Cultivating the ability to sustain ourselves — the future of sustainability

Forum for the Future follow signals of change so that we might discover dynamic trends that present opportunities to catalyse system change. We publish these trends and areas to watch in our annual report — The Future of Sustainability, this year it includes the growing action against plastics pollution and new ways of organising that are catalysing social action.

The report recognises that we live in non-linear times, and that we need to really understand how people, organisations and our society may respond fundamentally to these issues to help navigate the shifting times we are living within. This requires us to take a systemic approach, creating change at a deeper level, in how we think and act. We need to go beyond single issues and develop the capability to live with and shape change.

Through my research I explored what some of the qualities of living systems and how we as social systems might also learn to have the ability to sustain ourselves — the sustain-ability — if we aligned to this living systems perspective.

‘To take a living systems perspective we need to: Seek the whole system view that recognises ourselves and our society are nested within our environment; take a relationship-based approach to cultivating change; and learn and innovate.’ (Birney, 2014).

It asks how might we:

So that we might build a sustainable system — or put another way have the ability to sustain ourselves.

This report takes this work further, drawing on the work of our System Innovation Lab action inquiry experiments, exploring what this might mean in practice at the multiple levels of society — ourselves, our organisations (including new forms of organising) and across society.

We are exploring how we might cultivate these capabilities, through ventures such as the School of System Change building these capacities with individuals, how we organise ourselves and model this out in practice and through inquiries with others into societal transformation — such as the Civil Society Futures and through our Living Change action inquiry which we are launching soon — helping us to explore how we can embody this living systems perspective.

If you would like to know more do get in touch!