Catching Time

To prepare for the second season of the @Risk podcast, I was re-listening to episodes of the prior season. As I was doing this, I was catching up with friends and we were all in some state of scramble getting ready for the return of school, work schedules were heating up, and board and committee meetings were resuming. The summer holidays are over and many people are feeling overwhelmed by time. To help alleviate that stress, I’ve collected some of the wisdom shared on the @ Risk podcast in the Spring and Summer to help you prepare for the Fall.

You are not alone!

If you’re feeling badly about not having prepared enough for the spike in demands on your time, know you are not alone. In fact, you are in some pretty august company. Many @Risk guests lament the failure of people, sectors and governments to act more quickly or, to put it another way, to use the time they have more effectively.

For example, Jeanne Beker pointed to the lethargy seen in fashion towards the sustainability of the industry and the materials used in it. The good news is the sector is acting now but an earlier start would have been much better and would have resulted in less of a contribution to the climate crisis.

Also, very few people believe Canada was well prepared to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic despite our country’s relatively recent and helpfully instructive experience with SARS. In light of this, Dan Gardner wants the Canadian government to initiate a Royal Commission to study our preparedness for high consequence | low probability events. In Dan’s view, our lack of preparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic has created an imperative to consider more broadly our preparedness for big impact events whose precise timing are difficult to predict. Rather than a focused look back on the pandemic response, he encourages us to strive to identify and apply a broader set of lessons in order to become and stay prepared for more than just the next pandemic. He views this as the best way to use the time we have before the next big crisis hits.

What’s that saying about a stitch in time?

Time is a Slippery Fish

Time is a funny thing. It’s always slipping into the future. It flies by when we are having fun. It’s tough for us to accurately appreciate time and its impact. Michelle Good is a lawyer, poet, author and winner of this year’s Amazon First Novel Award for Five Little Indians, which follows the lives of five residential school survivors. Michelle has a fantastically useful way of understanding time passed. To her mind, the events of the past are the ingredients of the cake we eat today. So the past is not dead and buried; it’s not even past. Her metaphor of the cake is a great means of understanding the paradox that is the present-ness of the past.

When it comes to grappling with the future, we have extreme difficulty with finding the motivation to act on dangers when they seem off in the distant future. Perhaps the gravest example of this conundrum comes in the form of our slow response to climate change. Andri Snaer Magnasson is an Icelandic artist and activist and is the author of On Time and Water. He is a delightfully interesting person and storyteller. He highlighted for me that it’s sometimes hard to see the repercussions of our failure to plan and it’s not just due to willful blindness or laziness. Sometimes, the signals are mixed.

Take the example of the false prosperity that comes with a melting glacier as told by Andri:

“[W]hile the glacier is melting, the melting rate might increase 10% a year or something. Then people will have more water and access to more water temporarily while the glacier is melting, just like when you’re emptying your bank account or something, not saving for the future. So you have this false prosperity while the glacier is melting and you can maybe get more crop, you can have more water for your industries. But then when the glacier is gone or it has reached this tipping point of collapse, then suddenly you will have much less water and even much less water than before the glacier started melting. And these glaciers, for example, in Asia they are perfect systems because the monsoon, the wet season, is so intense where you have an over abundance of water and it’s actually damaging. So the glacier is a perfect system. It keeps the water when you don’t need it and then it gives it to you when you really need it. So even though glacial water might only be 10% of the total water in some regions, it might be 100% during the most important time when it’s about making or breaking for your ground water or your crop. So now when we are experiencing this false prosperity and then after that we have a very devastating situation. So that’s a very evil dilemma or like Timothy Martin talks about it’s a wicked problem. And this is something we have to prepare for. And the problem is that when you have prosperity, then you should use that time to prepare for what comes after that. But people tend to get lost in that situation of not worrying what comes next.”

The message is clear: prepare while the going is good.

Practise! Practise! Practise!

We can’t undo the mistakes of the past so what does good planning look like for next time? Who are our role models? Dr Farah Alibay and Col. Chris Hadfield are engineers of the near impossible and they kindly shared their planning best practices on the @Risk podcast.

Dr Farah Alibay was born in Canada and grew up in a small town where working at NASA was “unheard of,” but she’s doing exactly that now as a systems engineer working on everything from mission concepts to the Mars 2020 mission. She went from student in England to NASA intern to her dream job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I asked her about the role of planning in success given we hear so much about moving fast and breaking things. Here’s what she had to say:

“[I]t’s not so much about moving fast and breaking things when you’re on Mars. Right? Like you don’t have that luxury. It’s the same in anything that’s space related. Once you’re out there, there’s no way to fix your rover, there’s no way to fix your spacecraft if it’s on Mars. So we work very differently. So in development of course we move fast, we try, we test, we test all over again and then we test our designs. But when it comes to operations, it’s again about testing but it’s definitely about preparation. I always say that once we do something on Mars it’s almost boring because we’ve done it like a million times on Earth before we do it on Mars.

And we have for example a replica of Perseverance called Optimism and we have a big what we call a Mars yard. It’s a big sandbox essentially when we drive around our rover and we put it through its spaces. Like deploying the Ingenuity helicopter, that’s the next big thing that’s going to be happening, I’ve tested it at least 20 times in the Mars yard, and we test it over and over. So that’s what preparation looks like is we build our activities, we test them, we put it through all of the normal scenarios that we think might happen on Mars, and we make sure that we’re robust against them. And then we do it on Mars.

And then sometimes it still doesn’t look like the way we want it to, but most of the time when things go wrong we kind of expected it and know how to react. And if we don’t, we can pause. And that’s kind of one of the advantages of being on the surface of another planet rather than orbiting somewhere or going somewhere is if something goes wrong, the rover has some automation. It knows how to react. It goes into what we call a safe mode and calls home and then we’re there to fix it. So it’s definitely about preparation, it’s about expecting and planning for the worst, and being prepared for anomalies.”

Col. Chris Hadfield is an astronaut, engineer, pilot, educator, musician, and the first Canadian to walk in space and to become commander of the International Space Station. As sophisticated and careful as the planning was that Dr. Alibay described, planning for human space flight must be even more robust because lives are at stake. It takes a lifetime for an astronaut to be prepared to travel in space.

As extreme as that sounds, Col. Hadfield shared with us a practical takeaway suitable for our more Earthy lives:

“[T]here’s almost always more time to prepare than people allow themselves, and if something serious is coming in your life or in your work or whatever, it’s maybe good to spend just a little time simulating it in your mind and running over what are the possible consequences and which ones are you least ready for and maybe try and do the work in advance. Because it really optimizes your chances of succeeding.”

Wise words. You have more time than you think. Use it.

Think Forward

When Tareq Hadhad and his family left Damascus for Lebanon to flee the war, they thought they would only be there for a short time and then return home once the conflict subsided. Little did they know that they would never return to Syria and that Canada would end up becoming their new home. Theirs is a harrowing story with a thankfully happy ending that you should really listen to if you haven’t already.

Like for Tareq and his family, some situations can’t be anticipated. Not everything can be planned for. So what do you do when the unthinkable strikes?

Hayley Wickenheiser is Canada’s captain: four-time Olympic Gold medalist, community leader and physician. I asked her how sports helped her prepare to become a physician and for serving as a trainee and community leader during an unanticipated pandemic? There are some excellent life lessons in her response:

“Yeah, I guess first of all, none of us ever probably thought we’d be in a pandemic in our lifetime. I know I certainly didn’t think I’d be finishing medical school in a pandemic but here we all are. So I think one of the things being an athlete, I think athletes in general are some of the most resilient human beings that I’ve ever come across. And the reason is that at a very young age when you start competitive sport, you grow up learning to live in the unknown, and learning to live in a world that is very competitive where there are no guarantees and where your performance really dictates your next step in your career. And that’s not always the case in many other walks of life. And there’s a lot that happens in sport because it’s, as for example in hockey, it’s a game. And you just can’t control everything. One player on the ice certainly can’t make everything happen. So it’s not necessarily what’s happening, it’s your ability to react and to pivot and to adapt to all of that. So I think that that’s probably the biggest thing that I learned through sport.

And then obviously when the pandemic hit, my mindset around the pandemic is less about running around panicking or putting out fires and more around, okay well this is what’s happening now. What are we going to do now? What’s the next step? You’re always constantly forward thinking as an athlete, as well you’re always constantly taking information in. You’re always adapting to feedback and to criticism to try to elevate yourself to the next level. And so to kind of get mired in negativity doesn’t help you in any way, shape, or form as an athlete.

The ability to sort of like have a short-term memory is what’s really important, and I think that’s really important in this pandemic. It’s about today and what we can do today to help ourselves get out of this moving forward.”

When you find yourself in unanticipated circumstances, the best plan may be as simple as a carefully considered next step.

It’s very easy to let time slip away. As humans, we are better suited to dealing with immediate threats. Having lots of time to prepare can feel like a curse even when it’s a blessing. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over that. The guests of @Risk instead recommend using any regret we feel as fuel for better preparation for next time and to get going on addressing our current as well as tomorrow’s challenges today. While our relationship to time may be murky and complex, the solutions are elegantly simple: Practise! Practise! Practise! Plan! Plan! Plan! You likely have more time than you think you do but not if you don’t get started. Even if your plan doesn’t address the specific event you encounter, your planning practice will leave you better prepared than if you never got around to planning in the first place. There is no better time than now to get planning for the future. Behind every success is a plan.