How societies become resilient in crisis

A recent webinar hosted by the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS, brought scholars, practitioners, policymakers and innovators together to examine how societies rebound from crisis.

The real-world examples were obvious: the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, the waning trust in governments around the world. And yet the tactics and ideas shared by the panelists demonstrated that resiliency in the face of crisis is not only possible; it is happening.

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Allen Lab led the discussion. The panelists were:

• Valeriya Ionan, advisor to the minister of defense of Ukraine and to the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine
• Adam Kahane, co-founder of Reos Partners  
• Fathali Moghaddam, professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University  
• Paulius Yamin, policy fellow at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation

Allen began with an example from the COVID-19 crisis.  

“My own research network before the pandemic brought together economists and public health professionals, and it was reasonable and natural for us to pivot rapidly,” she said. “Our argument was that the right thing to do was to ramp up the use of testing in order to track the virus through contact tracing and then block its transmission.”

Explaining that this escalation of testing meant rapidly scaling up the production of the materials needed for COVID tests, Allen and her team pulled together a network of mayors from all over the United States.

“That meeting was really transformative for my own thinking about policymaking,” Allen said. After detailed presentations, the mayors were mystified by the scope of the researchers’ suggestions and kept asking how their work would help their communities.

“The point was that as a group of policymakers sitting in the ivory tower, we had developed the habits of thinking in a macro and aggregate way,” explained Allen. “And at the end of the day, that left us actually deeply and fundamentally uninformed about both what was necessary and what was feasible.”

Allen’s team reversed course and asked mayors what they needed, then structured a plan to fit their needs: “We were able to turn the policy completely inside out, rebuild it from scratch as a policy about what would be needed at a local level, city by city.”

Collaborating across deep divisions

Adam Kahane is the author of “Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust,” which asserts that collaboration across deep differences is possible without requiring agreement or trust, but it demands a particular relationship about power.  

From his work across 50 countries, he has observed that crisis almost always produces conflict between powers. “It would be nice if in working together we could agree on the problem, the solution, the plan, who does what, values, language, trust,” said Kahane. “My experience is that those are not necessary conditions, and if we assert them as necessary conditions, then we’ll make something which is already very difficult—collaborating cross difference—impossible.”

He also used the COVID pandemic as an illustration. Two things, he said, are implicit in facing a crisis: “One is that we are all part of a larger whole. We need to work and live together.” At the same time, he said, each party will have its own interests, and there may be disagreements. Kahane’s work concentrates on that shared space: “I don’t see it as a choice. I think the whole challenge is to be able to do both and to have governance and institutions that enable us to do both.”

Changing the culture of celebrating differences

Fathali Moghaddam is the author of “Threat to Democracy: The Appeal of Authoritarianism in an Age of Uncertainty” and developed the idea of omniculturalism, which he explained, starts with the premise that people are psychologically and biologically much more similar than they are different. Science, he said, tells us this. “However, we have developed a culture of celebrating differences, and this has led to an exaggeration and fabrication of differences,” Moghaddam said. “This fabrication of differences is ongoing and is also being politically used by extremists to come to power, to grab power.”