What’s the Best Way to Change the World?

A lot of us are embedded inside old patriarchal and hierarchical systems, trying to do the best we can to affect change from the inside. Some people are superbly suited to this Trojan Horse style of changemaking, able to hold their deeper mission while playing a strategic long-term game of politics and attrition until they find themselves in a position of power, able to affect significant and systemic change.

Others of us have traded the stability and the social recognition of working within the system for the freedom of being able to create our own projects, schedules and teams, for the most part on our own terms. These social entrepreneurs and innovators often thrive in a great deal of uncertainty, are extremely stubborn and don't mind taking massive risks.

In real life, where we often make compromises and try to balance taking care of our own needs with going all-out for the deeper sense of purpose we're driven to create. Sometimes the best laid strategic plans fall flat and we're left wondering if there isn't a better way to get things done.

There's a need, doing this work, to be cognizant of the inherent instability that changemaking, or disruption, takes. So it’s worth asking, how is it that changemaking works best?

One of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, Buckminster Fuller, spoke directly to this when he said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

In my 20's, I used to be quite opinionated and reactionary, quick to think that I knew best and fast to share my strong opinions. As I've gotten older and more experienced, I tend to distrust anything that puts me in direct opposition to anyone or anything.

So much of our thinking and our language depends upon false binaries: it's either black or white (or blue or pink or grey or), you're either with me, or against me, and so on. Linguistically, these false but easy categories are useful, but it's far too easy for our thinking to become locked in these made-up boxes, unable to recognize how much they limit us.

Often, when I'm signing Internet petitions to ask corporations or governments to protect and prioritize the planet and the people, I find myself wondering what it feels like to receive a signature from 50,000 people telling you that you're unequivocally wrong. We tend to punish our leaders, when they're wrong – humiliating them in the media, denigrating them and dehumanizing them in our conversations. If they could overhear us, I wonder, would they feel safe enough to try to change?

If I was in their position, admitting mistakes and turning things around would feel extremely risky and even dangerous. Not to mention that our corporations (not the new B-Corps, but most of our old corporate structure) are set up such that if leaders don't make the most profitable decisions for the shareholders, they can be accused of negligence and even get fired. Within our structures and our movements, we don't make it easy for our leaders to pivot and change.

As the First Nations are at Standing Rock and the Sacred Stones Camp in North Dakota in the United States, they stand in opposition to an oil pipeline that threatens to pollute the land and water. But at the same time, by calling themselves protectors, not protestors, they anchor the discourse in one of shared values, while calling attention to the continuing colonization of their culture and their land. Rather than the old model of fighting against, they're creating a permanent ecovillage to put into practice new models, new ways of living and working together in harmony with each other and the environment.

Bucky was right. Creating something new and amazing is so much more energizing and attractive then getting locked into the old and antagonistic energy of opposition. It takes practice and concerted intention to rise out of the old ways of doing things, and to create new pathways towards change that align more directly with the world that we want to create together. But each time we do, that world emerges more concretely into reality for us all.

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