How are you framing your response to our predicament?

“If you change the way you look at things,

the things you look at change.”

Max Planck

Increasingly, our day to day lives are being touched by burgeoning efforts to reduce carbon emissions, to protect and restore nature. In many ways it feels good, a relief. And yet, many of us carry an overwhelming sense of too little, too late; rearranging the deck chairs as we struggle to come to terms with how profligate we have been.

Professor Jem Bendell explains: “As chronicled in my book Breaking Together, the evidence for the unfolding process of societal disruption and collapse is becoming overwhelming.” He goes on, “In recent years we have learned that senior role holders do not want to admit this, preferring tactics of delay. What they are delaying are urgent efforts at adaptation, economic redistribution, justice, and reconciliation.”

Given this framing, what are your reflections on the transformation efforts you, your organisation, your community are engaged in? What’s the balance of commitment between keeping the lights on today and ensuring they stay on for future generations? What’s in – and what’s out of - scope if/when you talk about adaptation? Even while committing wholeheartedly to improving one set of metrics, might you inadvertently be mortally crashing another?

As we look around, watch and listen to people, find our way through our own struggles about how best to respond to the emergency we are living through, it can feel impossible, futile even. Only when we locate today’s efforts in a wider frame over a longer time horizon - intentionally cultivating the qualities that we believe will be vital for moving through our increasingly turbulent future - do we begin to make better sense of things.

What would it be like, we wonder, if we not only all acted as though this is an emergency, but brought a different kind of attention to how we be in the world? What might become possible by letting go of rigid certainties long enough to curiously inquire into what else may be true or possible? What would it feel like if radical collaboration was a normal part of our repertoire, each of us committing to the deep personal work required to get along with the ‘other’? Surely seeking to integrate love with leadership power is a no-regrets pathway?

With a cacophony of alarm clocks ringing, what are your inklings about the transformation efforts you are engaged in? On point, or too little, too late? Over-privileging one set of metrics rather than taking a wider view? Too much investment in keeping the lights on today at the expense of serious preparation for the coming tragedies that are now inevitable? Or do you simply not know, but carry on regardless?

Part of our Leading Through Storms contribution to the patterning of hope is slowing down, holding the widest possible frame and, in community with others, inquiring deeply into all that matters. While loosening our attachment to certain outcomes – such as trusting that our children will continue to enjoy secure access to food and water – so we strengthen our commitment to cultivating a more consciously interconnected society, supporting people to find their best adaptive responses from where they stand, with what they have.

Inspired by Boyd Varty’s sharing from the world of lion tracking, ‘we don’t know where we’re going, but we know exactly how to get there’.

Whatever your part in the massive improvisation act we are all currently engaged in, what are your misgivings, and what is giving you hope? What are you finding supportive, and which aspects of your leadership would benefit from a different kind of attention?

Image: Manes Photo

 ***

If you’d like to further explore these themes and the inquiries offered here, join our Monday Monthly on November 18th, 4-5pm UK.

If you’d value time and space to think, taking stock of your change efforts in good company with others, join our November programme, The Patterning of Hope. Bringing the world-leading Three Horizons approach* alongside our Four Pathways to Spirited Leadership, you will be invited to work on your current transformation challenges, learning alongside others as part of a growing movement of people working to repattern our future.

* Three Horizons is a brilliant ‘understandascope’, helping make sense of our personal agency in the context of complex, uncertain futures. Used by individuals, communities and organisations large and small throughout the world, it helps to discern what needs to happen today to step forward into the futures we wish for.