Aarathi Krishnan is a 20-year veteran in the world of humanitarian aid and international development. But over the years, she’s sometimes found herself disappointed with leadership at the organizations she partners with.
Too often, Krishnan says, in spite of their good intentions, they’re caught flat-footed by crises that they should’ve seen coming. Fortunately, however, Krishnan thinks she has the solution: imagination.
Krishnan joined The Show to discuss how it’s an idea that grew out of a series of frustrating post-mortem conversations with her peers.
Full conversation
AARATHI KRISHNAN: It was always the same thing. We didn't see this coming. We weren't prepared. We were taken by surprise. I kept thinking, well, this is not right. Why are we not thinking about the future? Why are we assuming that things are just going to keep happening the same way? And when we keep making those assumptions, it's the people that are already disenfranchised, already underrepresented, already in moments of fragility that bear the brunt of our lack of imagination.
SAM DINGMAN: Could you give me an example of what you're describing a situation where something happened that in your mind could have been foreseen if the stakeholders had been a little bit more imaginative.
KRISHNAN: Back in I think I want to say 2015 maybe, just when the Greek migration crisis was happening and we had a lot of people that were fleeing the conflict in Syria. You know, we were going by this assumption back then that what people needed when they arrived was, as refugees or asylum seekers or whatever, that what they needed was food, water, and shelter. And in fact, the first thing people asked for was, where can I charge my phone?
And so the assumption that people were making back then was that if you were fleeing or seeking asylum, you were poor, you were uneducated, you needed the very basics but in fact people fleeing Syria but none of that. They were middle class, extremely educated people that were fleeing a situation outside of their control.
DINGMAN: Interesting, interesting. So there was this picture, it sounds like in the heads of some notional humanitarians of what a refugee is. So what do you think accounts for this lack of imagination?
KRISHNAN: We often as human beings tend to think that the world will continue to unfold the way it's always unfolded. We also as human beings have trouble believing that something that seems implausible, seems ridiculous, could actually occur. But as humanity, we've been proven wrong on all those accounts.
Just in the last five years, the amount of shock as we have had over the last five years alone has shown us that everything that we thought was implausible can actually happen. The sort of things that we thought would never happen to us is actually happening. So I think it is a bit of myopic thinking on our part as human beings and certainly on the parts of decision makers that hold on to a lot of power that don't want to imagine a different status quo.
What we want I believe is disruption as long as it doesn't decenter our own safety and privilege. Or are we raised in cultures like indigenous cultures that prioritize dreaming. I'm Australian, we grew up with our indigenous elders that actually have dream time that talk about the importance of dreaming.
DINGMAN: I'm glad you brought your own experience with this because I'm curious to know about your relationship with imagination. Is it something you've always felt like you're in close touch with or was it something that was an outgrowth of, of the professional work you've done?
KRISHNAN: So I was born in Malaysia and, back then, like, you know, as Southeast Asian kids, science fiction wasn't really a thing for us. But I, from a very young age, always had my face in a book of fairy tales. And then when I started to get into the work that was really important to me, I started to see how the limitations of our ability to imagine something new was actually holding us back as, as people, as people that want to do good, as, and as communities that want to serve.
DINGMAN: So, can you think of an example, once you kind of arrived at this idea of needing to introduce imagination into the work that you do with with institutions, can you think of an example where you encouraged somebody to think that way or maybe brought your own imaginative idea into a situation and you saw the benefit of it.
KRISHNAN: I started integrating this into my professional work back when I was based in Geneva. I was with the International Federation of Red Cross, and we decided to use futures and imagination as one part of how we designed the global strategy. We decided to run a consultation with young people entirely on WhatsApp.
DINGMAN: OK.
KRISHNAN: And so we partnered with the university. The Red Cross youth volunteers would engage with the group in the same sort of region, not subregion, but region. And one of the things we took away from that was that climate change was such a huge issue. And when we ran this process, when we were distilling the data down, what I learned from that was that young people in Europe, the things that were really important to them around climate change were issues of sustainability. Young people in the Middle East, the issues that were important to them were around their safety and security, that if land and water became a lot more scarce, would they get displaced, would they have to flee for their lives? So their safety and security were really important.
For young people in the Pacific, it was something completely different. It was around the sense of identity and home. So when they thought about climate change in the future, what they were thinking about was, well, who am I if Kiribati doesn't exist anymore because it's projected to sink, then who am I? Where do I belong? Where is home?
And so you take this one broad blanket of climate change, but then the nuance of what young people were concerned about and this is almost what, a decade ago. You start to see the nuances in that.
DINGMAN: That's so interesting. That's so interesting. So if I'm hearing you right, it's like if you have a sustainability strategy that is focused on personal safety, the kind of practical concern of personal safety, that might not be very meaningful to somebody for whom climate change represents more of an existential identity threat. What are some of those tools or exercises that you implement to get people thinking this way?
KRISHNAN: You can write a story. Like if you imagine yourself in the future and you're sending a postcard back to your current self, what is that, what is that story telling you? When I was at the UN, we actually created a whole toolkit. We worked with designers in India and with young communities in Southeast Asia and South Asia and the Pacific, where we asked them instead of drawing on, you know, science fiction movies or books where they think about the future, to actually draw on things that they grew up with that was indigenous to their cultures.
So whether it was on indigenous perspectives, whether it was on principles of mythology or lore, what were the things that they were taught from their parents or grandparents or anything else that they wanted to draw on to imagine their futures. I think what it unleashes are ideas about the future that are very relevant to who we are as an individual person. That we design futures that we can see ourselves in rather than futures that we copy and paste from somebody else from the Elon Musks of the world and try to fit into those spaces.
