System Change

social change always begins with people who have “both a critical eye and a hopeful heart.”

When we seek to intervene in any system created by someone, it’s not enough to view their decisions and choices simply as the consequences of first-order thinking because we can inadvertently create serious problems. Before changing anything, we should wonder whether they were using second-order thinking. Their reasons for making certain choices... See more

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).


13. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.


14. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).


15. The lengths of delays, relative to the

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It’s also something that I encourage people to investigate with their own practices. There’s so much that you can do beyond just making your thing. You can also work on the whole system of getting that thing and others like it out into the world. There’s a lot of room for expansion and creativity there. I think the coolest projects look at the

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“We have a problem with scale. The planetary crisis can seem impossible to grasp. But focusing on the local can feel limited. How do we work to a scale that feels manageable? There is a way of reorganising how we think about scale: the -shed. -sheds (from Old English scead) describe the natural boundaries between waterbodies. They are not

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