How do we balance the urgency of transitioning to sustainable lifestyles with the need for deep change?

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Boundless Roots

9 min readMay 29, 2020

It is quicker, easier and immediately impactful to get people to do simple things like recycling. But to transform to a low-carbon world we need much more to change in our lives — like values, aspirations and belief-systems. With our first thread of inquiry we explored the tension between urgency and depth and looked for new answers.

In Boundless Roots we engage in action inquiries to address the challenge of radical changes in society that are required in response to the magnitude, urgency and scope of the climate crisis. Together we explore the question: How can we create the conditions for radical changes in how we live? We do so through an approach known as a systemic action inquiry. As Sarah Reed writes “The transforming power of action inquiry comes from an intentional shared vision; alertness to gaps among vision, performance and outcomes in ourselves and others; and a willingness to play a leading role with others in transformational change which requires us to be vulnerable to transformational change ourselves.”

The approach is based on iterative action and learning cycles:

Starting from a position of uncertainty
Valuing multiple perspectives — nobody has a monopoly on the truth
Questioning underlying assumptions and the status quo
Seeing ourselves as part of the inquiry
Constantly learning and adapting, and contributing towards the collective intelligence and experience about how systems are changing

Action inquiry cycle, Source: Covid-19 and systems change: some reflections from the field

To approach the question of sustainable lifestyle change from different angles, we split into sub-groups, following four threads of inquiry that we felt were central to this question. In each of these sub-groups we explored the roots of our inquiries with people holding different perspectives of how change happens and with a focus on identifying where there is potential to contribute to deeper, more radical shifts. In the coming weeks and months, we want to share with you the findings and observations from our first cycle of inquiries. You can read more about them in this article.

Rapid Depth inquiry

The first of these groups explored the tension between creating rapid change and deep change. We used the word “depth” in two different capacities: to refer to a values-shift or a shift in worldview and also in relationship to radical changes in actions (“one planet living”).

According to Envisioning Lifestyles, “A “sustainable lifestyle” is a cluster of habits and patterns of behaviour embedded in a society and facilitated by institutions, norms and infrastructures that frame individual choice, in order to minimize the use of natural resources and generation of wastes, while supporting fairness and prosperity for all.” In three online-calls and at the physical gathering in February 2020 we used different frameworks to explore the question of how we can balance the urgency of transitioning to sustainable lifestyles with the need for deep change.

We asked about the tension between the achievability of quick fixes and “superficial” behaviour change and the deeper changes of consciousness and values that are needed to move to a low-carbon world. Guided by the principles of pushing for radical ambition, valuing multiple perspectives, recognising potential, focusing on the how, consciously learning and iterating as well as walking the talk, we dove into six months of collaborative action-inquiry process.

In the course of our inquiry around speed and depth, we moved from thinking about the polarity of both concepts to holding the paradox and asking about co-benefits and interrelations between both. We decided to change our question to: How do we make urgent changes that have depth, integrity, and longevity in terms of impact? In this article, we’re sharing some of the insights and questions that came up for us. They are pointers and landmarks we felt were meaningful in our collective sense-making.

Transition spaces

Inspired by the three horizons framework we reflected about our current practices and asked what is working and what is not, looked for “pockets of the future” that are embedded in the present and inquired into the middle ground — the transition spaces. What does the path towards an ideal future look like?

We explored two pathways: individual behaviour change and activating a shift in worldview. According to Anna Birney, “A worldview is a particular philosophy of life, paradigm, mind-set or a set of core assumptions about how the world works and how we make meaning in our lives, which informs how we act. A paradigm is what we’re referring to as the pattern or system of beliefs and values that underpin our shared understanding of how the world works.”

Both worldview shifts and behaviour change are interconnected. Behaviour changes can create embodied experiences and a feeling of empowerment that results in deeper mindset changes. Worldview shifts can change how we live and ripple out through social norms that then in turn translate into changed behaviour. If this is the case, where should we start?

Transition spaces are highly fertile spaces that carry the potential to transform the present-day system. We identified the following questions to point us in their direction:

How can we spot teachable moments — moments in which people are open to learning and challenging their assumptions — in individual life?
How do we give more depth, longevity and integrity to existing behaviour change practices?
How do we build worldview-based communities of practice per sector/industry?
How do we scale existing rapid and deep change practices?
How do we communicate more widely about these transformative spaces?
How do we build the capacity for sustainable behaviour change practitioners to balance polarities?
How do we recognise and make visible a multi-faceted ecology of change-making approaches so people and organisations can identify their place within it, whilst valuing others?

These questions might help to identify transition spaces that allow us to change behaviour and shift the current paradigm at the same time.

Teachable Moments

The idea of radical change to a sustainable lifestyle is often accompanied by the notion of sacrifice. A deep shift in mindset is needed for people to accept these changes and even be able to frame them in terms of mutual gain and new opportunities instead of loss. We discussed how to identify and replicate the moments that are key to shifts that then trigger wider changes in other areas of people’s lives.

It felt important to us to find entry points to meet people where they are and understand what level of commitment feels right for them and their respective contexts at a given time. Group member Nicole Van Den Berg from the University of Utrecht for example is using big data collection in different contexts to find out what changes in behaviour people are willing to commit to, which then informs realistic transition pathways for different people in different places.

While our group shares the ambition to create environments and actions that trigger mindset shifts, we have different ideas about the time they require. Retreats that create relational and emotional embodied experiences were highlighted as particularly powerful practices. Examples for effective tools that were mentioned were nature connection methodologies or Theory U-type processes that highlight the level of dissonance in our lives and give people pathways forward. In those settings, changes in worldviews can happen relatively quickly. As pioneering systems thinker Donella Meadows says in “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, “‘There’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change [change in the shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions]. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing.”

Other transformational practices mentioned were modelling a different worldview, cultural mentoring and storytelling. If connective experiences aren’t accessible, personal transformative stories can go a long way in opening new perspectives.

Scaling deep instead of scaling up

Another question we asked was, who should be reached with these practices to achieve the goal of tipping our social norms? We explored ideas of early adopters and multipliers, democratisation and scaling. While there is an argument to be made about targeting the ‘political class’ or those with power in the current system in the hope that from there change cascades through our structures, we felt that accessibility of transformational experiences for much larger and diverse groups of people can play an equally important role.

The term ‘scale’ is often associated with a growth and tech mindset. Instead of ‘scaling up’ we wanted to speak about ‘scaling deep’: impacting shifts in cultural values and norms at levels where they then cascade and ripple out. There are effective toolboxes, processes and frameworks like Eco-villages, The Gaia Theory, Transition Network, the Permaculture movement, The Work That Reconnects or 8 Shields that support deep scaling.

We identified networking, languaging and relationship building as potential bridges to move them from niche to mainstream as they trigger curiosity and learning instead of guilt-based messaging. We also thought about how we can reach people in power and leverage our personal and collective relationships in the Boundless Roots Community to support this process. Decentralised ways of organising, dedicated community-building and replicating and adapting models that target specific industries (e.g. The Comms Lab) are all routes to spreading these practices that reach at scaling deep without needing to ‘scale up’ in the traditional sense.

Balancing Polarities

The group had different views as to what extent surface-level engagement can drive the change we want to see or whether it can only be achieved through deep values work. The general feeling is that all of these approaches are valuable and necessary in unlocking sustainable behaviours, from those that are ‘easy-to-tip’, to those deeper shifts that ripple out across society and start to tip social norms.

A multitude of approaches will be required to achieve sustainable lifestyle changes. All of us are confronting different parts of the system in our own way and learning from and working with each other helps us to deepen our understanding of what works where. There is not one correct way to create change or influence how we live, so we need to come at this challenge from many angles and with our different approaches. Understanding our place within this ecology could help us to better understand how we might operate better as a system of practitioners, and also help others to find the routes and pathways to join.

As practitioners, we need tools to balance polarities, we need to embed these practices in our culture of work in our organisations and we need to develop the skills to hold spaces that allow for these values-shifting experiences to happen. In another inquiry group, we talked about “relational practices” and mentioned Process Work, Deep Democracy, Non violent communication, Quakers’ practices and value-based approaches as examples. We asked ourselves how we could build more capacity for that and found a key barrier in our own limiting beliefs and ‘lack mentality’ — we think we don’t have enough power, resources, money etc. — beliefs that are linked to our respective systems in which we operate.

Spiraling cycles

The findings and observations above were surfaced during our first cycle of inquiry where each group met for three online sessions and a joint in-person gathering. If we could, we would have written this article in spiral form. Text is linear but our inquiries don’t flow in a linear form, our goal is not to converge and arrive at some kind of end-point together but to deepen our collective understanding and awareness of possible ways forward. In the course of our inquiry we strongly felt the importance of the ability to work with contradictions and polarities. It is a continuous, lifelong journey and yet each of us has found a number of tools that help us do exactly that in our various projects.

As the conversations we had in the past months evolved, some of them turned into new themes and questions. Two of them were heavily influenced through our rapid depth inquiry:

Meaningful life: How are we inviting people into an open, evolving conversation about what gives our lives meaning?

Working with contradictions: How do we work skillfully with polarities? Us as practitioners and the communities we serve. How do we create spaces to connect with what people need in the moment with collective exploration of the potential?

We are now preparing for the next cycle of inquiry and will soon be creating new groups. If you are interested in joining the community to explore related topics with fellow practitioners, we would love to hear from you!