Karen O'Brien • You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World

Connecting: Creating ideas and possibilities for action, and rearranging them into new forms. In this stage, you look for links between your potential actions and other patterns of behavior in the system around you. Scientists think of this stage as the time for generating hypotheses about the way the world works.

The idea of agency provides that humans have choices and can exercise them. We are subjects, not objects, in the world. We have the capacity to act. Having agency hinges upon our ability to frame causally. This is not to say that “free will” exists objectively, nor that human choices aren’t influenced by social structures. Yet only if our actions h

here: these very actions of agents’ exploring, changing, adapting, and experimenting further change the outcome, and they’d have to then re-adapt and re-adjust.

like fixing climate change; this is a system design problem.

many people are conditioned to see our “organizations” as things rather than as patterns of interaction. We look for solutions that will “fix problems,” as if they are external and can be fixed without “fixing” that which is within us that led to their creation.

Quantum social change requires that we step outside of our pre-existing narratives and instead have the courage to shift social and cultural norms to support an equitable and thriving world.

the potential for humanity to reflect, imagine, collaborate, and consciously co-create equitable transformations has not been adequately integrated in sustainability science.