REINVENTING THE RECOVERY MODEL FOR TIMES OF CRISIS
Looking to the future letting go of the past
A crisis should be seen as an invitation to reimagine the preferred futures and not as a desperate clamour for the romanticised certainty of the past. Madelaine Page and Jamaine Krige discuss Dr Morne Mostert’s Pro-silience model to take South Africa into the future. Dr Mostert is Director for Futures Research at Stellenbosch University and also used this model to score South Africa’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak.
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anguage, he argues, is the audit of knowledge. And as knowledge evolves and changes, so must the language to communicate this. “Insights expire,” he explains. “And to the extent that language reflects the thinking that produced the insights, language that describes strategies for general success also appears to have a limited shelf-life.” This, he says, is rather easy to prove. “If the general tenet of
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continuous change is embraced, then it cannot be argued that language, derived of a time and a place never to be revisited, is somehow immune to similar evolution.” In times of general success, it’s easy for individuals, organisations and societies to overcome minor disruptions and return quickly to the status quo. “The need to bounce back to a time of prosperity makes intuitive sense under pressure,” he
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explains. This, however, was not the case with Covid-19. “When the negative disruption is nothing short of tectonic, and the status quo was already severely undesirable, a meek attempt to return to a previous normal appears deeply misplaced,” he says. Even if successful, resilience under these conditions would not produce a satisfactory future. Dr Mostert warns that the reality of Covid-19 with its deadly impact and
