Social inequalities, the climate emergency, the collapse of biodiversity, threats to democracy… the list and urgency of the challenges we face mean that we need to invent new ways of mobilising collective intelligence and creativity. And what if envisaging the worst would enable us to act better today?
In the 1950s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow turned psychology on its head by seeing patients not just as mentally ill or neurotic, but as people who could improve, by seeing what was going well and what could go even better. From there, his colleague Martin Seligman invented positive psychology.
In the same spirit, at the end of the 1970s, the professor of medical sociology Aaron Antonovsky theorised ‘salutogenesis’, which turned medicine upside down by focusing on the factors that promote health and well-being, rather than those that cause disease, the classic ‘pathogenesis’. Whereas we usually see life as a river that carries us from birth to death, Antonovsky postulates that with salutogenesis we can “learn to swim against the current”.
There are many examples of how thinking upside down can be a salutary response to many challenges, be they personal, social or political. So can we learn to turn the world upside down, and turn it right side up again? In 2013, the European paper industry decided to see the challenge of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 not as a European technocratic whim, but as an inescapable fact of life. Saying “go for it” to an industry that will be carbon-free but half as prosperous in 30 years’ time, it contradicted other energy-guzzling industries by concluding that it could manage it.
In the Netherlands, some tolls are reversed, not punishing vehicles travelling at certain times, but rewarding those travelling at off-peak times, an idea that Lille town council is examining.
Reverse thinking stimulates ideation
Reverse thinking is a proven technique for thinking laterally. Instead of following the ‘logical’ direction of a challenge, you turn it, or one of its components, upside down and look for opposing ideas. For example, “How can I halve the number of overweight children?” becomes “How can I make twice as many children obese? “How can I increase patient satisfaction?” becomes “how can I make patients more dissatisfied? More generally, “how can I solve this problem” becomes “how can I cause it?
Once you’ve asked these questions, let all the answers come in, no matter how incongruous they may seem. Once you’ve finished brainstorming, you can reverse the proposals again to study all the possible positive proposals: are they positive? Do they reveal the attributes of a good potential solution?
What you’ll find is that most people find it easier to generate ideas for a negative challenge. Because it’s absurd, intriguing and provocative, they dare to consider all the dimensions of the problem without taboos.
Faced with collapse, dare to think the worst to prepare for the best
More generally, thinking “backwards” helps to cultivate the conditions that are essential if we are to tackle societal issues, whether local or wider, in a constructive way. In particular, it allows us to see constraints (in terms of resources, recognition, time, etc.) and contradictions (between players, between requirements, between time horizons, etc.) as opportunities for reinventing ourselves, rather than excuses for procrastination, as is all too often the case in politics.
It also allows us to see imperfection and personal or group limitations as potential resources, as London’s ‘Ugly’ casting agency boldly does with its broken-faced supermodels.
The absurd can also be a powerful and humorous way of denouncing injustice, as the women of Pakistan courageously demonstrated in 2018 behind the slogan #HeatYourOwnMeal, or as the Pinnochio Climate Awards, which annually reward the most effective lobbying campaign to halt the fight against climate change, hope to do at European level. The world has fallen on its head. Anyone who has read about the fragility of our economic, political and ecological systems and feels paralysed by the fear that they could collapse at any moment will find reasons and tools for action in this creative approach. We have to envisage the worst, so let’s make the most of it.
Originally published in L’Echo.
Author: Stephen Boucher
