Summary report: What has the Covid-19 pandemic taught us about future opportunities for change?

At The Resilience Shift, we have long recognised that the past is an increasingly unreliable predictor of the future, and that deep uncertainty around challenge and risk is felt across many sectors. In 2020, the rapid global impacts of Covid-19, and its consequences across every aspect of the work that Lloyd’s Register Foundation supports, provided a unique opportunity for us all to consider the transformations we’d like to see as we emerge from this crisis.

Together, Lloyd’s Register Foundation and The Resilience Shift have developed this series of conversations as an antidote to the pervasive online ‘noise’ that confronts us as we seek serious discussion and meaningful insight into the ramifications of this crisis. We sought to bring together innovators working within the Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s grant programme, joined by outside subject matter specialists, with the aim of surfacing insights on the likely scale and permanence of changes that Covid-19 has triggered.

Our participants also examined how we approach infrastructure systems and interdependencies, and what the pandemic can tell us about our existing preparedness and horizon-scanning practices.

With the five sessions respectively focused on safety at work, data and information systems, education, infrastructure and public understanding of risk, this series explores both the impact of disruption and how disruption can create windows of opportunity for change.

Publication date: 16 February, 2021
Authors: Amy Leitch, The Resilience Shift; Will Newton, Arup; Akshaya Kannan, Arup