Change for the Audacious: a doer's guide to Large Systems Change for flourishing futures by Steve John Waddell

Author:Steve John Waddell [Waddell, Steve John]
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: NetworkingAction
Published: 2016-03-20T23:00:00+00:00

Societal Learning and Change

In the mid-1990s, I spent time looking at the relationships and fraught history between banks and low-income American communities. Banks simply refused to lend in poorer neighborhoods, particularly in minority communities. Banks claimed lending was high risk, whereas the communities claimed the banks were simply racist and biased against poor people. The federal government passed laws that obliged banks to demonstrate good relationships with local communities and publish information about their lending practices to them. This produced a very different outcome: greatly increased profitable lending, and the ability of communities to invest in their housing, as well as advancement.

Uncovering hidden assumptions accompanied this transformation. For example, banks assumed they would need a brick-and-mortar presence (i.e., buildings) in the communities that would generate expensive overheads. They discovered they could lend through churches and community organizations instead. The banks assumed they would need to enforce lending agreements through costly legal procedures; instead, peer lending and support led to very low default rates.

This is an example of societal learning. Learning is usually associated with individuals, but Peter Senge popularized the concept of the learning organization.111 Learning can also be thought of as a societal activity and that concept permeated my book Societal Learning and Change.112 In all cases, learning is associated with a growth in capacities – something can be done after learning that could not be done prior to it. Learning is also associated with invention and innovation, and is a core activity in all five change spheres described in Chapter 3. Often, the learning process also involves “unlearning,” such as with limiting assumptions and understandings that do not align with experience. Examples include believing that: human flight is impossible; the world is flat; democracy will never work; transformation requires violent crisis; and profitable lending cannot be undertaken in low-income communities. With ideas outside our awareness, there is a natural tendency to think they do not and cannot exist. Transformation is often accompanied by the sentiment: “I never thought about it that way before!” Questions about how we unlearn and learn are related to imagining how something can be different, and creating the necessary transformation.

Learning involves exploring and experiencing the unknown. As described in the individual change sphere case in Chapter 3, it includes opening oneself up and becoming vulnerable. This is a core activity of successful multi-stakeholder processes, as people work across stereotypes and assumptions. In the 1990s, the concept of multi-stakeholder processes was still young. We still didn’t know how to make them work well. But, important pioneering work had been decades before. A particularly robust strain is associated with the merger of two aircraft engine companies in England headed by Eric Trist, an Englishman, and Fred Emery, an Australian. They built on effective dialogue knowledge to treat “my facts” and “your facts” as “our facts.” This opened the door to much more effective planning,113 which led to development in the 1980s-90s of the Search Conference as a methodology. It was further refined by Marvin Weisbord as Future Search.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.