Systemic Change? Yes, It’s Possible

Joel Makower, Executive Director of GreenBiz.com, posted a thoughtful article about creating systemic change–and actively requested the wisdom of the collective mind. And Gil Friend of Natural Logic devoted an hour and a half to an open discussion of the same topic (It will probably be called “Living Between Worlds #2.5 and it isn’t posted yet as I write this the day the conversation took place).

This is not a coincidence; Gil sent the link to Joel’s article around before the call to everyone who registered for it.

I found the article provocative enough that I posted this comment (and the Living Between Worlds open discussion was so fascinating that I plan to listen again once the video is available):

Good piece, Joel. You’ll be glad to know Gil Friend @gfriend kept his promise to discuss this topic in the monthly “Living Between Worlds” brain trust Zoom.

I come at systemic change through a lifetime of weaving together my two “split personalities” as both a marketer specializing in green and social change companies/products/services and as an environmental, social justice, and peace activist whose credits include starting the movement that saved a threatened local mountain.

Through the nonviolent social change lens of people like George Lakey and Erica Chenoweth, I look at institutional structures: how they prop up the system, create major barriers to change, and ultimately fail because they fail to change–and where they are weak and shaky and vulnerable. Sometimes they collapse with surprising speed (think about the Arab Spring a decade ago, or the government of Afghanistan just in the last ten days. Sometimes, it takes decades. The Quakers targeted slavery for about a century before it was illegalized.

But the marketer in me says systemic change is far more likely to succeed if the effort was made to change popular opinion first. The US civil rights movement created the opinion shift that made civil rights legislation not only possible but enforceable. Opposition to the Vietnam war was strong enough that LBJ felt a need to withdraw from his re-election campaign, years before the troops finally came home. And when we did Save the Mountain here in Western Massachusetts 21 years ago, our first task was to change the “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do” mentality. Once we shifted that, the victory was very quick.