Learning for the future: A case study of transdisciplinary collaboration to improve pandemic preparedness

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the COVID-19 pandemic, attention has turned to the impact of societal initiatives and what can be learned from them for the future beyond COVID-19. Little attention has been paid, however, to how ‘learning for the future,’ as an organizational process, is concretely accomplished. This paper offers a collaborative autoethnography of our team’s project to ‘learn for the future’ through transdisciplinary collaboration during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, where our broader goal was to help improve future pandemic preparedness for Belgium and beyond. We engage practice theory, with its processual, relational ontology, to understand the empirical phenomenon of ‘learning for the future’ as a practice or set of relational activities and artifacts that constituted our experience and collective sense that we were ‘learning for the future’ in a transdisciplinary way. Our interpretive analysis uncovered three relational activities: inclusively broad sharing, participatory concretizing, and collective suspending of sense. The analysis further revealed that, at the same time, these activities were the means through which the tension our team repeatedly experienced between the present and future (i.e. making an impact on the present pandemic versus taking a step back from the present to ‘learn for the future’) was being reproduced. This explains why our team’s repeated attempts to clarify priorities and reestablish the focus on the future did not simply resolve the tension. From a processual, relational perspective, ‘learning for the future’ emerged through ongoing efforts that relate to making a difference in the present. We discuss what our theoretical perspective and findings may mean for organizing for a more resilient society and future directions for research