Five conditions for a successful civilisational transition (2)

We continue our processing of the important points made by Kenneth McLeod in his investigation on how we can contribute to a succcessful phase transition for our economy.

Here he focuses on capacity building:

“I … believe … that we can make a start on sketching out the processes needed to catalyse and nurture a consciously proactive engagement with this Age of Transition. One way of doing this would be to develop plausible transition scenarios, then use them to identify the capacities that will be needed for renewal and thus what capacity-building processes we can begin to experiment with now.

It seems to me there are five particularly important areas of capacity-building that we can address right away. Our approach should be holistic – all these areas should be engaged simultaneously with a continuous exchange of information and learning between them. The creation of meta processes to facilitate and integrate such an holistic approach is therefore essential, a question I address in the final point.

The five priority areas I’d suggest are:

1. The resilience of local communities and of critical bio-regional infrastructure on which local viability depends.

We need a better understanding of the conditions for such resilience and what can be learnt in this regard from natural ecosystems, long enduring traditional cultures, and from the experience of contemporary relocalisation movements. We also need to consider how to strengthen local autonomy and confidence and protect them from encroachment by reactive institutions and rapacious interests.

Resilience is significantly a product of a community’s deep relationship to a unique place. Sharing historical, cultural and ecological knowledge of the local environment and valuing this as the basis for place partnership can build strong bonds of identity and mutual responsibility. This is an area in which settler Australians can learn much from the caring for country traditions of the first Australians.

Personal and community distress is an inevitable by-product of any process of deep change. Social resilience will depend on how well we deal with the intense grieving, fear, and disorientation that loss and profound uncertainty will cause. Courage, compassion, skill, and strong human solidarity will be required to see us through this transition.

2. A resurgence of Earth-centric partnership values.

These values are grounded in a profound respect for the interdependence of Earth’s community of life and frequently celebrate our place in the universe story revealed by scientific inquiry. As I have argued throughout this paper, such core values are essential to inspire and inform the kind of cultural transformation that can carry us through.

Opening a series of Earth Dialogues with indigenous elders, land stewards, holistic scientists, and creative practitioners would advance this process of value renewal here in Australia. Such dialogues could be designed to encourage creative expression of transformational core values in ways that resonate into every facet of human experience. We must go beyond proclaiming charters and manifestos to a broadly participatory process of co-creation. It is not marketing we need but heartfelt creative engagement.

3. A greatly enhanced capacity for rapid adaptive social learning.

We need a better understanding of how diverse human communities make sense of their shared experience and modify their social practices in response to sudden and unforeseen environmental changes.

The development of more effective methodologies of social learning can be informed by the holistic insights from complexity science into how complex systems (like ecosystems and societies) evolve and transform. Decades of experimentation with approaches to organisational learning and communities of practice are also a valuable resource.

Social innovation, experimentation and prototyping in communities and workplaces must be encouraged. To support this we need to open up spaces within existing institutions for autonomous action and innovation, linked by robust networks of reflective learning. These social innovation test beds will need protection from political and bureaucratic interference. Devising effective ways to build and maintain inter-regional and global learning exchange under difficult conditions will also be important to the bigger human project.

4. Effective transition leadership in communities and workplaces.

Skillful, intelligent and inspiring leadership equipped to facilitate social innovation and learning at all levels will hasten the process of transformation and help disseminate important learnings. Fostering and resourcing such distributed leadership must be a high priority.

5. Dynamic meta processes for learning and integration.

For such diverse activity at multiple locations to evolve as a dynamic whole, some form of “connective tissue” or transmission medium is needed to facilitate exchange and growth. This suggests the need to experiment with innovative meta organisation and processes that can encourage collaboration and ensure the rapid dissemination of social learning.

In my experience neither existing educational institutions nor activist organisations are equipped to facilitate this kind of holistic, transdisciplinary, and exploratory developmental work. They are too bound by their origins and the ideologies, interests, and agendas of their controlling elites and sectional interests. Transition times require more fluid structures with permeable boundaries that can rapidly adapt to emerging needs and opportunities and readily experiment with new approaches.

Can we envisage a kind of embedded or viral learning institution working in and between communities and organisations?

Some of its principal functions might include:

i) Catalysing and facilitating collaborative projects to flesh out and implement capacity-building initiatives like those proposed above, using a diverse range of creative processes.

ii) Stimulating experimentation and prototyping of social innovations.

iii) Researching, developing, and propagating social learning methodologies and tools.

iv) Identifying and advocating for enabling policies and action by established (old order) institutions at all levels.

v) Fostering transition leadership learning networks and communities of practice.”

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.