INSIGHT: Who Wins?

Expediency vs Perfection
Resisting fear is difficult. Several of Foresight's recent projects have involved facilitating a diverse group, working under a tight deadline, on an ambitious goal. Having a trusted methodology to achieve the outcome is crucial. Knowing when to compromise process for deadline has required a mix of intuitive and intellectual judgement. I’ll never forget a poor decision I made one summer at camp, when I was 12, while captaining a small sailboat in a race. Swamping the boat, we lost the lead and the competition. Overeager, I should have waited. Doing so requires finding and occupying a certain kind of patient psychological space, which I find difficult to conjure when external indicators are imploring: go faster. Practicing yoga, strangely enough, has helped. Compromises will be required in the race to address climate change, but so will holistic and resilient approaches. We will have to navigate the way forward, through our collective anxieties and reservations, with the clock very much ticking. In the end, what we will need to better master isn’t so much a myriad of technical elements, although those will be important, but simply ourselves. If I don’t maintain an open and generative mind, striving to balance seeking the best answer with a timely one, then securing the wherewithal to achieve the objective will be near impossible.