From:

http://www.artpromotivate.com/2012/07/what-is-role-of-artist-in-society.html

The artist provides society with emotions, color, and texture. Scientists think up of ways to make life easier, builders and technicians turn those scientific ideas into tangible objects. These things help us - they blend our foods, put roofs over our heads, make mowing the lawn easier - but they never add real emotion. Artists come in to play on our emotions and subconscious thoughts. Amazingly, artists know how to elicit these strong feelings by creating images on canvas and clay.

Artists see things in a totally different way, they challenge the boundaries of rules, society and imagination yet also keep us in touch with the past.

Art takes us out of ourselves. It allows us to address the big questions in life. It makes us think of ourselves and mortality

Art is a huge part of all communities being that it creates a sense of culture! Without culture how can any community truly consider themselves a community?

Finding alternatives to workshops to help people question – education, conversation, experience as the three ways of working with people.

Art helps us question….

What is the experiment? What are we wanting to learn?

What is it’s purpose?

Questioning: How might we fast track questioning (and knowing how to act on these questions) in society?

-          Be the moment of opening: Does it help bring out what is already there in people (across society)? Does it help them make the shift?

-          Open up a window of opportunity in our culture: Does it lay the ground? Does it show that it is alright to question? i.e. open up the space for other things to emerge?

-          Making the questions visible in society: Does it broadcast to a wider audience and then help us find people who are ready to take the first step? A calling card for those who are ready to question and learn? 

-          [Demonstrate personal intent: Does it help us communicate to others what type of change we need to create through a non-workshop environment? Does it help people see what transformation and systemic change is?]

What do we want to learn?

-          What did people experience? What did they feel?

-          What do they know now that they didn’t know before?

-          Does it enable people to question? [Does it leave people with a sense of continual questioning?]

-          Who does it attract?

-          What does it inspire people to do?

What is the follow up to this for those who might be ready?

Imagine going to the Tate modern (or another large space museum), there is an exhibition on and called – reconnecting to life.  You decide to take part.

As you enter the exhibition there is a massive wall with pictures and words on with a question in the middle – What are the features of a wonderful world?  You are asked to participate, to draw to add, to take part.

The second room is a space to lay down your concerns and fears for the world as it is today.  You are invited to have a conversation with other people visiting the exhibition, in booths (think confessional) and there are questions in the booths that you both ask of each other – like what is the state of the world today? What are your concerns for where we might be heading?

In the third room there are loads of games that you can play with other people, or screens where you can play online.  These games help you understand the interconnectivity of the world, the challenges we face – for example the fish game.

In the fourth room you are invited to write a letter to a future child, either your great-grandchild or someone else’s – you can either do this by hand on through video booths.   You can start to tell them what the world is like today, what you hope it will be like in their time and what needs to happen to make it so.   You can then watch or read other peoples or you can keep yours in your bag.

As you turn the corner into the penultimate room you see many other people milling about the room, at first you are not sure what it is you are watching but you are invited to experience your body and self as part of the wider ecology (how to make this more meaningful needs more work).

Finally as you come to the end of the exhibition you are invited – next to the wonderful world wall to write your personal commitment to making this world wonderful, to reconnect with life and to support it.

This is an example of an experience that might support people tap into the flow of life and could be made available online as well where the body of stories, pictures and letters grow and grow…

What do you think? Anyone know how we might make such an exhibition?

In my previous blog I talked about what systemic change would mean – a shifting of our perspective towards a self-sustaining life.  This shift needs to happen at the individual level as well as the cultural conversation that informs our individual actions, values and motivations.   

Our culture is the sum of all our activities, it both informs our action as well as is created by our actions and perspectives.  It is the rules that govern us, which can be both constraining and enabling.  However our current industrial growth society of mass consumption is locked us into unsustainable patterns of behaviour and has created structures, such as transport networks or cities that are keeping us on this path.

There are two approaches that could help us to shift this perspective, the first being empathy and the second the reconnection to the patterns and flow of life.

‘Empathy can bring about major change in human behaviour and contribute to social transformation’  Roman Krznaric – see his talk and video to hear more on this here.  Empathy can be experienced by both starting to see the world through someone elses eyes as well as experiencing another person’s perspective.   Roman has some interesting ideas on how to support an increase in personal empathy.

However we need to move beyond this and start seeing ourselves and experiencing the deeper structures of reality, the ecological patterns of life that run through ourselves. (see ideas in the previous blog)

There are a variety of ideas about getting people to engage with these ideas through leadership work and small group dialogue, which is highly valuable - see Joanna’s Macy’s work and Otto Scharmer Theory U as great examples.

However can we provide something that reaches wider, stimulates a conversation in a wider field and conversation to start to influence the cultural conversation of society?  With the multiple innovations in ICT we have seen a massive move to a new form of interconnectivity – can ICT’s enablement of interconnectivity create a multiplier effect to support a paradigm shift in human thought and a global consciousness tipping point?

This is what my project with on the 30 day challenge is about – what experience could we create to engage people at the cultural level so as to reconnect us to life and thus stimulate new actions and thus re-creates new structures and rules of society?

Who wants to get involved?

Why we need system change ?

We have a wonderful world.  How can we sustain what we have and cultivate a life that remains wonderful?

My concern that is that we are on a path to our own destruction. With all the progress we have made and all the benefits it has brought, from improved health, better quality of living and a deeper sense of who we are it has also created unintended consequences – inequality, poverty and the destruction of our life support systems, most notably our climate.

What is the outcome?

We need to shift – or a systemic change – towards a self-sustaining society – one where we are innovating and learning so that we sustain ourselves, our wonderful world, within the limits of our ecology.

This requires a shift in perception, the way that we see the world.  We see ourselves as separate from each other and especially separate from the world around us.

- We see this as us and them – as win and lose

-  That we are at the top of the hierarchy of life

-    We see the world as a static resource to be used for our production and consumption

-     And are thus addicted to the economy ever growing – which could be suicidal

We need to start to shift our perception towards

-          The world being alive with flows of relationships

-          As Interdependent and us, humans as an embedded part of this ecology

-          That we have evolved into self reflective consciousness and  so we can (collectively) choice our path forward

We need to reconnect to life. This perspective needs to inform our actions as we create and co-create the world.

Innovation is often seen as the route out of the lock in we experience, especially within our economy. But what if current innovation processes are part of the problem not the solution. Our current paradigm is to value economic growth and the engine for this growth is innovation and which innovations breakthrough and reach the market are those valued by this market or paradigm. For example the obesity problem stems from innovations within the food sector however we seek to innovate it’s solutions in healthcare rather than tackling the root causes of consumption.

Innovation in this context is not the same as sustainability innovation. Current innovation is all based around continuing economic growth, which I suggest is at the root of our sustainability challenge – so what would innovation be in non-growth economics?

Many market innovations focus on more technology and structural change, where for transitions and long-term change towards sustainability we need to focus not only on these new structures but also on values and consumer behaviour. When we look at our systems we focus on the more tangible elements but what we often need is to look at the deep structural elements, the rules and values underlying these systems; moving from an industrial growth society to one which is self-sustaining.

This requires us to look beyond the political and economic to our worldview. We often take this for granted but it effects our conception of fundamental questions such as what life is for and what kind of life do we want to lead. This then affects the way in which we go about innovating and seeking change.

The difference in these innovations is the move from ‘moderate’ innovations to radical – of which there is a growing number of research in this area – for example www.grassrootsinnovations.org looking at alternative currencies, energy services or alternative therapies. These radical innovations are often created not around a market need but to reflect a different set of values.

This is why at Forum for the Future we want to look and understand what pioneering and radical innovations and practice can look like, how they might diffuse through society and if they can shift the current regimes, systems and wider socio-cultural landscape. We run collaborative leadership programmes that help us both examine our values, worldviews and behaviours in action whilst also innovating, to see if we can create these radical seeds of a different kind of future.

[Thanks goes to Alex Haxeltine, Jeroen van den Bergh, Frank Geels, Gill Seyfang and Noel Longhurst who presented at the International Sustainability Conference www.ist2011.nu held last week, who stimulated this exploration.]

Civil society organisations can play a multitude of roles in society, from stimulating discussion, creating a social movement or driving change.  I even heard this week that civil society can be a ‘free space’ where organisations such as Hells Angels or Al Qaida can reside.

However for Forum for the Future we see our role as working with business and government to create a sustainable future.  Our aim is to transform the critical systems that we depend on such as food, energy and finance. 

At the International Sustainability Transition Conference this week Derk Loorback   discussed how researchers and practitioners have spent much of their time looking at the phase of pre-development in transition that being creating innovations and demonstrations.  He said it was now the time to move to accelerating the change.  Acceleration does not happen through a single innovation being scaled up but where multiple events come together to have a reinforcing effect and where new alignments are started. (See blog on tipping points above)

Derk had a list of different principles from coordination and guiding build up and controlled break-down, networks, dealing with barriers, changing the role of business and focusing on first followers and system innovation. 

At Forum our new strategy echoes this need and strategies with a renewed focus on futures & diagnosis, innovation and scaling up. We are looking at 6 main approaches to make this happen

·         Capacity building – build the ability of leaders to translate and work to shift the system

·         Collaboration – creating networks of people who will take forward the change

·         Communication – helping a wider audience engage, through tools to replicate and feeling a part of something bigger

·         Incubation and acceleration – supporting entrepreneurs scale up

·         New financial mechanisms – as finance is a key barrier to scale we are develop approaches that can support access to capital

·         Barrier capture and identification – there are many hurdles to scale, our learning approach explores ways to overcome them including through working with policy makers

This seems like an exciting area of learning and practice, something we still need to crack and this is something we hope to do over the coming years in Forum’s Lab – to learn in the process of what happens to these ideas in reality.

Similar to 6 steps to significant change? Seems like others have similar thinking!

Finding the point of change… the place in which the system tips from one thing to another can seem like the holy grail.  Yesterday attending various sessions at the international conference on sustainability transitions we started the day with a talk on reconnecting to the biosphere by Carl Folke, SRI.  For the rest of the day I followed this idea and here are a few thoughts and reflections.

For sustainability we need resilience of the planet as a whole.  It is not really about saving the earth but more keeping the conditions on the earth within the thresholds for human life.  However do we need resilience – the ability of a system to be stable or maintain itself – at all levels?  If we are seeking a shift towards sustainability do we need to reduce resilience in some places in order for some things to die away?

Jans Newig talked about the difference between the function and structure collapsing.  For example in food we don’t want the function of the system to change – the feeding of the population but we might want the structures to achieving this to change. 

-       We need to make choices about what we are seeking to keep stable and what needs to collapse or die away

It was suggested yesterday (Rebecca White, SPRU) that the UK government food strategy seems to assume it can deal with shocks such as food prices or floods through the market.  Little attention has been paid to interventions on building the resilience of food production through looking at diversity of supply.  Could this be because they don’t want to change too much of the status quo as it might mean collapse some structures and growing others?  Will we be able to respond?  Have we got enough robustness to make the shift without whole system food collapse?

Rebecca’s second case study was community gardens but even there the trend seems to be that they flourish as a responses to shocks in society not as a resilient measure…

So where does this leave us in thinking about shifting systems?  Are we heading towards total collapse or can we make it a smooth ride?  Is it really about sudden points of change?  The case of the collapse of the Rome Empire struck me as an interesting example.  Although we talk about their downfall many of those living under their rule just shifted to Christian dominance, which in part was also adopted by the Romans…  So was it more of a shift not a collapse and what would this mean from where we are today and the future we seek?

-       Tipping is not a single event but where things come together, an acceleration of multiple events having a self-reinforcing effect and where new alignments are created.  Much of what was there still remains but either for a differnet function or structure. 

Later I will write about possible strategies that can enable this tipping or acceleration.  I am writing from the international conference on sustainability transitions – these ideas are stimulated from the speakers and participants http://www.ist2011.nu/.

In System Innovation there are three different levels or conceptual areas of intervention

- Landscape – is the context beyond the direct influence of the regime or niche

- Regime – shared routines of the current status quo – the current mainstream

- Niche – radical novelties that emerge from the fringe

So what is my/our boundary at Forum regarding where we intervene and what should the boundary be for sustainability?

Sustainability, for me, is a whole system concept. It is an ambition that requires us to think about all our futures and in particular the root causes of why we are in this mess in the first place. This means we have to define the landscape level at the socio-cultural perspective – the paradigm and norms that determine our consumption mindset (perverse shorthand).

This might make it hard for quantifiable analysis, measurement and objectification, however it is totally necessary if we are to achieve the huge normative ambition that we are setting ourselves with issues such as climate change and world poverty.

- If we don’t tackle root causes of society we will never create the necessary transition

Secondly – what is the regime or boundary we are placing on the system we hope to shift. For Forum this is beyond the sector to the wider system of food, energy and finance.

If we want more than business as usual we can’t work with the boundaries of the usual – we have to take a more transformative systemic perspective – looking beyond sectors for example from agricultural sector to the food system. [Note you could go one step further to the market, marco-economy – we will aim to look at this level through the interconnections of our work]

- If we don’t think big (whole system) then we will never shift at this fundamental level

Thridly – what of the niche? Where does the new come from? Within our work we assume that it can come from both those within the incumbent, mainstream players that are holding the current structures in place – the companies that are really seeking to be pioneering and transforming their business model as well as the system. However we also are interested in the new innovations that might emerge from the outside. What happens when you scale them up, juxtapose them with the current norms and behaviours of the regime?

- If we want to shift dynamics we need to both work with the dynamics of now as well as the possible of tomorrow

So an interesting framework that requires us to define where we are acting and what we are interested in… what are the boundaries you are working with?

I am writing from the international conference on sustainability transitions – these ideas are stimulated from the speakers and participants http://www.ist2011.nu/.

Following on from yesterdays post - here are some reflections/catagorisation of the areas that might be useful areas of inquiry to pursue further:

1.     Beginnings and endings – Do we see the process of change as complex & emergent or ordered & and something we can control – what does this imply for our work with destinations, visions, intentions, pathways, roadmaps?

2.     Knowing and metrics – How will know if we are successful in system innovation? What are we defining as our metrics, or effective and quality work? What does change look like in a system? What is a successful intervention?

a.     How do we know we are not creating unintended consequences?

3.     Collapse and evolution - If systemic change is about ‘tipping’ (stable/freeze/lockin, transition/unfreeze, stable/refreeze), then do we have to have collapse, catastrophe or does it happen smoothly? What is the path of evolution?

4.     Paradigms and values – If systemic change for humans deals with personal and social change, what is the psychological perspective on this change, (fear, grief)?  Will people and organisations resist (incumbents)? What does it mean to shift perspectives of our view of the world, what we value, desire and need?

a.     How do we understand systemic change as a social process?