Transforming through crisis

The world is on the threshold of multiple converging crises due to a failed paradigm of endless extraction, which threatens to lead to an increasingly uninhabitable planet by end of century.

Climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, food insecurity and maldistribution, economic instability and inequalities, resource depletion and over-consumption, population growth and demographic imbalance, escalating interstate communal violence and geopolitical disorder, rocketing rates of mental health distress and unhappiness, disease outbreaks and pandemics like the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) – all these are intensifying symptoms of a Crisis of Civilization.

While each comprises a crisis in itself, they are in reality facets of a deeper, global systemic breakdown, with regional, national and local ramifications. COVID-19 has acted as a destabilizing amplifier, tipping over a global system that was already on the edge – in effect, a pin that burst a bubble. That deeper global systemic breakdown speaks to the reality that the prevailing ideologies underpinning this system, its theories of human nature, theories of reality, value-systems, political models, financial architectures, and structures, are not just failing, but in many key ways demonstrably false and dysfunctional.

Along the way, on a business-as-usual scenario, we will see households, communities, villages, towns, cities and nations increasingly disenfranchised by the centralization of power, wealth, data, knowledge and resources for the benefit of the few, at the expense of the planet.

As systemic breakdown escalates, the biggest question of all is what will emerge in its place? And how can we become change agents who accelerate the emergence of a new life-oriented system that works far better for humanity, other species, and the earth?

Our work, and the work of experts in our network and beyond, reveals that global industrial civilization is approaching the last stages of its life cycle. As the old paradigm associated with this civilization breaks-down – a paradigm premised on extreme reductionism and associated theories of human nature, society and culture – the task ahead is to catalyse our capacity to become agents of change in an adaptive cycle of reorganisation, for a new civilizational life cycle that operates in harmony with the planet and the web of life – in other words, what some have called an ‘ecological civilization’.

But we cannot get there based on the same, old thinking, structures and practices. If we want to recreate markets, transform economies, build sustainable companies, create a politics that works for people, we cannot do so using the same logic and methods we are familiar with.

Instead, we require new understandings of human nature, society and culture, as well as new perspectives on the economy, reality and ethics, communicated to influencers in key sectors at scale. This emerging but nascent paradigm will be more holistic, more grounded in systems, interconnections, complexity, and behaviourally-centred around cooperative values such as compassion, generosity, mutuality, and indeed love and empathy. And such values, reflecting more adaptive behaviours, will need to be institutionalized in new systems and structures fit for the post-carbon age.

But to get there, we will need to enhance our collective clarity around what a life-oriented approach looks like, and generative conversations that can help us reach greater shared understandings of our predicament and the actions needed to move toward life-supporting systems.

The System Shift Lab is a consultancy being convened to explore and develop applied collective intelligence approaches that can help incubate and accelerate adaptive system change for the new life cycle at multiple scales – from the individual and household, to communities and municipalities, to national governments and international institutions – through the cultivation of what we call ‘public networked empathic intelligence’: by correctly diagnosing system crisis, developing strategies for living systems change, and facilitating coordinated action.