The Texas flood of July 2025 was not a surprise. Forecasts were accurate. Warnings were issued. And still, more than 135 lives were lost.
This wasn’t just a flood. It was another chapter in a story we’ve seen before — in Pakistan in 2010, in Bangladesh in 2025, in Canadian wildfires, in water shortages from Bombay to Nairobi.
These disasters remind us of a hard reality: knowledge alone doesn’t save lives. The question is not what we know (or not) — but why, time and again, we fail to act on what we know.
We have experts from the scientific domain and policy areas working on these problems with deep knowledge.
Why is knowledge not translating into actions?
We recognize that these are social experiments. Everything is connected to everything else. Context Matters.
But that’s enough to do something about these problems.
Think of a tree.
Branches are the visible problems: the things we rush to fix.
Roots are the values, perceptions, power structures, and politics underneath.
If we prune branches without tending to the roots, the tree cannot thrive.
Take the so-called ‘Global Water Crisis.’
We often diagnose it as a shortage of water. But the total amount of fresh water on Earth hasn’t changed since the time of the dinosaurs. What has changed is us—8 billion people now share the same supply.
So yes, globally we talk about ‘shortage.’ But tell someone in Bangladesh during the rainy season about a water shortage, and they’ll think you’re crazy.
That’s pruning the branches—focusing on an abstract, global diagnosis.
The root of the problem is not global. It’s local. Water problems are always context-specific. The real challenge is in finding local solutions—grounded in contextual capacity, constraints, and governance—rather than hiding behind a global crisis narrative.
That’s the lesson: scientific facts can tell us how much water exists. Social facts tell us how people experience and manage that water.
Both are needed if the tree is to survive.
A wise practitioner friend once told me: science without policy is just another paper for the library… and policy without science is gambling.
So here’s the question: Do we want more papers? Or do we want to gamble?
We need scientific facts to ground us.
We need social facts to give meaning and legitimacy to our actions.
But when I bring this up, my science and engineering colleagues say: facts are facts—why complicate them?
And my social science colleagues say: science is just another narrative—why privilege it?
I’m not saying one is better than the other. I’m saying alone, each is incomplete.
Scientific facts give us reproducibility and verifiability.
Social facts reflect values, perceptions, and power.
By themselves, they fail. Together, they turn knowledge into action.
That’s the tree again: science is the branches we see, but social facts are the roots that sustain them. Without both, no solution can thrive.
And this is our struggle today: how do we synthesize the precision of science with the wisdom of society to create outcomes we actually want?
We’ve seen this story before. How many more times do we need to watch science warn us while society fails to act? The next flood, fire, or drought will come. The only choice is whether we repeat the past or act differently.
That’s exactly what I’ll be exploring in my Radcliffe talk at Harvard on Wednesday (October 29 at Noon): How Engineering Diplomacy can help us move from facts to action, and from crisis to solutions that stick.
Please plan to join if your schedule permits.
