Well, basically my point of departure is this:
1. Our lifestyle has a few flaws – the major ones being that we’re killing biodiversity and cooking the planet
2. Our lifestyle – embedded in the idea (or mental model) of civilization – didn’t just appear from nowhere. We have constructed it bit by bit over generations.
3. Given 1. and 2. – it should be possible to rethink our priorities and bit by bit construct new mental models for human life on Earth.
I am quite convinced that this can’t be done by ”supreme thinking and planning” from above. Rather this is a process of experimentation at the grassroots level and scaling up the things we want to see more of. But in addition we also need to apply systems thinking to our development – to generate ideas to experiment with and to evaluate the pattern breaking potentials.
A lot more experimentation seems to be going on now. But are these ideas generated within our existing mental models or are they pattern breaking? We’re probably seeing both. But can we tell the difference? Are we sinking our resources into the right initiatives? Can we recognize the pattern breaking experiments that should be scaled? Or are we still mostly putting our resources into stuff that are variations of our old thinking and mental models?
And, perhaps most exciting of all, how do weave a new story for humanity from all this?
These are some of the questions and conversations I’d like to focus on here.