A successful Christchurch recovery: Articulating the vision and identifying tipping points
In May 2011, the Resilient Organisations research programme held a two day Resilience Retreat high in the hills of Banks Peninsula to bring together a group of thought-leaders to share and debate resilience issues and strategies related to the Christchurch recovery.
One of our sessions set the participants the challenge of articulating the vision for two key elements of the overall recovery:
- The Christchurch rebuild
- The economic recovery
To ensure that the vision articulated was sufficiently focused and punchy, we tasked the groups with keeping to an “elevator speech” format, of no more than 5 or 6 sentences. We then asked people to visualise that they were 5-10 years in the future, once their vision for recovery had been successfully achieved, and to use a process of pre-emptive reflection to look back on what were the critical tipping points that ensured recovery success was achieved. The final stage was for people to visualise they were in a future where their recovery vision had failed dismally, and to reflect back on the tipping points that turned the recovery process into a failure. You can see the outcome of the lively discussion and debate that was generated here.