HOW TO CHANGE ANYTHING

• Change the Measurements & Formulas: What gets measured gets done, and formulas powerfully affect human behaviour. Examples: Ecological taxation, which would measure and tax resource consumption and waste, replacing taxes on employment and clean production, would radically alter our economy. Higher prices for energy would produce cleaner cars and less commuter-dependent communities. Metrics like a Well-being Index instead of GDP would change how we assess government performance and hence what governments do.
• Change the Inventories and Flow Rates of Resources: When you increase inventories, you create surpluses and buffers against future loss; when you decrease them, you increase agility and openness to innovation. When you speed up the flow, the impact, for better or worse, increases accordingly. Examples: Greater inventory of perpetually-protected lands would halt biodiversity decline. Faster flow of weapons exports would increase capacity for terrorism.
• Regulate Negative Impacts and Vicious Cycles: You can slow down, or even reverse, a vicious cycle by regulating what feeds it. Slowdown in approval for GM foods would, in the system chart above, slow the vicious cycle of food production, population, and land use degradation. In Story of B, Daniel Quinn makes a compelling argument that curtailing human food production would quickly and humanely solve the problems of human overpopulation, poverty and famine. And regulating maximum work hours would reduce unemployment, family alienation and stress-related work problems.
• Sustain Virtous Cycles: A virtuous cycle, like a vicious cycle, is two or more forces that reinforce and perpetuate each other, except that the results of a virtuous cycle are desirable. For example, a falling birth rate will produce fewer women of child-bearing age and hence lead to a further reduction in birth rate, in a self-perpetuating manner. Providing further incentives to have smaller families, instead of larger families as many governments now do, could sustain this virtuous cycle instead of undermining it.
• Provide New Information: Many problems are due to lack of awareness of problems or their causes rather than lack of will to change them. Despite the loony Lomborgians and the Bush head-in-the-sand denyers, the scientific information showing how human activity has caused global warming, and showing the future impact of its continuance, has been essential to achieving consensus like the Kyoto Accord, the first small step to solving the problem. If every community was required to send a list of its top polluters to every resident, and publish it in the local paper, much more action would be taken against them.
• Change the Rules, or Who Makes and Enforces Them: Laws and regulation, incentives, and moral codes powerfully affect behaviour. If so-called ‘free trade’ rules were set in open-door sessions by representative citizen groups instead of closeted business pressure groups and the governments they fund, and if these rules specified that ‘free trade’ was only allowed in products and services that cannot reasonably be produced locally, then WTO and NAFTA would be forces for the public good instead of creators of massive inequity, insane economic policy, environmental destruction, unemployment, misery and social unrest.
• Create a New System That Makes the Old One Obsolete: What Ms. Meadows called self-organization entails walking away, opting out of an old dysfunctional system and building something completely new. This is the essence of human ingenuity and innovation, and is consistent with the model I have suggested for New Collaborative Enterprises. When the entertainment industry attempted to price-gouge consumers and sell them less, lower quality product, many consumers, especially the young who were most able to see the dysfunction, simply opted out and traded among themselves, employing new technology and vastly increasing the quantity of content available to them by including independent artists and even home made product in their self-organized production and distribution system.
• Change the Goals: If the objective of the system is changed, and provided the new objective is clearly articulated, understood, accepted and achievable, massive buy-in can be achieved quickly and everything mobilized in new ways. Hitler’s restatement of the objective of the German state is an example. Walmart’s restatement of the objective of a retailer from selling products to leasing shelf-space is a more positive one. The Reagan-Bush I restatement of the role of government from providing service to doing only what is absolutely necessary is arguably the cultural underpinning that hads allowed the Bush II damage that now threatens irreparable damage to America’s institutions and its very social fabric. If corporate charters were changed to make their objective the well-being of their employees and communities, instead of the maximization of profits for their shareholders, our whole economy would be transformed.
• Change the Mindset: All of the other elements of systems listed above are driven by what is perceived by the system’s stakeholders as ‘fair’, ‘good’, ‘reasonable’, or ‘right’. If you can change that mindset, everything else changes as a result. If people equated taxes with services (something that provides a ‘good’) rather than something inherently bad, or if people were to begin to see ‘growth’ as dangerous, unsustainable, instead of good and necessary, if people changed their mindset and saw land as a shared resource for all life on the planet, instead of something that belongs to humans, if people began to recognize that animals are living, feeling, sentient creatures and not ‘property’ to be enslaved by man, then that would change the goals, the rules, the whole system by which we live. It would change everything.

How do you change the mindset? In the words of Ms. Meadows, citing Thomas Kuhn for her inspiration:

The tenth and final leverage point requires a bit of a leap of faith (at least it did for me). It says: 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.

(Thanks to Professor Jim McGee — who I cited earlier this week for his excellent article on KM — for bringing this to my attention)