How To Change This World? Be The Change!

	Critical Questions

We must thank and celebrate the excellent work done by David Pollard on his very generous site entitled "How To Save The World".

Dave has recently picked up on the great work by Dana Meadows and has effectively summarized its crucial points in a wonderful essay.

What Dave lays in front of you is a very precious recipe of advice and directions that will be quite likely part of our change action plan. The core issues listed by Dana Meadows do provide some wonderful and enlightnening view on what we must look at to be able to bring about the "deep", transformatory" change we are working for.

Especially inspiring is the passage from Thomas Khun that highlights in a wonderful synthesis our very own mission as Communication Agents:

"You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm,

you come yourself, loudly, with assurance, from the new one,

you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power.

You don't waste time with reactionaries;

rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded."

This is a celebration of our spirit as Communication Agents and of the ethics and approach we believe will contribute to make change take over.

How encouraging to know, that at least in our minds and hearts, we are trying to be that very force!

Robin

HOW TO CHANGE ANYTHING by Dave Pollard

Systems thinking is an interesting and disciplined way to look at how things work, and how to bring about change. Peter Senge may be the guru of systems thinking, but Dana Meadows was its master. The late Ms. Meadows, author of The Limits to Growth, founder of the Sustainability Institute and writer of The Global Citizen column until her death two years ago, wrote a remarkable paper for Whole Earth magazine in 1997 that described how to change anything by using one of ten system leverage points, which she listed in increasing order of power (and also increasing order of difficulty).

Here is a summary of these points in layman's terms, with some examples of how they could be used to bring about remarkable change.

1) Change the Measurements & Formulas

2) Change the Inventories and Flow Rates of Resources

3) Regulate Negative Impacts and Vicious Cycles

4) Sustain Virtous Cycles

5) Provide New Information

6) Change the Rules, or Who Makes and Enforces Them

7) Create a New System That Makes the Old One Obsolete

8) Change the Goals

9) Change the Mindset

10) Be The Change
Be open, yourself, to new ideas and ways of thinking. Be able to change. Acquire an ability to let go of things that no longer work, no longer make sense. Perhaps she's paraphrasing Ghandi when he said, simply, Be the Change.

Some of the above are our very own goals as Communication Agents in this very project. For example n.5 Provide New Information is one among our key tasks. As you scroll down the list you find goals that nonetheless ambitious are more and more in synch with the spirit of the Communication Agents Initiative.

I stronly suggest you give a good read Dave Pollard original article which provides a lot more depth and reference to the original sources. He also goes in depth at providing his own vision for how each one of the then above listed points shoudl/could/is handled.

A great read and very inspiring too, not only because it brings back valuable know-how that I didn't even know existed but also because it provides a timely new point of reference for our work at hand.
Original post by Dave Pollard.

Thanks Dave!

Robin Good