Changing… the world!
© 2024, James McLean
Yesterday, I facilitated a team responsible for supporting/enabling resilient communities. One team can't really be responsible for that, can they!?
However, this highly skilled (and very willing) team engage across the entire state system to help us all change for a sustainable future.
Part of our conversation was about how to catalyse or continue to fuel the impetus for broad social change. We started talking about ‘comms plans’ and behaviour change…. But if the change, sometimes referred to as The Great Turning, only required this, the job would be done!
What are we missing? What are we assuming is true, but is not?
The focus on specific behaviours, etc, misses the complexity of the challenge. I’ve been thinking a great deal about ‘leverage points’ recently. Places in the system where a small change is most likely to generate a disproportionately larger outcome.
What’s at the heart of our unsustainable world? Carbon emissions, use of resources beyond their ability to renew or be replenished by Earth’s system, our modern Western economic system, our modern Western way of life and cultures… the way each of us expects to live a successful life?
What if a leverage point was simply reassessing what a successful life really looks like? Could conversations about this question be a leverage point? Maybe these small conversations in families, in schools, in tertiary institutions could fuel a real societal change… Eventually, changing our communities, cities and the world!