, and the second that of resilient interventions. In my mind, this latter one comes across as object-level interventions for for specific problems—drought-tracking, etc., and the former as meta-level organisational design/interventions for ensuring that our current institutions can build operate under (future, probable) high organisational stress conditions.
Is this a conceptual divide you would endorse, or do you more see the institutional resiliency as another object-level area of resiliency interventions on line with others, and which would be upgraded/updated in tandem with other object-level interventions? (e.g. As we get better drought-tracking capabilities, it is designed so that institutional resiliency in the usage of this systemis a built-in feature package.)
Hi Ian. This write-up made me even more excited to follow the work of the EIP in the coming years.
One thing I wanted to ask for more information about was the “system-centered” approach you detailed towards the end of the post. I’m not sure I see entirely the difference between an approach which “seeks out and prioritizes the highest-impact opportunities without artificial boundaries on scope related to issues, audiences, or interventions.” and using a mish-mash of interventions from the traditional improvement strategies.
Is the proposal that e.g. instead of coming to an organisation and saying “we think you need forecasting”, there should instead be more of an open-ended analysis of their structure, needs, incentives, etc., to tailor both *which* interventions/products to implement *and* (as usually done) how to implement them? And that before even coming to an organisation you will have carried out an analysis like the one in this post, and by doing these two things, be issue-, audience-, and product-agnostic?
I am not familiar with too many examples or case studies of carrying out large changes in organization, but in an area I *am* familiar with, performance psychology, one of the large limiters on this kind of approach is resources. As a one-person operation, you don’t have the capacity to play around with approaches, and have to specialize in one issue/implementation, e.g. mindfulness in athletes. Do you expect that the EIP will be structured so as to, and have the resources to, do the needs analysis of relevant institutions, and then have individually specialised, expert staff on demand to deploy as the needs analysis suggests, or that you will have general competency staff at these different levels?
I see that these issues might be things that will be considered and dealt with in due time, and if you think they are not timely for the current state of EIP, that’s fine.