Back to school?

In this episode, we explore key concepts that everyone will need to learn and use, to survive the coming changes…

If we’re to survive what’s coming our way right now, there are a whole bunch of basic concepts and skills that we really really need everyone to understand, and put into practice in every action, everywhere.

The catch is that most people still don’t seem to know those skills at all - or why they’re so important, for everyone.

More worryingly, it seems that most did know and do those things when they were younger, but have forgotten them. Or unlearnt them, perhaps.

Or forced to forget them, under the pressures and insanities of the possession-economy.

Whatever the cause might have been, we need to turn this round.

Almost literally, send everyone back to school, and start again from scratch…

(public-domain via the Dover Collection)

(Well, maybe not quite that kind of schooling, perhaps, but close. Certainly something with some serious discipline in it, anyway…)

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So what is it that’s needed? What do we need people to learn?

One is systems-thinking. For some reason, this seems to scare people: maybe it’s just because it includes difficult words such as ‘system’ and ‘thinking’? (Okay, I’m being sarcastic there, but you’ll see the point, I think?) Whatever the cause, though, the systems-thinking community have been trying to get more people engaged throughout the whole of the past half-century and more in this, but have consistently failed to get much traction at all. It all just gets chucked into the too-hard basket. Oh well.

If we want this to work, we’re going to need a better approach…

Okay, some parts of systems-theory are challenging - particularly around what’s known as ‘hard-systems theory’. But that’s a bit of a specialist concern anyway: it’s important, yes, but most people won’t need it. The parts that we do need everyone to learn are a lot simpler, and come down to just a few key concepts, such as these:

• everything interconnects with everything else

• every system is part of a larger system

• everything is dependent on everything else

• there is no single ‘The Centre’, ‘The Most Important Thing’ - everything has its own task, but that doesn’t make it ‘more important’ than anything else

(To give a simple illustration of this last point: yes, ‘the boss’ does an important task (or should do, we’d hope) - but that doesn’t mean that ‘the boss’ is any more important than anyone else.)

Then there some other themes that are a bit more detail-level, but definitely useful to know:

• things have knock-on effects on each other, but they may not happen straight away

• things do tend to balance out, though they can also snowball, or fade away to nothing

• there are usually limits or constraints, some of which cannot be ignored or overruled

(To illustrate that last point, one straightforward constraint is that we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet - so an economics that relies on that kind of infinite-growth is inevitably heading for disaster…)

There are a lot of other themes we could usefully get people to learn - stuff about fractals, recursion, patterns and so on, all of which can make actions simpler, easier and more effective. Probably the classic on that part is Donella Meadows’ work on ‘leverage points in a system’ - there’s an overview on Wikipedia, of course, but the original text and, especially, the visual sketchbook are probably much easier to follow. Everyone needs to know that list - and how to use it, too.

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Next item on our ‘everyone needs to learn this’ list: understanding timescales. That’s because just about everyone gets stuck into short-term thinking. Parents plan things only around the next school year; business-folk think only about the next quarter, or maybe as far as the next financial year; politicians plan everything around the election-cycle, three, four, five years at most; tech folk focus on how much time they have before the current systems get replaced by the next shiny new toy. But in almost every real-world case, that usual kind of short-term thinking, well, that really, really isn’t enough.

If we’re dealing with healthcare, we need to be thinking in terms of decades, whole-lifetimes. If we’re thinking of buildings and heavy infrastructure, that’ll need to extend out into centuries. For trees and timber, the timescale will have barely gotten started by the time we get into the centuries. For some of the nastier chemicals, the timescale’s more like millennia. And even that may not be long enough: I once had a real business-compliance task where the legally-mandated timescale was a quarter of a million years. (In case you’re wondering, the task was ‘How to label nuclear-waste “Do Not Touch”, for the entire time that it might be hazardous’. No surprise that we ended up marking the task as ‘Non-Compliant’, but by law we still had to take it seriously…)

People in our cultures really struggle to grasp those kinds of timescales: we’re going to need help on how to learn this stuff. Tough call, right?

But actually, we’re in luck there, because it turns out that, yes, there are still quite a lot of people around who do know how this works, and have had a lot of practice in it too. People who, for example, when assessing strategy, would consider the needs and concerns not only of the next seven generations, but the previous seven generations too - a time-range of around four hundred years. Those are the kind of people we need as teachers here.

But there aren’t so many of them as we’d need right now, because our own cultures spent a lot of effort killing them off wherever we could. Or, at best, deriding them as ‘primitive’ or ‘underdeveloped’ because they weren’t as myopic and shallow-minded as our own cultures were. But we won’t survive for long if we can’t learn those skills. Which, for the most part, we can only learn from the peoples our cultures killed off. Literally.

Kind of ironic, really.

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We really, really need everyone to get this now. To act on this now, To learn this now. To apply this now, everywhere, in everything that we do.

It’s really, really urgent.

In this case, we may have as much as ten years to do it - which at first might seem not all that urgent at all. But remember, we need everyone to re-learn this stuff - everyone in the entire world. Several billion people, who all need to go back to school to re-learn old new lessons and how to apply them - and do it with all of them in barely a decade. So yeah, that’s urgent all right - we need to get started right now, with no delay at all.