Addressing the Elephant in the Room: 3 questions about the systems we're in, and the ones we want

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Bob Bollen. In my paid working life I was electronics engineer, software engineer and project manager. Now I spend much of my time promoting and organising respectful discussions on big issues, and bottom up decision making with Talk Shop www.talkshopuk.org .

I’m also doing all I can to learn more about the ways of thinking embedded in Systems Thinking, and the related tools and methods appropriate for the multiple crises in which we find ourselves. I want to find ways to share that learning to the widest possible audience - in accessible and useful forms - because I believe that that will be crucial for our survival as a species.

What is your complaint about the current system?

The dominant collective purpose of the world (spread originally by the UK, USA and Europe) that personal worth is measured according to wealth, self-fulfilment and consumption; driven by the advertising industry, which is itself driven by the self-reinforcing behaviour that is known as economic growth, is leading us towards civilisational collapse. This collapse can be viewed as a vortex of political collapses leading to economic collapses, leading to further political collapses, with increasingly frequent, damaging ecological and societal events accelerating the vortex.

It may not be too late, so we need to focus our intelligence and energies into the highest leverage activities we can each find.

At each collapse there will be tipping points where the force of our ideas and preparedness has the possibility of causing a transition to a fairer, more equal and sustainable world.

We need to anticipate possible collapses, and consider what we wish we had done in advance.

How can you describe the new system arising?

I believe that the concept of Emergence is a valuable way of looking at this. Emergence is one example of a behaviour that Systems Thinkers call an ‘archetype’. They see instances of Emergence across different disciplines eg Ecology (the social organisation of ants, termites), Cognition, Economics & Society (the growth of language, the rise of the internet). These instances appear over vastly different timescales and physical extent.

Emergence of the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem

A good example of emergence is the wide variety of life forms that appeared as the corals in the Great Barrier Reef started to form. The main driving force was a relatively sudden rise in the sea level which created a shallow underwater shelf where sunlight could penetrate. (In relation to the text above - we might see this rise as a tipping point.) Incoming ocean currents brought life and nutrients and dissolved calcium.

One animal species - the Coral Polyps - arrived on these currents and found an ideal situation for growth because the shallow water meant that plenty of energy from the sun could reach the sea floor to which it attached itself. These polyps joined in a mutually beneficial relationship with several different microscopic plants to convert sunlight into food & energy. And the energy allowed the corals to extract calcium from the water to build their limestone structures. And so we see an emergence of these new and wonderful limestone structures - so very different from the plants and animals that cooperated to build them. And each different species of Coral Polyps created its own distinctively shaped structure.

And that wasn’t the end of it. Many other plants, animals and fish found the coral structures ideal sites to grow, and to feed and mate. By chance also, the nearby mangrove swamps along the shoreline - also recently arrived as the result of sea-level change - with their network of underwater roots, became a wonderful playground for young fish spawned on the coral reefs to grow without being eaten by larger predators, who couldn’t swim between the roots.

So, we can see that a single change - the rise of the sea level - creating a new environment where something new and unexpected could come into existence: the corals. And then this new limestone infrastructure created the environment for an energetic explosion of many new forms of life, with each species exchanging matter and energy and DNA with each other to form a wonderful new ecosystem.

Emergence of the New System

Many commentators assert that we are in the middle of a 40, 50, 60 .... year transition to a different society.

Might we be witnessing a new emergence similar to that of the Great Barrier Reef, where we’ve seen a number of technological changes that have enabled the internet to emerge, allowing much more peer to peer contact around the world and through society, analogous to the formation of the reef?

And we’re all aware of many emerging cooperative organisations in areas such as food production, community workshops, cycle delivery, sharing platforms and the like - all appearing to be peripheral to the current market economy - yet striving to link up into a beautiful ecosystem; just like the way the many vibrant plants and creatures of the reef share matter, DNA and energy.

So what will take the role of the mangrove roots, protecting these small yet vibrant entities from their larger predators, so that they can grow to maturity and start to form a new and wonderful ecosystem?

And will ‘the water have to rise more’ before some of this can really start to happen?

We really have no idea how soon, or how far away this might be, nor the hardship we may have to endure on the way there.