What if culture is the solution: Big Pictures 005

The biggest and most-discussed problems of our era — the current pandemic, climate change, political and ideological polarization, racial and income inequality, global supply chains, among others — can only be understood and engaged with as systems of interrelated phenomena and actions.

Mindsets

• Sees the whole picture


• Engages different perspectives to see new leverage points in complex systems


• Looks for relationships and how parts interact


• Looks for unintended consequences


• Thinks circularly; not linearly


• Embraces complexity


• Questions assumptions

One challenge of our era, if not the defining challenge, is to reach a coherent, actionable understanding of what is happening in our culture. This is always what I have tried to accomplish with my writing, and increasingly this is what I find myself doing in work. Little today is clear. There are still questions to be answered on how to orient to ... See more

A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.