Opening Passage
For those looking for a comprehensive introduction to what
Thwink.org has to offer, here is the opening passage to Analytical
Activism:
"The goal of the modern environmental movement is
to change the course of civilization to one that is environmentally
sustainable. In the early stages of the movement, the 1960s,
70s, and some of the 80s, this goal looked attainable,
as problem after problem was solved. Clean air and water
acts were passed in nation after nation. Pollution was
fought as if it was a demon. Governments became so committed
to environmentalism that most industrialized nations created
an environmental agency, charged with the task of preserving
and protecting the nation’s environment forever.
An international agency to encourage environmental stewardship
at the global level, the United Nations Environmental Programme,
was created as a result of the Stockholm Conference of
1972.
"In the beginning these efforts worked. Law after
law was passed at the national level to solve problem after
problem. At the international level, treaty after treaty
brought nations together to preserve and protect the biosphere
as a unified whole. The air, the rivers, the oceans, even
the land became cleaner. Dramatic success was the norm.
Visions of victory danced through the heads of those who
sought to make it all happen.
"But starting in the
1980s something changed, and that vision was soon shattered.
Environmentalists are now waking up to the sober realization
that they were not solving the total problem—what
the Club of Rome calls the complete
problematique. Instead, they were only solving the easy
problems first, by picking the low hanging fruit. The hard
problems, such as climate change, topsoil loss, natural resource
depletion, deforestation, and abnormally high rates of species
extinction, remain as unsolved as ever.
"Then in 2001,
when the George W. Bush administration ascended to power
in the United States, things grew even worse. The sole
remaining economic and military superpower was now fiercely
opposed to solving environmental problems of all types.
It began moving aggressively to undermine and even reverse
much of the progress that had been made, sending many in
the environmental movement into an apoplexy of helpless
doom and gloom.
"What went wrong? How can the environmental
movement find its way again?
The Five Invisible Traps
"Like the mighty beasts that could not escape the
tar pits once the first paw went in, the environmental
movement is stuck. It cannot pull itself free from its
present strongly held paradigm, the one it is using to
solve the sustainability problem. The reason this has occurred
is environmentalists have fallen into not one but five
invisible traps.
"The first is the unconscious assumption
that the normal processes we use to solve everyday problems,
either at home or at work, will also work on this problem.
But because the global environmental sustainability problem
is actually what’s
known as a complex social system problem, this assumption
leads to attempting to solve the problem with the wrong process,
which fails. Simple processes will not solve complex problems.
"The
second trap is that because of the wrong process, there is
little realization that the change resistance or social
side of the problem is the crux. Instead, problem
solvers are pounding away furiously at the technical side.
In others words, they are solving the wrong problem.
"This
leads to the third trap. As a result of the blind spot
of not seeing that the social side of the problem is the
crux, there has been no deep analysis of why there is such
stiff, prolonged resistance to adopting a solution. Lack
of such an analysis has led to failure to uncover the existence
of the fundamental social structure that lies at the heart
of the social side of the problem. This invisible structure
has a name: The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace.
And it has an exploiter: the New Dominant Life Form, more
commonly known as the modern corporation and its allies.
This structure appears to be the reason
for such strong change resistance.
"The fourth trap is that if you can’t see
structures like this, then you can’t see where to 'push' on the
system to solve the problem. Instead, you must make educated
guesses, which causes the most intuitively attractive system
points to be pushed. But this is a trap, because those ever-so-attractive
points are low leverage points. Environmentalists simply
do not have the force (numbers, money, and influence) to
make pushing on low leverage points work. They must find
the system’s high leverage points and push there instead.
"Finally,
pulling the beast even deeper into the tar pit is the fifth
and biggest trap of them all. The same characteristics
of problems that make them attract attention first also
make them easier to solve, like local pollution. This creates
the seductive illusion that the right process is being used,
because the process works at first. Then when it begins to
fail on the more difficult problems, such as climate change,
it is not at all obvious what went wrong. The natural reaction
is to try the same thing all the harder, which is the same
way the dinosaurs, mammoths, and saber toothed tigers reacted.
For them, and for even the mightiest of environmentalists,
the end result is always the same. The fiercer the struggle,
the more entangling the tar, and no beast is so strong or
so skillful but that he ultimately sinks.
"There
is, however, a better way.
"That better way is human system engineering, using
the process of Analytical Activism. Understanding what Analytical
Activism is and why it’s a better way begins with this
line of reasoning:"
Above is the opening to a book in progress, Analytical
Activism. The Introduction to the New Paradigm and Part
One are the best possible overall in-depth introduction
to the work at Thwink.org. Read them and see if you agree
with the thesis of the book:
1.
The environmental movement has lost its way because it is
using an inappropriate problem solving process, called Classic
Activism.
2.
Use of the wrong process has caused the movement to "push" on
low leverage
points. This dooms even brilliant and heroic effort to
failure.
3.
It follows that if the movement would switch to an appropriate
problem solving process,
such as Analytical
Activism, it could solve the sustainability problem by
finding the right high leverage points and how to push on
them correctly.
The Introduction to the New Paradigm is only 7
pages long. It begins with the above passage and is available here.
Part One is three chapters long and runs only 37
pages. It is available here.
Image credits: The mural of the La Brea tar pits is by C.
R. Knight, as published in The Mythical Man Month,
by Fred Brooks, 1975.
