What phase of societal change are we at and what capabilities do we need to navigate what comes next?
Navigating change is one of the premises of our curriculum at the School of System Change. We bring in multiple contributors who share different frameworks and practices that help us both understand how change happens and also how we might live through change. During this time of Covid-19 I have turned to some of the frameworks and models to help me figure what is happening as part of a larger story. What is the pattern of society changing and what approaches might be useful?
Societal change frameworks
There are a number of models and frameworks that draw from history to understand if there are patterns of how change happens in society and through humanity. These models are often circular, shaped like infinity (panarchy), or spirals moving, waving developing through time. They do not necessarily work on the same time or scale. The purpose of this exercise is not to try and align all the models but to see if we can pull out the pattern.
Here I have listed some of these frameworks.
Just as we are not really seeing these phases as linear we also need to understand that multiple phases exist in different ways at any one time. As a society, we are likely to be hovering in a more dominant place, that has more emphasis on how we live and structure our society.
So where are we now?
Looking at these theories and where they say we are in the phases of change, many say we are in a time of decadence. In our near past there has been a time of growth, building through the industrial age, accelerating through the digital age and with increasing bureaucracy, seeking more property and affluence as we look to achieve more. Our global culture is at this achiever stage — this can sometimes be understood in an anthropomorphic lens as being a teenager stage. As with late teenagers asking questions about what happens next in our lives, is this the question we need to ask now as a society?
What could we be moving towards?
These models mostly suggest that now, like in the past, there will be breakdown, a release, a decline in the prevalent structure of society. A time of possible collapse and disintegration — there are plenty of narratives out there which offer images of what this might be and how this happens. Disruption usually comes from shocks outside of the system, from the environment. Covid is one of these shocks that takes hold of society and climate change is the one that is larger and looming over the horizon.
It also suggests that through this there is a space of reorganisation, of new pioneering seeds being planted and growing and a time for learning to change, wondering what is needed next? Even looking towards a more holistic and systemic view. To what extent will the fabric of our society collapse, with what force? To what extent are we ready and able to reorganise? We can now turn to other theories that might help us understand how we live through such times so that work with the reorganisation that comes with any systems change.
The phases to dealing with change
Change practitioners from multiple lineages and traditions have developed frameworks that help us as individuals and organisations work through times of change, and change ourselves. These smaller cycles or phases of change echo and resonate with the large societal phases, hinging on the fractal nature of systemic change. Through engaging in cycles of change ourselves at this time, we are contributing to the wider change cycles and putting in the ingredients the system needs to move and reconfigure.
Joanna Macy’s The work that reconnects talks of 4 phases — of Gratitude, Honouring our pain, Seeing with new eyes and Going Forth. Theory U, a social process looks at ways of how we might tap into source, or inspiration to a deeper knowing of who we are in this world — what is the life process such as these waves and spirals that might guide us. Processwork talks about needing to work at this essence level, and also that we need not to ignore the power struggles in the structures and dynamics of the world as we see ourselves to go forth. The transition model of William Bridges asks us to honour the zone between the ending and the new beginning.
What implications might this have?
“All that you touch,
you change
All that you change
changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is change
God is change” Octavia Butler
We cannot know how big a collapse there will be — how painful this process will continue to be — from loss of our ways of living to loss of life. We also don’t know what the time scale will be. But if there is one thing we do know — is there is nothing permanent but change itself. Drawing from these ideas about how to navigate change, what capabilities might we choose to cultivate to deal with change — to support ourselves through change?
- We need capacities to deal with the pain, grief and power struggles
We need processes to help work with the tensions of our world, in all realms, the personal, in groups, communities and as wider societies. We cannot skip over this phase and ignore it. We need listening circles, group processes such as the resurgence of death cafes or loss circles- we need new narratives about the world. We need ways to help us let go of our old stories and ways of living. We need to let what was die and work with the negotiation of power that comes through a phase like this so that we do not perpetuate inequalities going forward.
2. We need to see with new eyes, to learn together and explore what is happening in the world
We need to learn how to learn, placing the this process at the heart of the work, so that we can imagine and identify the new seeds. We need to support the feedback loops so that learning can be used. We have to ensure that this really is connecting into something deeper, so that we renew afresh from what the world needs from us. Allowing ourselves to challenge our assumptions but also be lost and to not know. How might we work with complexity and see the systemic nature of the way the world works?
3. We need facilitative capacity to help us to re-organise
We need to be able to facilitate at all levels, we need this capacity more than ever — to help decision making, to help us communicate — both working with the psychological elements of change as well as the practical questions of resource allocation, continuing to learn and work with the challenges. Facilitation supports the interactions and relationships between the different parts, zooming in and out. It is a creative act that helps bring awareness to the world enabling us to work together.
These and likely others are the capacities that we need to help us navigate the types of change that are coming across our societies, so we are prepared, to bring awareness to what is happening and be ready to regenerate and renew our world.
[At the School of System Change we help change makers navigate systemic tools and frameworks. We too are now looking at how we continue to evolve what we offer so that we address issues of power, put learning explicitly at our centre and develop programmes that can cultivate the facilitative capacity for systemic change.]
References & links
Octavia Butler — Parable of the Sower
Meg Wheatly in her book references John Glubbs work on cycles of civilisation
Panarchy and the adaptive cycle at the Resilence Alliance
Tonybee — a study of history
Developmental levels of consiousness — a summary
