From a longer text by Kenneth McLeod which is also a critique of traditional sustainability action:

What we need to know to prepare for a transition, or at the very least, need to talk about together:

“1. Industrial civilisation is heading for systemic breakdown at an accelerating pace.

By almost any key measure our species is on a collision course with the biophysical limits of planet Earth. There is only one possible outcome of such a collision – human ecological collapse.

The momentum of this process is variable and uneven in different societies and locations. Nevertheless, because of the density and continuing growth of human populations, historically unprecedented global integration, the already advanced degree of social breakdown in many societies, and the sheer magnitude of our impact on the planet’s life support systems, few if any human communities can be insulated from it.

Consider one of the foremost drivers of the unfolding global emergency — human over-population.

There is no reason to believe that humans are different to other organisms exhibiting exponential population expansion. Swarming, or rapid unsustainable growth, reaches a peak determined by bio-physical constraints and then moves into a phase of equally rapid decline or die-back. Despite our ability to shape the environment, we are animals to.

Over-population is the elephant in the room that we have demonstrated an inability to address, probably because of biological predisposition reflected in cultural taboos and societal blind spots. But we can be sure that the planet itself will deal with this problem. The experience will not be a happy one for humanity and the many other species we are crowding out or destroying their only viable ecological niches.

2. The notion of human ecological sustainability is meaningless without acceptance of the necessity for cultural transformation.

To continue to talk of the dominant industrial growth civilisation achieving sustainability has become a nonsense. We have reached the point where we need to abandon its underpinning and necessary assumption — that humans have first claim on environmental resources — and move to compatibility with the life support systems of the planet as the core organising principle of all our institutions and cultural values. This means a very different kind of society.

If culture is the prevailing consensus in any human society about what is real, what is knowable, what has value, and what is possible, then a complete makeover of the existing consensus is a precondition for a viable human future. Achieving sustainability is not a question of public policy, green technologies, responsible business practices, or popular education, though it subsumes all these. Nor is it a question of personal commitment to a ‘sustainable lifestyle’ — a worthy but ineffective aspiration.

It requires the transformation of our deepest cultural values.

3. The transformation we require is most likely to occur within a process of collapse.

Thomas Homer-Dixon has used the term ‘catagenesis’ to describe the process of creative renewal emerging from systemic breakdown. It is a process that can be observed in the life cycles of virtually all natural systems.

Consider the implications of the inability of international and national institutions over more than three decades to come to terms with climate change. It is improbable that they are even capable of a timely and proportional response that has any chance of averting catastrophic climate disruption. This is not only because of powerful vested interests and conflicting assessments of the danger. It reflects a deeper systemic incapacity to deal with a threat to our common future that is qualitatively different to the issues that these institutions have evolved to manage. They are in the wrong ball court.

Without doubt the transition will not be a more or less managed process of incremental change from society as we know it to a fundamentally different world. We have neither the knowledge nor the institutions to achieve this. The Age of Transition is more likely to be marked by sudden unforeseen fractures in the unsustainable reality we have convinced ourselves is normal. It will be an age of shocks and surprises.

If we accept that the cultural transformation we need for a viable future is likely to be a consequence of collapse rather than a way of avoiding it, then how we prepare for it will be significantly different. Transition strategies must aim to support creative renewal within a context of systemic breakdown.

What can we do now to strengthen the resilience of communities and crucial social institutions? How do we nurture the shared values and skills to carry us through? How do we enhance our capacity for effective adaptive social learning to better face circumstances of profound uncertainty within a changing and sometimes hostile environment?

4. Transition strategies must encompass both conservation and transformation.

If indeed we are already seeing the first stages of accelerating global systemic breakdown, then creating intentional “lifeboat” communities that can preserve pockets of viable human society through the hard times ahead could make sense. There are certainly those who think so.

Others propose a similarly defensive posture at a national level. But, the logic of Australia as an island of sustainability is not a scaled-up version of a lifeboat community, but Fortress Australia. Unfortunately, it would be a fortress fatally vulnerable to much greater external forces, both natural and human, that would inevitably lay siege to it.

It is not my intention to dismiss this impulse to preserve that which we most value. It is a powerful motivator that will serve us well in difficult times. But what if we were to conceive of this transition as an opportunity for creative transformation, as well as defensive conservation? What approaches to strengthening local and national resilience would this suggest? What genuinely radical social and cultural innovations would we need to bring forth? What communities of practice and learning networks would we envisage to nurture such creativity?

My suggestion is that we turn our attention to ramping up two of the most powerful emergent characteristics of our species: social learning and creative adaptation. How can we equip communities and organisations to be vehicles for co-designing a viable future? How can we create working models of cultural transformation here in Australia that can inform and inspire experimentation around the world?

5. Transition leadership is about facilitating adaptive social learning.

We should not expect the gathering global crisis we have provoked to unfold evenly or move to a sudden apocalyptic climax. It is a crisis already well advanced in many regions of the world while barely apparent where material abundance still cushions its effects. However attenuated, the trends are clear and well advanced and their implications only too apparent. There will be communities and even whole societies that respond with wisdom and compassion. Others will remain mired in self-deceiving denial and confusion. Some will regress to destructive reaction.

In a country like Australia the present generation can readily protect its own short term self-interest. Our abundant mineral and energy resources will permit us to ride the wave of our trading partners’ unsustainable growth. Business-as-usual will deliver us sufficient wealth for decades to maintain our lack of care for the future. But if we retain even a glimmer of respect for the sanctity of life on Earth, we must begin now the task of equipping the next generation and the generations that follow with the capacity to rise to challenges unlike anything so far encountered on the evolutionary journey of our kind. For this we need a new form of leadership.

The Age of Transition calls for a break with the leadership models we’re familiar with in politics, corporations, and established institutions. The times require a focus not on heroic leaders but on shared leadership embedded in our communities and workplaces — leadership that can facilitate creative adaptation at all levels.

Ultimately our ability to survive and thrive as an integral part of Earth’s community of life will depend on our capacity for greatly enhanced adaptive social learning. This will not look like anything presently offered in our educational institutions preoccupied as they are with individual learning for career success in competitive settings.

We must bring forth an altogether more open, reflective and creative process of learning integrated in our everyday social practice and transformative in its outcomes. It would be based on an understanding of how communities and organisations make sense of their shared experience and collaborate to modify their collective responses to external change. It would encourage social innovation, experimentation and prototyping at a local level where the bonds of trust are strongest and thus the potential for risk-taking greatest. And it would be supported by a web of connections to enable sharing of the learnings that emerge from such rich tapestries of experience.

The challenge of transition leadership is to facilitate such adaptive social learning and, by so doing, grasp the possibilities that the long years of our evolutionary journey on this planet have bequeathed to us. Can transition leadership networks become the crucibles within which to develop new social learning methodologies as tools for conscious evolution? Can we conceive of a new kind of viral learning institution embedded in communities and workplaces to nurture such leadership and propagate the required social technologies?”