By Monika Jiang

During this historic moment, for the first time in modern human history, all of us are fighting a common enemy. We are all facing adversity at the same time, and the question of how we can cope with it or perhaps even find opportunity in it — to transform ourselves and reshape the world — suddenly affects us all in a very concrete, immediate way.

The virtual Living Room Session on “Opportunity in Adversity” that the House of Beautiful Business hosted recently brought together five guests from diverse backgrounds to share their perspectives on this topic. We spoke with them about personal resilience, regenerative practices inspired by biological systems, and the strategies business leaders and organizations can apply in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of them had thought and written extensively about moments of crisis, and some had experienced the ugliest form of adversity — war.

Laughter in war

Ina Arnautalic and Maja Zećo grew up in Bosnia during the Bosnian war. Zećo, an actress and writer now living in Berlin, was eight years old during the siege of Mostar by the Yugoslav People’s Army after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia in April 1992. Mostar became a divided city in 1993, with the Western part dominated by Croatian forces and the Eastern part controlled by the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Zećo’s situation was particularly complicated because her parents were a mixed ethnic couple, so either side of the city was the wrong one for them. One day, she said, soldiers (“We didn’t know which army they belonged to”) came to arrest her father, who was hiding in the adjacent room by hanging on to the window frame, and she remembered thinking that she must not somehow let her eyes reveal his position, so she “hypnotized herself to simply stare at the wall.” When the soldiers left, she saw her father on the roof, and in her child’s eyes she imagined he was a “superhero.”

Arnautalic, now a costume designer living in Berlin, says that the current lockdown has triggered some post-traumatic stress because it reminds her of wartime Sarajevo. She was nine years old during the siege of the city, the longest ever of a capital in modern history. At the same time, the war was like one big game for her, she said, describing it, in hindsight, as a “video game.” After the war, as both of them told their childhood stories, they realized that while their friends’ childhood memories were mostly light and fun, their own appeared heavy and dark, even though for them wartime had seemed in some ways like a tremendous adventure. When they shared their memories, their friends felt uncomfortable.

Almost 30 years later, Maja and Ina turned deep into their memories and wrote a play called “What Did We Laugh,” inviting the audience to experience war through their unique child’s perspective. The experiential, immersive play is slated to debut next year in a production by Deutsches Theater Berlin.

Overcoming adversity through the lens of one’s imagination is also, of course, the story of Roberto Benigni’s famous movie “Life Is Beautiful,” and it is a powerful way of reclaiming a reality that’s been taken away from you in a moment of crisis. Humor can change the meaning of things, it inserts an “alternative reality.”

Reclaiming reality

Mohamad Al Jounde, a Syrian refugee who had to flee with his family to Lebanon, used similar words to describe how he faced adversity: “Reclaiming my reality.”

What had started as a revolution against the Syrian government — part of a wider wave in the Arab Spring of 2011 — is now a multi-sided conflict of domestic and foreign forces, resulting in a massive migration of approximately 5.6 million people seeking safety in neighboring countries and another 6.6 million who are internally displaced inside Syria.

Amid a new reality in Lebanon, facing discrimination, police brutality, and poverty, Al Jounde, together with his family and fellow volunteers, started what he called their own revolution. For three years he could not go to school, so at the age of 12 he decided to build one himself — a remarkable effort for which he was awarded the International Children’s Peace Prize in 2017. Striving to normalize the circumstances for himself and fellow refugee children, he began teaching English and photography, which he believed would give him some measure of control over how he perceived the situation and coped with persistent challenges.

Today, the Gharsah School is backed by Gharsah Sweden, a non-governmental organization based in Älmhult, Sweden, and it teaches 250 children on a regular basis, providing access to a comprehensive curriculum including arts and culture, human and civil rights, and the core mission of mutual support.

When asked about specific moments that helped him to imagine a different truth, Al Jounde shared how he — both then and now — returns to the fictional world of “The Sims,” a popular computer game, which enables him to be in control, even for a moment.

One thing Al Jounde thinks we can learn from refugees is the notion of impermanence:

“Nothing will last forever. Don’t get trapped in the situation now, while preparing yourself for all possible outcomes, for better or worse. When I think about my time in lockdown for about six months back in Syria, another important thing is to not feel the need to be productive. And finally, especially for fellow activists: take a break from the news, and do not overwhelm yourself with the burden and frustration of not being able to help others around the world at this point. Focus on what you can do for yourself that makes you happy, take a breather, and then go back to your work.”

Finally, Al Jounde emphasized the power of imagination that comes with youth, and which should be encouraged, so it can unfold in great ideas.

Resilience and reimagination in business

Ina Arnautalic and Maja Zećo as well as Al Jounde — even though he stressed the importance of “not being productive” during stressful times — coped with their crisis situations through creativity and what some would call “frugal innovation,” showcasing human ingenuity at its best under severe constraints. What can their stories, as well as their entrepreneurial and artistic ventures, teach us about how businesses can find opportunity in adversity?

One person who has been wrapping his head around this question over the past few years, is Martin Reeves, the chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, the think tank and strategic foresight arm of the Boston Consulting Group. His post-graduate studies in biophysics and the natural sciences have informed his understanding of complex systems, and he is particularly interested in the role of resilience and imagination in business.

Resilience is a buzzword that has long circulated among urban planners, management gurus, life coaches, and business leaders, and it’s really being put to test right now by the COVID-19 pandemic. Did the current crisis prove him right or did it challenge his concept of resilience?

Reeves said that his ideas hadn’t changed but surely the way business leaders — he said he had been in touch with about 750 of them since the outbreak of the virus — responded to them as they had become more receptive to his argument that “resilience beats efficiency.”

Most business systems had been designed for efficiency and optimization, he explained, which was now their very weakness. Resilience actually means being wasteful, Reeves pointed out, and he considers redundancy one of six characteristics that increase the resilience of natural and social systems.

The others are: heterogeneity (a diversity of perspectives and approaches), modularity (creating “fire breaks” to prevent whole system collapse), adaptability (the ability to flex designs in changing circumstances using a process of variation, selection, and amplification), prudence (stress-testing for plausible tail risks), and embeddedness (coherence with higher-level systems like society and nature).

He observed that “in the case of COVID-19, we see that organizations that failed to build resilience, such as governments that lacked reserves of critical health-care equipment or companies with distressed balance sheets, have much more difficulty responding to the crisis.”

In an article on “Leading Out of Adversity” Reeves writes: “COVID-19 has made organizations aware of the limits of its ability to learn quickly in an extremely fast-moving environment, in which 10 days of hesitation can lead to the quadrupling of infections and to escalation of business and societal disruption.”

Reeves thinks that because pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, imagination — “the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new paths to growth.” In recessions and downturns, 14% of companies outperform both historically and competitively, because they invest in new growth areas.

Reeves explained the typical response cadence of organizations in a time of crisis: after the initial emphasis is on reaction and defense, the focus shifts to manage the ensuing economic recession and to rebound. Imaginative companies, however, shift their focus to reinventing themselves. In addition to the importance of imagination, he urged business leaders to think in more diverse time-scales.

Finally, Reeves believes that so many businesses are now seriously hurt by the downturn and the pain has become so strong that the chance for a great reset is real. “Just a year ago, talk of humanism, purpose, imagination, or play was still being dismissed.This is now changing,” he reckons, as leaders recognize that it’s exactly those qualities that will help them cope with and thrive in the next crisis, and prepare their organizations for more sustainable growth.

In his view, it comes down to “communication and leadership”:

“I always think of ideas as the ultimate technology. The right idea communicated in the right way can change how others behave and it can change an entire system. So we have a window now to communicate new ideas. However, what isn’t very helpful is the sustainability people talking to the sustainability people about sustainability. I mean, essentially, this is pushing on an open door. I think what’s required is the mainstreaming of these messages. And that will probably require more agnostic rather than confrontational language.”

Regenerative practices

Dawn Danby is an ecological design strategist based out of Oakland, California, who co-leads Spherical, a studio focused on regenerating the health and integrity of Earth’s living systems. Danby cited as one example of such practice the human body immune system as well as the immediate social systems we are embedded in. Especially now, and in any other time, too, we are taking care of ourselves and our immediate environment such as family members and friends to keep our “living systems” alive and healthy. In the business context, she sees this approach reflected in a small cooperatively owned shop in her Bay Area neighborhood, a business that is currently thriving:

“They support getting healthy food for low-income residents here in the Bay Area. And they’re wearing masks and gloves, they’re dancing to hip hop, and they’re full of joy. I go in there and I get the sense that they are regenerating themselves every day, everyone there. They are actively generating health, not just for themselves and others around them who buy their products, but they are also supporting a local network of food producers and suppliers. These are the kinds of businesses that illustrate resilience-building through diversity. And similar to the trees, soil, and other natural resources, we take for granted, they can easily get overlooked.”

“The most beautiful businesses I know are commoning, healing, regenerating. Building immunity at every scale,” she said.

In one word: hope

From a child’s imagination overcoming wartime adversity, reclaiming one’s reality through an “impossible venture,” to resilience and reimagination in business, to regenerative practices on a local level and planetary thinking on every level, the session urged us to question our typical crisis responses.

The usual instinct in the face of an adversity is to fight against deviation and “normalize” things. But resilience means that you’re generating new resources to overcome the adversity: first you adapt, then you transform. As Al Jounde reminded us, it is interesting what we can learn from refugees in that regard, as they have to constantly adapt to ever-changing circumstances; they’re probably the most “agile” population on earth.

Moreover, for businesses, resilience often means less efficiency, as Reeves pointed out, and more importantly, any crisis presents the opportunity to not just respond or adjust to but to fundamentally reshape reality. It’s an opportunity for reinvention. This is where imagination comes in. Often crises lead to “a crisis of imagination,” he cautioned, when in fact imagination is the most precious asset in the face of adversity. How do you nurture imagination? Allow yourself time for reflection. Play, practice artistic thinking, and experience the world like a child. And laugh if and whenever you can.

As Danby proposed, changing perspectives is key, such as shifting from human-centered cognition to planetary cognition. What if we thought like the planet? It would not only elevate our perspective on any crisis but would also help us understand ourselves as “living systems” that are part of a greater living system.

Let’s use this crisis to regenerate and build more resilient systems. But let’s also allow for redundancy, especially when it comes to imagination. By its very nature imagination is extremely wasteful — and yet we can’t have enough of it.

In this spirit, we concluded the session asking the speakers to imagine a better world post-COVID-19 and describe their hopes with one word, just as the members of the community did in this composition by House musician-in-residence Mark Aanderud.

Monika Jiang is the head of content and community at The Business Romantic Society and a co-curator of the House of Beautiful Business.