{"id":3224,"date":"2026-07-28T10:49:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T09:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?p=3224"},"modified":"2026-07-28T10:49:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T09:49:10","slug":"professions-triangulation-and-the-costs-of-adaptation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?p=3224","title":{"rendered":"Professions, triangulation and the costs of adaptation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
The Charybdis is a swirling water feature in the temperate house at Savill Garden. It was designed by Giles Rayner in 2006. https:\/\/funandgames.org\/web\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/The-Charybdis_Savill-Gardens_9257-2-scaled.jpg<\/em> – you may have recently seen the original in The Odyssey<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last week<\/a> I mentioned that I thought this blog, for the rest of the year at least, would be about what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of a terrifying future. This week I thought I should start to put a bit of flesh on that particular carcass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One source for my thinking on this is Alex Steffen. I recently attended one of his Personal Climate Strategy: The Basics <\/em>webinars. He is particularly good on the importance of continually updating your world view<\/a> in the face of climate discontinuity and increasing evidence of societal brittleness, and how professions can often be a barrier to doing this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The greatest danger in any work that asks you to think systemically about the future is getting locked into the worldview that made sense to you when you first began, that you built your successful career on.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all have limited time and energy. Building up an insightful mental model of how the world works takes a lot of both. The pay-off is in the profit and sense of purpose gained from one’s expertise. It is very common, when you’re highly rewarded for a given set of working insights, to commit more to those insights as your career unfolds, to begin even to defend those insights from challenging new perspectives (ones you fear might devalue your intellectual stock in trade). This “sunk-cost expertise” can easily become a set of shackles.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article then goes on to explain the process of triangulation, by which professionals can “deflate pressure (from the public, regulators or activist stakeholders) to change more quickly and shore up the power of management and experts who would otherwise be forced to admit that they don\u2019t really know what they\u2019re doing”. If someone starts by saying that they support what you are suggesting, then responds with a bunch of short-term easy actions and claims that these are the start of a journey towards what you are suggesting, you are probably being triangulated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another is a recent article by Richard Murphy on the political economy of adaptation<\/a>. As he says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biological idea that first made me think this might be possible is called allostasis. It is not a complicated concept. It simply describes the way living organisms survive by continually adapting to the changing world around them.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we all know, nothing alive exists in a stable environment. Every living thing must continually respond and adapt to changing circumstances. Human beings are no exception. Our brains and bodies are constantly anticipating change and adjusting to it. Most of that work happens without us ever noticing. Allostasis happens all the time, and most of us do not notice. But the fact is that this continual adaptation has a cost.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murphy points out that, at a time of continual change like ours, that cost is high. And the adaptation required is much higher for people who cannot just throw money at their problems. He then goes on to say:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That changes how we think about political economy. Politics then becomes the process by which societies decide how those costs of adaptation are distributed, whilst economics becomes the study of how institutions either increase or reduce them. Accounting becomes the means by which we identify who ultimately bears the cost of adaptation and health becomes one of the principal ways in which we observe its effects.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think there is a lot to this approach, which would also provide a structure to identify and critique the triangulation process set out by Steffen. Murphy only mentions education once in this piece:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Education should recognise that human beings learn differently, rather than assuming that everyone should conform to a single model.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would go a lot further than that, because I think education is the key to helping individuals with their own adaptation strategies as well as in developing the political understanding to see how the costs of adaptation are currently distributed and how to change that within a democratic system. This seems to be an extension of what I have been writing recently about how not to be a reverse-centaur for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The implications for this in health, education and our institutions are considerable in my view and growing all the time. So that is what I am going to be writing about for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting next week with allostasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I mentioned that I thought this blog, for the rest of the year at least, would be about what we resist, what we create and what we could nurture in the face of a terrifying future. This week I thought I should start to put a bit of flesh on that particular carcass. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,8,25,24,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-change","category-economics","category-education","category-health","category-professions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3224"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3228,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3224\/revisions\/3228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}