Why planning for change?

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I am devoted to exploring systemic change. I believe that anatomizing the dynamics of change may hold the key to understanding how to steer and shape change in our social-ecological systems, by making intelligent decisions to yield positive results in the future.

Like in the practice of Eastern martial arts, where one doesn’t resist the opponent’s force but yield it to overcome, the resilience framework can guide such a change harnessing actions, and point the way on how they might be replicated or upscaled for deliberate adaptations and transformations.

Considering today’s massive global challenges, including increasing economic and social inequalities, urbanization, land degradation, and climate change impacts, pursuing purely curiosity-driven theoretical advances in the study of resilience and change in no longer an option. 

To address real-world problems we need to be better at recognizing, and utilizing, the dynamic relationships and transformations that complex systems, like our regions, cities, organizations, or governance networks, undergo. There is an urgent demand to translate them into operational assessment methodologies, guidelines, and procedures for navigating change, that is easily accessible to practitioners and decision-makers.

This exploration of the mine, some of which are presented here,  is nothing less than the seeking for principles for the new way of thinking in planning theory and practice, acknowledging different contexts in different stages of change.

For me, it is the inquiry of the highest quality and worth sharing.