Changing… the world!
Dr Josie McLean
Changing Human Systems | Speaker | Author | Facilitator | Coach | Co-founder Climate Coaching Alliance | 314.3 ppm
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!
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Programme Leader at Zenergy Global: Facilitating Collective Intelligence
11 个月Yes the leverage points are definitely multidimensional, This is where we can all play a part both individually and collectively.
People & Culture Manager | Career Development Practitioner | Coach | Non-Executive Director | Climate Action Advocate | Former Councillor | JP
11 个月"What if a leverage point was simply reassessing what a successful life really looks like? Could conversations about this question be a leverage point?" These are the very conversations that I love! Yet, I'm quickly reminded of the pervasive influence of mass media, and the ubiquitous consumption-centered "happiness scripts" that most of us marinate in every day (including being exposed to 10,000 ads, on average)! Conversations might well be an important catalyst, but my own experience suggests that forging a new path takes extraordinary courage, commitment and resistance, and will likely only be sustained through becoming embedded within an inclusive community where others are also working (and living) to flip the script! ??
Arts leader, Regenerative practitioner, Strategist, Founder
11 个月Such wonderfully articulated insights and provocations Josie. Thank you. ?… the essence of our aligned work. ?????? Of the many leverage points, expanding our worldviews from industry centric and human centric to life centric…. being nature. … is a big one. And place (as a nested ecosystem) .…. how might (whatever we’re doing …. planning, learning, designing, building, growing, manufacturing etc) be in service to place flourishing (ecologically, socially and culturally)?
Conductor in Residence at The Undaunted. Co-Curator at The Beautiful Collective. Chief What The Fuck Officer at The Undaunted PSF. Neuroconvergent pUNk at... everywhere.
12 个月There are multiple leverage points. The question is, what happens when the patterns and contexts of these are identified as common? At what point do we look to these rather than focusing on the individual points. More importantly, at what point do we look at both, together, and consider the whole as both interconnected/interdependent and individual, where the lived, living and liveable experience of increasing numbers of the unheard across society are listened to, understood and learned from and where the intellectual elite are in the vanguard of learners rather than preachers? This is systemic social change made real. We are The Undaunted.
Hi Josie, thanks for your reflection. My vision is that (social) change is needed in many different domains. My domain is tech. I think we should organise ourselves around these domains in open LinkedIn groups. We can also use a wiki platform to co-create possible next actions.