BRICOLAGE. Doing more with less

Work with what you’ve got – even if it’s limited. In fact limitations are a prerequisite for innovation and building resilience. And no, you don’t have to have superhuman powers to succeed.


Bricoleurs, DIYers and tinkerers

What bricoleurs, DIYers and tinkerers have in common is that they are inventors – improvising solutions without obvious or sophisticated tools. They know how to make the most of what they have and muddle through. Bricolage, a word appropriated from the French for ‘DIY’ by Claude Levi-Strauss (a French anthropologist who wrote “The Savage Mind”), is how societies create novel solutions. They use only what exists in the collective social consciousness. In other words, we tend to borrow from the stories we inherit. “Every discourse is bricoleur” wrote Jacques Derrida.

Why there are no limits to innovation

Where there are no high tech research and development labs, the street is the lab. In India for example, the improvised fix (or Jugaad as it is known in Hindi-Urdu) is not about making do but making things better, as Navi Radjou illustrates in his TED talk. We’ve a lot to learn from slums too (but that’s another story).

Bricoleurs and building resilience

Resilience is one of the great puzzles of human nature, like creativity or the religious instinct (Diane Coutu).

Resilience may be the greatest challenge of our time but, as Diane Coutu explains in her Harvard Business Review article “How resilience works”, most resilience theories draw attention to three principles, of which ritualized ingenuity – or bricolage – is one. The basic tenet is that resilience can be learned and built by improvising with what is at hand.

How might we use bricolage (ideas, spaces, volunteers) in building resilience?

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