All of us live in taken-for-granted-and-invisible assumptions about how minds change. And how they don’t. About how behaviors change. And how they don’t.
We’re obsessed—especially those of us concerned with climate change, regenerative business, polycrises, and things like that—with getting other people’s minds to change.
(Yes, you are. Be honest: Have you ever tried to change someone’s mind? Or change a habit? Your own habit? Someone else’s habits – your spouse, perhaps, or your child? Your coworkers, your dozen or hundred or 100,000 coworkers? Millions of country men and women? Billions of fellow earthlings? It’s not easy. And yet it happens.)
So how do minds change? How does behavior change? How do cultures change?
I’ve been obsessed with these intertwingled mysteries for decades, since long before “theory of change” emerged as A Thing in the 1990s. And I’m increasingly frustrated with many of the conversations I encounter about change. The pallette is puny, and the language is sloppy, which suggests that the thinking is sloppy as well. It contains:
- Lots of wishing. “It would be good if…” “We should…” “They should…” (Which begs Ken Homer’s perennial question, “Which ‘we’ are ‘we’ referring to when ‘we’ say ‘we’?”)
- Too much reliance on logic (as if facts ever changed minds)
- Too much reliance on fear (as if fear ever changed minds).
- Not enough invitation into the world we want. (This has long been the central element in my own theory of change, from World Game to Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the Office of Appropriate Technology, and Natural Logic.)
- And an aversion to power—recognizing it, accumulating it, and wielding it—confusing power-over-as-it’s-wielded with power in its many other forms.
I’ve been developing some theories—and a diagnosis—that suggest key pathways to both understand the mess and to engage it more effectively. I’ll offer them as seeds for our next Living Between Worlds “conversation for possibility.” this Wednesday.
We’ll explore four key drivers of change that I hinted at above: Fear (or aversion); Logic (or reason); Desire (or attraction); and Power (or coercion). And we’ll consider the role of Dignity and its sibling Shame, and their deep challenge to identity. (It’s no accident that Living Between Worlds—with Grace, Dignity, and Power is subtitled as it is.)
So please join us Wednesday (and the third Wednesday of every month) from 12:00-1:30pm Pacific time, for this ongoing conversation. You can register here.
(Who joins these conversations? Executives. Sustainability professionals. Investors. Activists. Entrepreneurs. Seekers. Up-and-comers. A poet or two. And you!
“Because people are hungry for meaningful conversations that move worlds. Let’s have some!”
OH, AND ONE MORE THING (speaking of change):
You may have been noticing a rising murmur lately about “degrowth”—the notion that humanity has gotten too big for its britches and needs to scale back. But degrowth, though rooted in the reality check of “carrying capacity,” has a branding problem. Daniel Aronson’s five part series on degrowth on LinkedIn last week, which generated lots of reaction, started out by calling it “dangerous because it runs smack into what I call the 10th planetary boundary: individuals’ aspirations.”
My initial comment there:
“Planetary limits are real. HOW we sort out living within them is an open question. Decoupling seems a more meaningful meme than degrowth, which has always struck me as (1) overly simplistic (since it begs the question of growth or degrowth of what, and for whom), and (2) politically tone deaf (since winning the world we want will require increasing, not decreasing, the masses of people who want that world). Seems a good time for people to read—or re-read—some Herman Daly, who as I recall handled these questions more wisely in his half-century of work on steady-state economy.”
What do you think?
PS: Now you can talk with my AI ’simulated’ me – 24/7!