Percept | December 2023
The past year has been a season of extraordinary transition at Percept. It has beckoned in new people, new clients, new portfolios of work, new leadership, and a re-articulation of our strategy and our values.
Over this period, the Percept collective has been living a set of questions about continuity and change:
Which aspects of our culture and practices feel essential and which remain open for continuous, collective iteration?
How do we hold reliability and responsiveness in productive tension?
How do we stay with the discomfort of the in-between spaces and embrace their generativeness?
At the heart of these questions is a thread about resilience, which also shows up in Percept’s vision to help seed “a healthier, more resilient world.” Often, over the course of the past year, we have celebrated Percept’s resilience. But what do we mean by resilience? And how might it help us navigate the course of change – ever emergent, but steady in purpose.
Re-imagining resilience
Sadly, the language of ‘resilience’ is now so commonplace as to be clichè, co-opted for a wide variety of contradictory agendas. It is often defined as an individual’s capacity to recover or ‘bounce back’ in the face of adversities, ranging from professional failure to psychosocial distress, deep trauma or deprivation. In other words, by valorising resilience, we risk abdicating from systemic work. We celebrate individuals’ resilience in the face of systemic injustice, instead of co-creating ecosystems of care, connectedness and healing. We bolster people’s resilience, instead of redressing the conditions that force them to be so resilient in the first place.
This is not the resilience we aspire to at Percept. We talk not of individual resilience, but collective resilience – a more ‘resilient world’, a more resilient planet. And we mean that in an ecosystem sense.
There are five features of a resilient ecosystem that have characterised Percept’s engagement with change over the course of 2023:
1. Interdependence (across generations – as in ECD, as in telehealth, as in transdisciplinarity)
Our interdependence is reflected first in the connectedness of our community, and the ways that our people and partners nourish Percept, and are nourished by it.
Over the past year, Shivani Ranchod, Dr Jodi Wishnia and Ursula Torr – three women who have seeded and nurtured Percept from its inception – stepped away from Percept leadership, each following their own calling to cultivate spaces of care: Shivani, through circanow; Jodi through Zazen Respite Care and Ursula at Alignd. But each has also remained intimately tied to Percept, modelling powerful forms of intergenerational leadership and serving as loving witnesses for Percept’s work. Together, Shivani, Jodi and Ursula have also constituted Percept’s newly-formed ‘Council of Elms’, a collective of close advisors that offer strategic guidance for Percept, support its leadership, and reflect an emerging model of organisational custodianship.
Meanwhile, Njabulo Dube, a Percept alumnus and long-time colleague, has joined as a close advisor and ‘godfather’ of the tech and data science portfolios, bolstering Percept’s constellation of strategic and technical advisors.
This year has welcomed a cohort of diversely experienced and uniquely talented new Perceptors, deepening our transdisciplinary capabilities. Our team of consultants now includes disciplinary expertise in sociology, engineering, history, actuarial science, anthropology, public health, clinical medicine, behavioural science and business administration.
In July 2023, Dr Ndileka Mbete joined Percept’s leadership team, alongside Dave Strugnell and Dr Beth Vale. The alchemical magic of an actuary, an anthropologist, and a healthcare practitioner leading Percept (even though we know each of us contains many multitudes) reflects and reifies who we are, and who we strive to be as a collective.
Percept has also welcomed two new members to our Board. We are privileged to have a Board that regularly provides Percept leadership with a well of guidance, fresh ideas, and robust strategic thinking. Sameera Hassan and Keletso Makofane have already begun to bring their unique experience and insight to bear in these conversations. Sameera is a Somali-American storyteller, humanitarian, communications strategist, and social entrepreneur with a wide range of experience in the global health and development sector. She is the founder of Chronicle Health, a platform that uses storytelling to drive context-responsive, inclusive impact in the health and development sector. Sameera comes with expertise in public health, a rich and collaborative network, and a commitment to inclusive, integrous practice. She is currently based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Keletso Makofane has a background in actuarial science and public health, with a special interest in Social Network Epidemiology. He has Board and governance experience, having served on the Board of Global Black Gay Men Connect (GBGMC) and the Governing Council of the International AIDS Society (IAS). Keletso is based at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Causal Inference, where he is a postdoctoral fellow.
The central node of Percept is its employees, but its root and spore system reveal a far more expansive ecosystem, in which there are multiple ways of relating to, nourishing, and being nourished by the collective. As our Council of Elms, and other advisory roles, take root alongside our Board, subcontractors, clients, alumni, and partners; the power of this interconnected ecosystem becomes ever-more apparent.
“There are a multitude of possible relational models, of coexistence, of collaboration, of symbiosis.” – Percept Field Guide
2. Adaptation
Adaptation is about being responsive to the changing needs of the ecosystem. For Percept, this has meant orienting towards emergence – following our curiosity, making room for learning and iteration, and staying attentive to the new questions and intersections that surface in our work. In the past year, this has included working at the intersections between climate and health, between youth and unemployment, and between maternity care and end-of-life care (both of which represent human life’s great thresholds).
Embracing emergence means getting comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, which are defining features of the complex systems and ‘wicked problems’ towards which our work is oriented. Percept’s work on system change for anti-racism and for early childhood development over the course of the past year, bears this out.
Adaptiveness in our context is to resist brittle, hardened thinking in favour of alternate possibilities and unexpected connections.
“We have naturalised the social, political and economic order as ‘law’ and treated the laws of nature as malleable. We have animated The Market with desires and habits, while denying the consciousness of living species. We have resigned ourselves to gross inequality and violent competition, while extracting and polluting with incomprehensible consequence. Our world suffers from a tyranny of ‘no alternatives’; an impoverishment of the imagination. All of this belies a fundamental truth: that our social order, our own brains, even our cosmos are elastic and expansive. Every second, in every place on earth, human beings – together with non-human beings and ecosystems – are engaged in fragile and embattled projects of social, cultural and biological reproduction. Because we are constantly in-flux, it is necessarily in the in-between spaces – including in unexpected collisions – that radical re-making and re-worlding is taking place.” – Percept’s Emergent Strategy
The work of transdisciplinarity – and of resilience – is about leaning into the in-between spaces. It is about making a home in the generative space of change and transition. Here we have been inspired by the work of Adrienne Maree Brown and other Emergent Strategists.
“Many of us have been socialised to understand that constant growth, violent competition, and critical mass are the ways to create change. But emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend upon critical, deep and authentic connections.” – Adrienne Maree Brown
3. Sustainability
Amid significant transitions in leadership, Percept has been called to think about collective continuance beyond particular leaders. What are the ways of being and knowing that sustain and strengthen our unique offering? What are the practices and systems that will support Percept’s thriving, even as the people in the organisation shift?
Our resilience, we have come to discover, comes from a culture and set of values that is carefully and deliberately nurtured by our people, but can transcend individuals.
One of the central practices that has emerged as non-negotiable for us is reciprocal feedback – or what our team have now come to call ‘feedforward’. Routinely reflecting on what is going well, and what can be improved, supports high-quality work, collaboration, and a culture of learning, listening, attunement and inclusivity. At Percept, this is a collective practice that incorporates both self-reflection and feeding forward to your peers, and is inspired by the work of Jim Dethmer and Time to Think practices.
“The blame and shame associated with making mistakes stands in the way of being oriented to learning. Curiosity exists at the other end of the energy spectrum of shame. It isn’t easy to build a culture that doesn’t blame and shame, and where people remain deeply accountable to each other. It requires rigorous commitment to giving each other feedback, and to the processes of making impeccable agreements, renegotiating agreements, and repairing broken agreements. Giving feedback is not about placing blame or shaming someone – it is about entering into conversation about learning.” – Percept Field Guide
The language of sustainability has also emerged for us in relation to the crafting of our ‘Planetary Strategy’. Percept has been called to embark on a new portfolio of work in response to climate breakdown, and articulate our positioning in the wider field of climate change and sustainability. Here we have found it essential to articulate what precisely is being sustained and for whom, so that the language of sustainability does not simply represent a greenwashed status quo, but an affirmation of life and renewal.
Some of the language and imagery that has inspired our planetary positioning can be accessed in this conversation between Báyò Akómoláfé, Naomi Klein and Yuria Celidwen.
“We’re faced with a crisis – not just of weather patterns. We’re faced with a crisis of becoming, a crisis of being. What does it mean to be human? How do we know things? What does our knowing enact? What worlds die as a result of our rituals of coming to know the world?” – Báyò Akómoláfé
4. Diversity
Any ecosystem knows that diversity is essential to tackling complex problems. Unless our team reflects a range of lived experiences, ways of knowing, and ways of relating, we risk approaching our work with dangerous myopia. While diversity in professional spaces is often reduced to a narrow aesthetic project, genuine multi-dimensional diversity is radical. It is undergirded by equity – asking not just who is in the room, but also who designed the room, who gains entry to the room, whether all voices are being heard, whether all are safe to speak. In this way, substantive diversity is in opposition to systems of oppression that enforce hierarchy and domination. And it is a continuous, everyday practice, rather than a bureaucratic tick-box.
Diversity is also reflected in our mix of clients and portfolios of work – with clients spanning the public, private, donor and NGO sectors; and our portfolio of work spanning financial services, health system strengthening, inequality, social protection, early childhood development, and much more. The diversity of projects puts us in a unique position to draw unlikely connections, and bring alternate voices to often-siloed disciplinary or sectoral domains; the diversity of clients helps to see a multitude of change pathways in the world.
5. Healing and renewal
To work in the in-between spaces, in places of connection, means seeing relationships as the fundamental site of change. Our role becomes to facilitate communication, find unlikely connections, and guide the distribution of resources to where they’re most needed. This is the healing and restorative work of ecosystems, and is fundamental to their resilience.
To tend to inequality, climate crisis or broken health systems is to tend to relationships, to the pacts between us that have gone wrong. This has also been central to our work in value-based care, which seeks to re-align and repair relationships between the providers, funders and seekers of healthcare. Tending to relationships – between business and labour, public and private sector, health providers and patients, human and non-human species, and across generations – is a type of care work. It helps us anticipate and prevent acute episodes, and build a lexicon for working with and through tensions.
In recognition of the importance of language in redressing systems of oppression and bringing new worlds into being, Percept has been running an internal ‘Crossing the Lexicon’ series to grapple with dominant languages of motherhood, gender, race and climate and how they show up in our work.
Among our inspirations here has been Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity’s (AFRE) podcast ‘Race Beyond Borders’. Percept has had the privilege of working with AFRE as a client and collaborator this year and we have been moved by their work to trouble understandings of race across geographies, and re-language and re-world a more equitable future.
In 2024, Percept will be partnering with Exemplars in Global Health and the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health on a major project to surface best practice in anti-racism and structural equity for health.
The resilience of spores
Percept has been forging relationships with partners in Kenya, the US and India, as well as in Timor Leste and Sri Lanka. In approaching this translocal work, Percept holds to its African roots, driving a Global South agenda in its response to global questions of climate, human resources for health, and value-based care. As we look towards 2024, there is more change afoot. Beth is transitioning to Vancouver, Canada, where she will continue to co-lead Percept, grow a network of North American partners, and a portfolio of work that disrupts archetypal North-South relationships.
Percept is small, but kaleidoscopic and unbounded. It is fractal: a space to practise and model the world we hope to see. We have learnt that borders, disciplines and nationalisms no longer serve us. Instead, our ‘inch-wide’ organisation will work across oceans and borders in the ways that our planet, and our problems, need.