From Surreal to the Slowburn — riding the wave of change
9 am. My eyes still heavy, darkness clinging in the room like paint peeling at the edges. We had cracked the shutters to let air in, and shadows shifted: orange dawn, green reflections, terracotta pinks breathing life into the dark. With each new slit, the sun’s warmth darted in; the city outside began to stretch, yawn, choreograph its energy.
That moment — between night and light — is a metaphor I return to often. We are in that threshold now: not emergency, not stability, but a “slowburn” transition. The question is: what do we choose to carry forward from the moment of crisis?
In a past crisis we have seen speed: Fiat retooling to make masks, breweries pivoting to hand sanitizer. In the recent pandemic, Camden saw similar shifts:
- UCL Hospital & Mercedes collaborated to make breathing aids more usable
- Neighbourhoods Space N19 repurposed by partners via the Dare to Care collective to deliver essential supplies
- Community groups sending essentials to the self-isolated and PPE to health services (via DareToCarePackages)
These rapid pivots show capacity to convert when needed. But survival mode is not the same as transformation. The real work lies in sustaining the behaviours, norms, and experiments that have proven useful, and in reversing those that did harm.
Below, I outline how one might ride the wave of change deliberately, with steps, examples from elsewhere, and reflections for your organisation.
1. Change the system one step at a time
You don’t have to rebuild everything at once. The trick is to weave experiments into systems. Some guiding principles:
- Blend experimental and systemic — make small shifts that can feed into larger change
- Don’t do everything at once — prioritise a few behaviours to sustain
- Cultivate communities of practice — groups of practitioners who share ideas and test together
- Keep researching while prototyping — observe, learn, adjust
- Challenge “what people need” — ask deeper questions rather than just fulfilling assumed needs
- Test new social norms — for example, remote work norms, mutual aid, neighbour reciprocity
Over time, these small steps can shift system equilibrium.
2. Adopt a whole-place approach to resilience
True resilience isn’t just in services. It’s woven through everyday life — shifting how people see, feel and act toward the place they live in. This means:
- Empathy and role-play — inhabiting another part of the system to see pressures
- Creating experiential spaces — simulating futures, running visioning workshops, co-design labs
- Seeding change broadly — distributing experiments across neighborhoods, not just central zones
- Bringing actors together — civic, business, academia, community, foresight practitioners
Jon Alexander observes that the “Overton Window” is still wide open: we have a chance to reset what’s acceptable before counter-narratives push us back. (See his writing on civic imagination and pendulum shifts.) Dan Hill suggests the slowdown gives glimpses of what a world addressing climate & inequality might feel like. Otto Scharmer frames the crisis as a mirror forcing awareness of our collective behaviour.
3. Example from Lambeth U-Lab & community fridge
Before the pandemic, I co-facilitated a U-Lab in Lambeth, centered on place. Over weeks, participants role-played parts of local systems: newcomers, churches, care homes. They said things like:
“I want to get the most out of this place” — the newcomer
“I’m different things to different people” — the church
“I don’t belong anywhere” — the care home
From that, prototypes emerged, including a community fridge in Brixton (covered by Brixton Blog), a space where neighbours share surplus food, reducing waste and creating social connection.
https://brixtonblog.com/2017/02/londons-first-community-fridge-launches-in-brixton/42840/?cn-reloaded=1
It was never meant to be a grand system, but it seeded a shift in norms — neighbors now expect a space where sharing is ordinary, not charity.
4. Steps you can try (in your place)
- List crisis behaviors you want to sustain. (e.g. neighbour check-ins, local reciprocity, shared procurement)
- Pick one to institutionalize. Make it slightly harder to reverse (e.g. formal recognition, policy support)
- Prototype experiments in neighborhoods. Let small groups test rituals, reciprocity norms, local mutual aid structures
- Embed into services. Tie one behavior into planning, health, streets, education — where relevant
- Peer learning and reflection. Host regular sessions across teams and partners to exchange what’s sticking, what’s slipping
- Narrate forward. Use stories to reframe behaviors as part of the new normal.
Why this matters
Surges of change are rare. If we fail to sustain what was learned in emergency, everything resets. But if we catch the wave — anchor small shifts, connect experiments, be deliberate — we can ride toward something stronger.
The alternative is regression: sneaking back into old norms, leaving the edges cold again.
Call to action
- Pick one behavior from the crisis you don’t want to lose.
- Design a small institutional “lock” — a support, rule, incentive, or norm to preserve it.
- Prototype in one area or team.
- Share what you learn (the messy bits matter).
- Invite your collaborators to co-design sustaining that behavior with you.
The shutters are opening. Let’s aim for light that endures, not just brilliance that fades.
What behavior, in your place, do you want to carry forward — and how might you begin anchoring it today?
