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Welcome to True Progress
By Jeremy Gernand | April 3, 2008
Onwards and Upwards
Do we know what we are doing? Maybe the right question is do we ever know what we are doing? What are the true consequences of our actions today and tomorrow and hundreds of years from now? Are we responsible for those consequences or should we never be concerned with them?
I believe that too often we accept not having the answers that we could have. We have chosen not to know whether our ways of “helping” each other really turn out to be help in the end. We have chosen to push the solutions to problems we have today off into the realm of tomorrow. While some of that may be rational (I am fairly certain that my computer will be faster in 5 years), not all of it is.
Many times we settle for easy answers. We try the solutions to our problems in business, technology, and organizational difficulties, that are the same solutions tried before. We live in our functional cultures of scientists, technicians, politicians, and managers without learning how to really communicate and see each other’s expertise.
This blog will be a discussion of what makes true progress, whether and how we can know what it is and how to achieve it.
There exist methods in use today in the broad field of risk assessment that we can use to arrive at lasting solutions. These things are not magic bullets, but they do allow us to anticipate problems before they happen so we are not all reduced to responding to crises. I have seen these methods work when many others had failed before. It is in this spirit that I hope to share many of those stories and demonstrate how we can use these methods in new areas.
- Root Cause Analysis and True Solutions
- A Way Out of the Politics of Climate Change, Part 5
- Assigning a Value to Life
- True Progress is Looking for Writers
- Progress and Unintended Consequences
Topics: ethics, risk assessment, sustainable technology |