Mistakes & Cities

Now you might be wondering why would he associate mistakes with smart cities. Up until quite recently I have been living life being afraid of making mistakes. In fact, I used to be so scared of making mistakes, that I would beat myself about it. However, the concept of developing an Exploratory mindset that is grounded in an approach towards learning, was one of the things that has changed my outlook on the whole thing.

It is not about beating yourself up because a mistake was made or the approach led to an undesirable outcome. Just a simple flip can make the situation more holistic, since now you know that this is something that does not work and that is going to inform better decisions moving forward. The key thing is that the mistake is extremely crucial to your personal journey of learning but in the larger context, beneficial to all parties involved. During one of the recent Design Thinking Workshops that I had, there was an activity that was targeted at fostering teamwork through learning from others' mistakes. Just a small gist - the 'game' was essentially a distant relative of Minesweeper with the caveat being that the team would continue from where you left off or 'blew up'. Therefore, every mistake made paved the way for the team to progress further - hope that makes sense. But while we were doing the exercise, none of this struck me until we had the reflection later, where one of the people made this comment that blew my mind (will paraphrase a bit) - 'I was not scared to make mistakes, but actually quite happy since I had comfort in the fact that my mistake would benefit the teams progress.'

Now how does this come into the Smart City context some of you might be thinking. Until the time of writing this article, I believe I had a judgmental approach to cities. During my visits to different cities, I used to think 'this ones better than that' or 'this and that'. But now looking at it, I believe these mistakes should be celebrated in the context that moving forward, the generation that is going to be leading the way has a larger base to refer to. Not saying that the cities moving forward are all going to be the perfect solution to everything, but rather establish even more basis and grounds for more improvement for future generations. Therefore, proving to be more sustainable already.

These mistakes can come in any shape and form - social initiatives, policy making, infrastructural mistakes, urban planning, etc. I know that making mistakes is something that is traditionally frowned upon, but I would like to believe that there would be a faster learning curve, if people are not terrified of making mistakes or the repercussions of such mistakes. My two cents on the matter is that to foster a more sustainable approach to Smart City development, people need to adopt an exploratory approach rather than a traditional approach. Now if you ask me whether major industry players, organizations and decision makers will choose to adopt this mindset or rather stick with the way things are going, I really don't know. Personally, as a youth entering this space, I am confident that my learning curve and potential to have an impact will significantly be heightened if those leading the way decided to adopt an exploratory mindset.

I hope this article just gave you some food for thought, and would love to hear what you think about it. I do realize that some of the topics are not super technical, but I believe that these are important as these are topics that will impact the social sustainability of the future of Smart City development.