Resilient Thinking – Concept Note for a Card Game

Learning Strategies – The JLS Game

Background and Context

In the international development sector, unprecedented challenges like climate crises, inequality, funding constraints, and disinformation demand innovative and adaptive learning strategies. JLS’s Learning Strategies (JLS) Game was created as one such tool – an interactive card-based experience that combines evaluation insights, cultural proverbs, imagery, and creative questions to nurture critical thinking and adaptive strategies.

The Developmental Thinking Coach is a proposed extension of this game, designed to deepen and structure the learning journey that the cards initiate. It will offer structured coaching journeys based on the game’sapproach and content, guiding users through reflection and application of the insights to real-world development challenges.

Strategic Design

A robust strategic design for development programs must encompass clarity of vision, sustainability of impacts, and responsiveness to dynamic contexts. Key elements include:

  • Theory of Change: Clearly articulated, incorporating assumptions and pathways informed by critical evaluation insights (Vogel, 2012).
  • Systems Thinking: Recognizing interdependencies and leveraging systems-wide understanding to foster resilience (Meadows, 2008).
  • Localization and Ownership: Prioritizing local leadership and culturally embedded solutions to enhance relevance, acceptance, and long-term sustainability (Escobar, 1995).

Operational Tactics and Partnerships

Operational implementation must prioritize tactical adaptability, resource efficiency, and partnership alignment. Strategies include:

  • Adaptive Management: Iterative approaches allowing real-time feedback loops and course corrections (Ramalingam et al., 2014).
  • Efficient Resource Utilization: Leveraging local resources, reducing dependency on external inputs, and maximizing impact through focused interventions (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011).
  • Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships: Inclusive partnerships with civil society, private sector, academia, and local governments to ensure coherent and coordinated actions (Brinkerhoff, 2002).

Philosophical Dimensions: Resilience and Sustainability

Philosophically, sustainable and resilient development integrates ethical reflection, ecological consciousness, and holistic approaches to human wellbeing. Principles include:

  • Holistic Sustainability: Aligning economic, environmental, social, and cultural dimensions of sustainability within the safe and just operating space defined by social foundations and planetary boundaries (Raworth, 2017; Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015).
  • Resilience as Adaptability: Building capacity within communities to adapt, recover, and thrive amidst shocks and chronic stresses, informed by ecological and social resilience theory (Walker & Salt, 2006).
  • Ethical Development Practice: Ensuring development is driven by moral responsibility, emphasizing dignity, justice, and equity (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011).

Cultural Creativity and Indigenous Wisdom

Incorporating cultural creativity and indigenous wisdom is crucial for authentic resilience. Communities historically facing resource scarcity often develop profound strategies embedded in local traditions, arts, and cultural practices:

  • Arts, Poetry, and Photography: Leveraging creative arts to enhance critical and creative thinking, stimulate innovative problem-solving, and foster deep engagement with development issues (Freire, 1970; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Berkes, 2008).
  • Proverbs and Traditional Knowledge: Integrating traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and local wisdom to guide sustainable practices and adaptive strategies.
  • Creative Resilience: Utilizing artistic and cultural narratives to cultivate emotional resilience, identity, and community solidarity (Boal, 2000).As Brian Eno suggests in his “Oblique Strategies,” creative problem-solving often requires lateral thinking: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” This approach encourages development practitioners to reframe mistakes and uncertainties as opportunities for deeper insights and innovative solutions.

Combating Disinformation through Critical Thinking

In an era dominated by disinformation, misinformation, and skepticism, the need for tools that foster critical thinking, informed judgment, and ethical decision-making is more urgent than ever. Disinformation undermines trust, distorts decision-making, and hampers effective development cooperation (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Tools such as the JLS Learning Strategies Game become indispensable in nurturing critical thinking, facilitating dialogue, and reinforcing sound, evidence-based values.

Implementation: The JLS Learning Strategies Game

The JLS Learning Strategies Game operationalizes the above principles, combining rigorous evaluation insights, cultural proverbs, artistic imagery, and creative questions into an interactive tool. The game serves as:

  • Web-based Interface: A simplified online tool integrated into the JLS-consulting.org platform, facilitating initial engagement and reflection.
  • Enhanced Mobile App: A sophisticated application enabling personalized learning journeys, deeper interaction, and broader knowledge integration.
  • Workshop and Team Coaching: A pedagogical instrument fostering dialogue, reflection, critical thinking, and collective problem-solving in workshops, training sessions, and team-building scenarios.

Are the lessons learned through the JLS game relevant and universal?

Relevant across sectors? Yes.

The lessons drawn from evaluations—on participation, unintended effects, power dynamics, learning, failure, innovation, etc.—are cross-cutting and applicable notably in:

  • Social protection
  • Health, education, agriculture
  • Climate action and resilience
  • Public sector reform
  • Private sector engagement
  • Community development and civil society

The game invites users to reinterpret and reapply these lessons to their own professional realities, making them sector-translatable rather than sector-specific.

Relativity of perspective

Importantly, the game incorporates the relativity of perspective—encouraging players to perceive each situation not as fixed or absolute, but through the lenses of age, gender, life stage, and lived experience. Development challenges and solutions may look very different from the standpoint of a child, an elder, a caregiver, or a policymaker.

The game does not pretend to speak for all cultures or contexts, nor to deliver one single truth. It seeks instead to:

  • Provoke reflexive thinking,
  • Encourage contextual adaptation,
  • Elevate multiple knowledges (evaluation evidence + cultural wisdom + personal experience),
  • And promote epistemic humility—a quality often missing in development work.

The language, metaphors, and visuals of the game are designed to be accessible, and the cards are intentionally brief and evocative. But:

  • Some concepts (e.g. “impact pathways,” “systemic bias,” “resilience trade-offs”) may need contextual explanation.
  • Thus, the game can be played at different levels: intuitive, guided, or facilitated (especially in group sessions).

It’s a learning accelerator, but not a substitute for critical engagement or domain expertise.

The insights it conveys—on learning from failure, navigating uncertainty, managing complexity, and rooting action in ethical judgment—are applicable across sectors and understandable by diverse audiences. While grounded in the language of evaluation and development, the game uses evocative visuals, metaphors, and cultural wisdoms to ensure accessibility. It invites users not to absorb knowledge passively, but to engage critically and contextually. In this way, JLS fosters a form of situated intelligence: not a universal truth, but a universal capacity to learn, adapt, and act with purpose.

The Developmental Thinking Coach

The Developmental Thinking Coach will serve as a bridge between the game’s insightful but intentionally brief and evocative cards and the practical implementation of those insights. Some concepts highlighted by the cards (e.g. “impact pathways” or “systemic bias”) may need more context and guidance – the coach function fulfills this need by providing that “guided” level of play. It transforms each card draw into a mini coaching session, ensuring players not only draw lessons but also apply and internalize them. Ultimately, this function aligns with JLS’s mission to “provoke reflexive thinking, encourage contextual adaptation, elevate multiple knowledges, and promote epistemic humility” in development practice.

Scope: The Developmental Thinking Coach will be divided into two complementary coaching tracks:

  • Programmatic Development Coach: Focused on project strategy and organizational learning – e.g. helping teams with Theory of Change (ToC) development, program design, evaluation planning, stakeholder engagement, and governance improvements.
  • Personal & Professional Development Coach: Focused on individual growth – e.g. enhancing self-awareness, leadership skills, career development, and personal resilience for development professionals.

Both tracks draw on the same card but tailor the reflection and guidance to either an organizational/program context or a personal/professional context. In essence, the system will translate the universal lessons from the game into actionable proposals for improvement in either a project strategy or one’s own practice and leadership.

Academic References

  • Banerjee, A., & Duflo, E. (2011). Poor Economics. PublicAffairs.
  • Berkes, F. (2008). Sacred Ecology. Routledge.
  • Boal, A. (2000). Theatre of the Oppressed. Pluto Press.
  • Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity. HarperCollins.
  • Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics. Random House.
  • Rockström, J., et al. (2009). Planetary Boundaries. Ecology and Society.
  • Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press.
  • Steffen, W., et al. (2015). Planetary Boundaries. Science.
  • Wardle, C., & Derakhshan, H. (2017). Information Disorder. Council of Europe
  • Sara Ahmed (2012) – On Being Included

Other Resources

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