Chapter 5
How to Work a Great Mindshift
for Sustainability Transformations
A transition to sustainability demands profound changes in understanding, interpretative
frameworks and broader cultural values, just as it requires transformations in the practices,
institutions and social structures that regulate and coordinate individual behaviour. In this
context, it is essential to get to the position where people, industry and governments can
easily distinguish between objective facts and opinions that are presented as facts to
advance particular interests, and rely on the former to make informed decisions.
UNEP, Geo 5 (2012: 447).
Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and
which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work
at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own
paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing. In the end, it seems
that power has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically,
profoundly, madly letting go.
Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (1999: 19).
By virtue of the authority with which they are endowed, i.e., as experts, they are able to
influence the definition of social reality others hold … the authority of logic and, therefore,
of the expert as a practitioner of logic, is what carries weight. This source of authority
legitimizes the stories they tell. But the source also tends to subvert the storytellers’ own
recognition that they are telling stories.
Don Michael, With Both Feet Planted Firmly in Mid-Air (1985: 96).
By tying pioneer practice back to the scientific basis of Chaps. 2 and 3, we see how
essential the role of worldviews or mind-sets are in the formation of individual
identity, collective vision and strategies for systemic change that have a mobilizing
effect. Thus, to really innovate a system, transformation strategies also need to
include futures literacy and the acknowledgement of mental path dependencies.
This means engaging with core human aspirations, beliefs or values and what they
mean in the historical context of any activity.
Sociologists and neuroscientists cited earlier show how different stages of civilization have influenced the formation of personalities and even psychological
needs (Elias 1982). Filters of how we perceive and thus feel in situations and
habitualized circuits of interpretation are modeled in our brains in parallel to our
experiences in the environments we happen (or choose) to live in (Hanson 2009).
© The Author(s) 2016
M. Göpel, The Great Mindshift, The Anthropocene:
Politik—Economics—Society—Science 2, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43766-8_5
149
How to Work a Great Mindshift
for Sustainability Transformations
A transition to sustainability demands profound changes in understanding, interpretative
frameworks and broader cultural values, just as it requires transformations in the practices,
institutions and social structures that regulate and coordinate individual behaviour. In this
context, it is essential to get to the position where people, industry and governments can
easily distinguish between objective facts and opinions that are presented as facts to
advance particular interests, and rely on the former to make informed decisions.
UNEP, Geo 5 (2012: 447).
Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and
which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work
at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own
paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing. In the end, it seems
that power has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically,
profoundly, madly letting go.
Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (1999: 19).
By virtue of the authority with which they are endowed, i.e., as experts, they are able to
influence the definition of social reality others hold … the authority of logic and, therefore,
of the expert as a practitioner of logic, is what carries weight. This source of authority
legitimizes the stories they tell. But the source also tends to subvert the storytellers’ own
recognition that they are telling stories.
Don Michael, With Both Feet Planted Firmly in Mid-Air (1985: 96).
By tying pioneer practice back to the scientific basis of Chaps. 2 and 3, we see how
essential the role of worldviews or mind-sets are in the formation of individual
identity, collective vision and strategies for systemic change that have a mobilizing
effect. Thus, to really innovate a system, transformation strategies also need to
include futures literacy and the acknowledgement of mental path dependencies.
This means engaging with core human aspirations, beliefs or values and what they
mean in the historical context of any activity.
Sociologists and neuroscientists cited earlier show how different stages of civilization have influenced the formation of personalities and even psychological
needs (Elias 1982). Filters of how we perceive and thus feel in situations and
habitualized circuits of interpretation are modeled in our brains in parallel to our
experiences in the environments we happen (or choose) to live in (Hanson 2009).
© The Author(s) 2016
M. Göpel, The Great Mindshift, The Anthropocene:
Politik—Economics—Society—Science 2, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43766-8_5
149