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Elizabeth Sawin, "Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World" (Island Press, 2024)
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Michael Simpson
More.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Old deck Boring money moves make kinda.
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Michael Simpson
Lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet PNC bank brilliantly boring.
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Podcast Host / Narrator
Since 1865 welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Michael Simpson
Hello, my name is Michael Simpson and it is my honor and pleasure to welcome Dr. Elizabeth Sawyin to discuss her recently released book Creating a Systems Change in a Fractured World. Now Beth has dedicated her career to the theory and practice of creating change in complex Systems and in 2021 she founded and is now currently the Director of the Multi Solving Institute. Now after studying many successful efforts around the world where people created systems change by building connections across silos, she developed a multi solving approach to more effectively address equity, climate change, health well being and the economic vitality as integrated issues. Now prior to her position, Beth co founded the think tank Climate Interactive to develop tools and project possible futures for grappling with the complexity of the climate system. And in this regard she led efforts to integrate measures of equity, health and well being into decision support computer simulations. Now Beth writes and speaks about multi solving and leadership in complex systems from both the national and international perspective. She has over 40 publications, both in scientific journals as well as more populous literature such as nonprofit quarterly, the Stanford Social Innovative Review, the Daily Climate, US News, as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Now Beth graduated from my alma mater to Dartmouth College with majors in Biology and Chemistry and subsequently received her PhD in neurobiology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Welcome. Beth.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Hi. It's great to be here.
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Michael Simpson
So let me start. As an ecologist and a practicing climate adaptation scientist, I have approached my on the ground efforts using what I call the CO benefits approach. This reflected that any climate adaptation solution I propose had other benefits that could be identified and quantified. This was usually in the context of also addressing climate mitigation of greenhouse gas loading, biodiversity loss. With all my work there was also an economic cost benefit impact of any action. But it seems your concept of multi solving has far more breadth and vision than just CO benefits approach. Can you comment on this?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Well, I'd say that they're very related and probably two different ways of talking about the same kind of truth about our world. So as you know, our world is inherently interconnected. Health isn't separate from the environment, climate change isn't separate from the economy, and so on. A lot of times we see that interconnection as a problem we're worried about, oh, there might be unexpected side effects, you know, as though the interconnection is something that, you know, we might not like but we have to deal with. I think both the CO benefits idea and multisolving flips that. It says actually this interconnection is here to stay and if we can be intelligent and elegant about how we work with it, may actually make it easier to solve some of these challenges that we face. If there's any sort of daylight between CO benefits and multi solving, I'd say it's two things. Like you, for a long time I used the CO benefits word and we what I ran into, and I'm curious in your work if you ever experienced this was CO benefits, kind of sets people up to think there's a main benefit and then there's some CO benefits. We never meant it that way, but it kind of puts like a two tiered system in place. And as I worked more and more with communities that were being impacted right in the present moment by the health impacts of fossil fuels. And I was showing up as a climate scientist, you know, I was thinking climate change was the main problem and the main benefit and that the children in your neighborhood would have fewer instances of asthma, that was a CO benefit. But if you flip it, if I'm the parent of a kid in the emergency room with another asthma attack, you might think asthma is the main, asthma prevention is the main benefit and climate change protection is a nice CO benefit. So the beauty of the word multisolving is we don't have to choose which one's the most important. We can say they're all important. I'm here for children with asthma and for the long term climate. Let's get down to it. Where are the solutions, where those meet? So that's just, it's a, it's a slight difference, but I found it was a difference that made a difference.
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Michael Simpson
No, it actually that's great. That sort of expansion of that. Since my work was always focused on doing something, a very specific thing, I never approached it that way because, you know, I was, I was under a grant or I was doing work for somebody with a specific task in mind. And then the CO benefits was trying to build a more solidarity around siloed groups who wouldn't normally think about that.
- [07:05]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it's probably a continuum of even just taking that collaboration spirit a little, even a little bit further. The second difference is multi solving we use as a verb, right? To multisolve is something you do. Co benefit is a noun, it's kind of a result. And so there's a subtle shift in people's thinking there as well. It's like over and over again over time. Can we work together in a way that meets multiple needs at once?
- [07:37]
Michael Simpson
I found the book was like that. It was a more to let's focus on how to do it instead of here's an example and let's do that example over here.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, Well, I didn't always understand that. When we started our work on multi solving, we had a donor who was really interested in climate change and health. And they sent us to look for projects around the world that advanced those two things at once. And we found them all over the place. They were things like a hospital that served vegetarian meals to staff and patients in Malaysia, a hospital system in the UK that worked on the energy efficiency of the physical plant, but actually saw better outcomes from patients. Because it turns out when you turn all those beeping machines off that aren't in use, people get a better night's sleep. There were public transportation projects, walkability projects, biking projects and the funder. And we thought what we would do is bring back to the U.S. these ideas and say, okay, now replicate in Seattle, in Kansas City. But we found that we couldn't do that. We didn't know how to recommend that because these projects were, and you probably have this in your work too. They were so beautifully fit to the people and place where they evolved that you couldn't really just like copy and paste. And so we said we didn't think that was the right thing to try to replicate. And instead we started paying attention to the way that people worked, the attitudes and the approaches, because we saw that those are really common across cultures, geographies, sectors. And a few things stood out to us. One was cultivating collaboration, bridging silos, which we've already been talking about a little bit, having a really serious commitment to equity so that all voices were heard in decision making and what we ended up calling solidarity. We were trying to talk about the way that these projects genuinely cared about all of the outcomes. And we sort of contrasted that to transactional alliances, which would be more like, well, if you vote for this in city council, I'll vote for that. This was more like it matters to us, those kindergartners with asthma, as much as the health of the river, as much as the good jobs, and we'll show up for each other's issues. So we lately, after that, sort of early, like thinking we were going to be sharing the products, have spent more time trying to share about the processes that we saw.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, well, let me jump on one point you just made. You had mentioned equity as being a. Is an important thing. And now equity and social justice. I saw our themes coursing through your writing here and you dedicate a whole chapter to it. So how do you define equity in your multi solving worldview?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, and again, this is lesson learned from looking at the bright spots where people were successfully designing for multiple needs at once. What we saw was that even if it took a little longer, even if it cost more money, they were operating in ways that all of the different interests and all the different groups had a say in the outcome. So in that sense, it's equity in decision making, it's equity in sharing resources. Another thing about these projects is there's flows in all directions and that could be grant money, it could be openings for relationships like, let me introduce you to someone. It could be leadership. We often saw both kind of formal leadership, people with degrees and credentials or positional power and people with lived experience, but maybe not a lot of credentials, both being a leader in these collaborations between them and in fact passing that leadership role around. So that's what we're looking for when it comes to equity. And in different situations, the sort of type of equity, the axis of equity, is different. In the US we're often needing to attend to racial equity because our society has such a long and traumatic history of racial injustice. In other communities, it might be religious minorities, gender. Gender equity is important. Intergenerational equity, do young people have a say in the decisions and the investments that are going to affect their future? Just like all these principles of multi solving apply to bike lanes and urban orchards and energy efficiency, they also apply to racial equity, gender equity, intergenerational equity. It's the way you approach, and it's not like it's a different set of approaches for each type of equity, if that makes sense.
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Michael Simpson
Well, if we're all operating in the same system, you're saying individuals can experience that system differently. Well, let me ask from your own experiences, can you expand about that on that?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, I think we probably all have experiences of this, because as we move through systems and through societies, we each are members of different groups, and in our hierarchical societies, those groups have different levels of power. So in many cases, I move through systems with a lot of privilege. I'm American, I'm middle class, I have an advanced degree, I lead a company, I'm a boss. For me, the main axis where I have less privilege actually is gender. And particularly early in my career, I was working in spaces that tended to be male dominated, particularly computer modeling about climate change, as often the only woman in a room at a UN conference. And so there I would have an experience of saying things and maybe not necessarily being listened to or feeling listened to. So those are some examples where I would move through a room as a Boss and as Dr. Sahen and have one experience. But on that gender axis, I would have a different experience. And as I began to sort of widen my set of partners, I was then working with people from the global south or in America, working with people of color and women of color. And I would watch how they move through rooms. And if I thought that it was difficult for me to be listened to, you know, multiply that for each of these different levels of oppression or flavors of oppression. And so there's many reasons why this is problematic for systems. There's the ethical side of everyone is precious and everyone is unique, and we have these inalienable rights, and we're not honoring the ethics of that. But there's also the loss of collective intelligence. If some voices that carry some knowledge or experience can't be effectively in the mix, it limits our ability to solve the challenges we're facing. I think a lot in this context of my mentor, Donella Meadows, who one of the things that she taught was that often the ethical and the practical line up with each other in complex systems. And I think this is an example that we want to honor all voices ethically because it's the right thing to do practically because our decisions stink unless we do so ethical and practical. When those line up, I tend to try to pay attention. And this is an example of that.
- [16:11]
Michael Simpson
As a follow up. For all the dynamics that can drive inequity in a system, what do you feel is the primary one to watch out for?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Probably there's more than one, so I'm just going to name a couple. But one I would look for is the concentration of resources. So systems are basically systems in the present represent all the decisions that were made before. So even if a society has made progress on equity, there can be this sort of legacy in the built environment, in inequities, in wealth that are sort of like a trace of the history of a system. And so people often want to move forward as though we're all equal and kind of gloss over that historical burden that we're carrying along. So for effective multi solving, there's a kind of courage and a willingness to look at that historical legacy in order to go forward. So I'd name that as one and the second I would name are just the unconscious patterns of thought. It's very hard to grow up in a society with inequities embedded in it without absorbing some of that, without reflecting on it. And so that's why here in the US in the last decade or two, I think that just the enormous stride in awareness among privileged people like me, white people like me, of being able to look at racial inequity and understand it and have a vocabulary for it is really important. And why it's important, I think, that carry on even when there's certain elements in ascendancy in our country right now that are, that are trying to shut that conversation down. I think the fact that it's so powerful is why it is a target right now.
- [18:13]
Michael Simpson
Okay, well, thank you.
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- [18:43]
Michael Simpson
Now you just mentioned Donella Meadows and you also mentioned her throughout the book. Can you share briefly who she was and what influence she had on your, shaping your thinking?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, definitely. Donella Meadows was a co author of one of the seminal books, I think in the environmental field called the Limits to Growth, which was published in 1972. And she, Donella and her co authors looked at the question of what would happen as the footprint of the human global civilization met and then exceeded what's called the carrying capacity of the Earth. So in 1972, the human draw on the Earth's capacity to provide for us was less than what the Earth's output was, but it had a pattern of exponential growth that meant that eventually those two things would cross. Their book was about and their study was computer modeling was about. What were the options given that this sort of collision was coming from the vantage point of 1972. The advice they gave to the world was that by shifting our economies and our consumption, by sharing more and reducing our consumption to what was essential needs, it would be possible to keep the human impact within what the Earth could sustain indefinitely. That was kind of a radical new thought in 1972. It met with a lot of resistance around the world, I think to those young scientists who just delivered their conclusions, you know, as a wake up call to humanity, I think they were a little shocked by the level of that pushback. And in that kind of emerged whole new fields, including the ones that I work in. The method of using systems analysis to look at complex social environmental systems was kind of born in that 1972 report. So fast forward to the late 1990s. Donella was a professor at Dartmouth College. I was a student there. That's where we began our association. And I was one of, gosh, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of people around the world that she was a mentor to. Part of her reaction to sort of that important message not being heard by the world's governments was realizing there needed to be a lot more people who understood. So she, at Dartmouth, she trained many, many people. She was the founder of important international networks of sustainability leaders. She became not just my teacher, but eventual mentor. She hired a bunch of young people when she started a research institute in the late 1990s. And I was, I was one of them and worked with her until her unfortunate way too early death in 2001. She also influenced my life more personally because in addition to her research, she was one of the best examples I know of walking your talk. And so part of how she brought what she knew from her research into practice was in how she lived first in a cooperative farm farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire. And then she had a vision of a community that shared land and an ecological organic farm, sustainable building practices. And she inspired a lot of people with that vision, including me and my husband. So we were part of a community where we still live today in heartland called Cobb Hill that is an ongoing experiment in everything from green building to organic farming. And probably the toughest element of it, collective shared living and shared governance and being human beings together making decisions.
- [23:09]
Michael Simpson
That's great. I know Cobb Hill and people that are there also.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Right.
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Michael Simpson
I want to change directions for a second. I note in your book you use antidote or provide real world examples in what I would characterize as storytelling in order to drive home the points you are introducing to your readers. Can you share why you chose this style in which to write the book?
- [23:34]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, that was a very deliberate choice and a little bit of an outlier when it comes to teaching about complex systems. There's a number of really excellent books on systems thinking and complexity. And almost all of them use a style of diagrams and charts and graphs to help convey that complexity. And I actually love those books. I love those diagrams. I've spent lots of time over the years making them, teaching people how to do them. And one thing I came to my kind of informal 1/3, 2/3 rule about this, which was one third of people, their eyes light up, they get a sparkle, those diagrams speak to them and they're hooked. And 2/3 of people kind of glaze over like their minds don't work in that way. It's part of just our human diversity. And I felt like there wasn't a good book on systems theory for those people. So I gave myself the challenge of really limited number of charts and diagrams and trying to use stories to convey the principles. One of my beliefs is that we're all actually experts in complex systems. We are complex systems. Our bodies are our organizations, our families, our gardens. We know a lot about complexity, but may not have been ever given a language for it in our kind of standard educations. So I'm trying to sort of tap what people already know and give them some words for it.
- [25:10]
Michael Simpson
Okay, so let me follow up for the uninitiated. In systems thinking, the first thing I think about is that you introduce the concept of stocks and you say stocks can be a double edged sword in regards to maintaining the resilience of a system. Can you speak to that?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah. In systems thinking, a stock is a very particular thing. It's a part of a system where something accumulates. Lots of times we first are taught about Stocks in the idea of a bathtub. So a bathtub is a stock of water. Stocks fill with inflows. So in the case of a bathtub, that's the faucet. And stocks drain with outflows. That would be the plug at the bottom of the bathtub. And the world is full of stocks. So a school is a stock full of children. A library is a stock full of books. Your pantry is a stock full of groceries, and so on. And once you have the idea of stocks, then you start to see how stocks are connected with flows. The stock of books in the library gets added to with new purchases, gets drained when patrons take books home, but then they can flow right back. So some stocks can. Flows can be loops that recirculate, and then some books get lost, don't recirculate. That would be another flow. Some eventually wear out and get retired. So at any one time, the books in the library and their makeup is the sort of culmination of all these flows, the decisions about purchasing which books are popular and won't be on the shelf because they're always checked out, and so on. So in some stocks where it's a matter of life or death or health, if the stock gets either too high or too low, then paying a lot of attention to the inflows and the outflows helps manage a system. So in our part of the world right now, we read a lot about a housing crisis. So there's a stock of housing, there's available housing, and then there's housing that's occupied. If the inflow of building new housing is insufficient to the demand of housing, then you have a housing crisis. And the solutions to it are either build more housing or find ways to share housing so more people can fit in the existing housing. But the thing about stocks is you can only change stocks by changing inflows and outflows. So those are our policy levers. Those are our conversations in communities about what's the right level of investment, what's the right level of retrofitting, how do we keep older housing stock livable? All of those are questions about flows. Yeah, yeah.
- [28:21]
Michael Simpson
And some of my work with the kinetic, the Colorado Plateau and water being supplied to Arizona and California is just all about that.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, Flows can be very contentious. Right. There can be power struggles about flows, for sure.
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Michael Simpson
You also have two chapters dedicated to feedback with the first of these is focused on positive or reinforcing feedbacks. So can you let listeners know what you mean by reinforcing feedback and explain the point you Put forward that such feedback dynamic can be a detriment to a system stability or possibly even multi solving efforts.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, so a feedback loop is anytime that the level of a stock feeds back to influence the level of that stock. And a positive or reinforcing feedback loop is when that change in the stock feeds back to create more change in the same direction. So here's what I mean. If you have money in the bank, in a savings account that's a stock, it earns interest each month, that gets replenished and adds to the amount of stock, amount of money that you have in your account. So the larger your savings, the more monthly interest, the larger your savings. So that's a feedback loop. And the bigger the stock, the bigger the flow into it. And that's why you know your savings over time, if you don't touch them, they don't grow in a straight line. They grow in a, in a line that is exponential growth or that sort of hockey stick shaped pattern. So lots of things in the world are reinforcing feedback, and it's neither good nor bad. But this potential to have change feed on itself in the same direction can create problems. So in our bodies, cells that escape cell division, the more cells you have, the more cells you get, we call that a tumor or a cancer. That's reinforcing feedback. And that can become a problem because it can overwhelm the system. The population of any animal or organism that's not in balance with its environment can have that shape of exponential growth. So some of the challenges that we face, that we call resilience challenges, are at their root some sort of a feedback loop that has escaped control. And so sometimes for multi solving, you need to understand ways to regulate that tendency toward exponential growth and help a system be more steady or more stable. Can I add one more thing about exponential growth?
- [31:15]
Michael Simpson
Please.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
That sort of illustrates that it's not all good or bad. A lot of the mechanisms we depend on to create change are also exponential growth. When an idea goes viral, if it's a good idea, the more people who know something, the more people who are curious and learn about it, the more people spread it. That can be a force for positive social change that we call it going viral now. So that's a reinforcing feedback loop. Growing a movement from a few people to enough people to make a difference is a reinforcing feedback process. So what I try to encourage people to think about in that chapter on reinforcing feedback is knowing when it's important to regulate it, to disrupt that reinforcing growth and when it's actually a force you want to design for and try to tap into. So it's more about discernment than good or bad.
- [32:13]
Michael Simpson
Well, you answered my next question, so thank you.
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Perfect. We're on the same wavelength.
- [32:19]
Michael Simpson
So, you know, roughly 50% of your book is a description of the various aspects of systems and their dynamics and how one might intervene in these systems. Is understanding the framework of systems thinking sufficient to addressing positive change? And if not, what else is required?
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Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, I don't think understanding systems is all that we need to do, but what I do believe is that to effectively intervene, we need to have this framework of systems and complexity. But it goes beyond understanding to acting, experimenting, and learning. And so I think you're right. The first chunk of the book is trying to offer a language and kind of a worldview into complexity. But then I'm, I hope trying to emphasize that we can take what we see about complexity and act and shift systems and create change.
- [33:22]
Michael Simpson
So I'm going to change directions a little bit. Many people look to the United nations as the organization to drive consensus about sustainable future. And I know you've seen firsthand the process at the UN Cops or the conference of the party's discussions about strategies to stem global warming. But from my perspective, besides the UN just informing the greater population to this existential threat facing the world, these gatherings and their supporting scientific documentation have fallen woefully short in regards to actual behavior change. Do you have any thoughts about this?
- [34:01]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, over the course of my career, I think I've had a whole sort of changing set of thoughts and feelings about the UN and these really consequential decisions. I started not knowing much about it and ended up being part of a team that was one of the first groups to develop a way to kind of hold up a mirror to countries who are making pledges about the climate. And this would have been around 2008, 2009, and my team and I were able to say, if all the countries did what they were promising, what might that look like for the long term climate future? Because within that set of negotiations, as you know, they have have a target to limit temperature and then they have pledges and our analysis, and now it's been replicated, you know, unfortunately for, you know, 15 years or more, was that there was a gap between the pledges and the target. So at first I was mostly struck with what a beautiful thing it was that the whole world came together in one place to talk about the future of our global Commons. And I still get that feeling even just saying it now. I can remember what it feels like to be at one of those meetings and feel like humanity is trying here. Then I went to many of these cops and met people from around the world. And again, I was just touched by the weaving of networks of connections that happen almost as a byproduct of those negotiations. Civil society, business, government, learning and supporting one another. But year after year our team did the same analysis and every year the message was pretty much the same. It was, you've made some progress and there's further to go. The UN Environment Program published a report they started in 2010, I think it was, it was called the Emissions Gap Report. And. And this is exactly what we're talking about, right? Are the pledges sufficient? I was a lead author on the first few of those reports and I just got really discouraged at saying that same message year after year. And hats off to the. There's some people I worked with at that time who've kept with it. I think it's essential to have that mirror. But it also doesn't seem enough. Pointing out a gap doesn't close a gap. I guess that would be what I learned in my years at the un, that it's that there are other ingredients needed. I came to feel like the other ingredients were different ways of making decisions so that the co benefits as we were talking about get factored into the decision making and so that we can look at the full picture of what would be different when we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. Because within that UN process, it's what I call a carbon centric frame, they're really adding up tons of greenhouse gases, CO2 and others, but they aren't really adding up. Fewer cases of asthma, improvements in biodiversity, jobs and all the other benefits that would come along. It's sneaking in more and more in the last few years, but every year the World Health Organization, this is a good example, I think, comes out with a report and they say pretty much the same thing every year, which is that the costs of the transition to clean energy would be more than offset by the benefits just to health. But we can't quite get there within the decision making as it's structured.
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Michael Simpson
Fiverr.Com in going through your book you have many examples of multi solving approaches at different scales, but I've found that they tended to be mostly described operating at the local up to the regional scale. Is there a spatial and an associated complexity limit of utilizing a multi solving approach to actually affect the system change?
- [39:57]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
I don't know if there's a hard limit, I suspect there's not. But I do believe multi solving is easier at closer and closer to the local level. If you think about it, the truth that our systems are whole systems is pretty obvious in people's day to day life. If you live in a neighborhood you understand that the diesel exhaust from the buses is affecting your kids health. You understand that that's part of the school bud it you could see that an electric bus might solve both of those things at the same time. The further you get in the sort of layers of a system, the more things tend to be currently designed in these silos that we've been talking about where you get to the state level and there's the Energy Department and the Education Department and the Transportation department and they may not even be in the same building and the people involved may not work together. So I think that multi solving more naturally happens at closer and closer to the local level. But because there's a lot of power and resources at higher levels of systems, I think is really important to work toward multi solving at those higher levels. And that's probably where more changes in structure and organization are needed if we're going to unlock this full potential. For instance, the World Health Organization saying this transition could pay for itself. We probably can't muster that only at the local level.
- [41:38]
Michael Simpson
So related question, advocacy has been a mechanism to create the solidarity to change a system. And even at the national scale, such as the civil rights movement and the implementation of Clean Water act in the US that dismantling apartheid in South Africa, the creation of Papua New guinea, and there even been advocates such as Greta Thunberg's cadre attempting to marshal global level advocacy movement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But this needle, from my perspective, has hardly moved at that scale. Do you feel it's possible to have an effective world advocacy movement?
- [42:20]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Well, first of all, I think there's a lot of layers between the local and the purely global. And I think we can look at the US in the Biden administration. We know a lot of that's been pulled back, but it doesn't negate the fact that it happened. We had billions of dollars in inflation reduction act investment that united equity, health, energy and climate. And that was a result of, I think, decades of education and network building among different sectors of US society. So that I think shows national level potential. It ebbs and flows with the complexity of the eu. But the EU has had Green New Deal aspirations and they use that language about uniting these different factors. So I do think that it is possible at multiple levels. I think we can look at things like the protection of the ozone layer as a global success story that shows that it's possible. I think there's new structures needed and a kind of rebalancing of the power of civil society versus corporate interests in order to get that kind of full global potential. I also think there's enormous amounts of alternatives being experimented with in the global south that have the potential for.
- [44:16]
Michael Simpson
First.
- [44:16]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Learning from in the global north and potentially having that kind of whole planet impact like you're talking about. And particularly I'm thinking about ways of organizing ourselves that aren't necessarily centered on the needs of capital that undo a lot of the extractive habits that got spread across the world with colonialism. So it's not simple, but I think there are pathways that I can still imagine towards that level of change that you're talking about.
- [44:54]
Michael Simpson
Thank you. I noticed you referenced donella Meadows leverage points. I use that in a course. These are places to intervene to change a system's behavior. And Meadows presented these possible system interventions as a hierarchy of leverages with changing a paradigm or worldview as you state in the book, as at the top and ultimately required. Now, paradigm shift was brought into the common parlance by the scientist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who you do reference in the book. But I want to frame Kuhn's thinking within a temporal perspective. He implied that scientific paradigm shift or scientific revolution is a slow, tedious and iterative process of questioning a worldview and finding it more and more lacking, which provides a springboard for a new worldview or a paradigm to emerge. Just to provide an example of this temporal dimension, there was 228 years gap between Sir Isaac Newton's and Albert Einstein's worldview of the physical world. So in regards to eventually leveraging a positive paradigm shift, would you characterize the multi solving approach somewhat different from Kuhn's slow, iterative and incremental path of change?
- [46:10]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Well, that's interesting. What I remember of his work is that he talked about two types of science. See if this rings a bell, that he called one of them normal science, and I don't remember the word he used for the other. But normal science is the majority of the history of science in his view. And it is mostly a theory can kind of solve problems and the level of knowledge gets better and better, but nothing really contradicts the theory. You're just sharpening it. And then there will be things that happen that, that don't account, that aren't accounted for in the theory. And Kuhn called those anomalies. And in his thinking, as I recall it, the first thing that happens with those anomalies is they get ignored. They don't fit the normal paradigm. The people who discover them often don't have brilliant careers. They get kind of ousted to the margins. But eventually, because there is an objective reality, and if the theory doesn't match it, those anomalies just keep accumulating. There's a kind of breaking point where there's just this pressure to look for alternative explanations. And then if those tend to have the ability to answer some of these questions that haven't been resolved, they can start to gain confidence and more interest and more effort in them. And those are those, those moments. And many careers never reach one, you know, never because of these long spans of normal science. But my view is that all these crises that we're facing are actually consequences and they're What Kuhn would call anomalies, like if the theory of capitalism and extraction is the way to health, happiness, peace and safety, why is everybody so sick? Why are we plagued with wars that never seem to end? Why is the climate crisis deepening and deepening? And so I, you know, I don't know, you could. These dynamics aren't predictable. But I believe there is this growing pressure of those anomalies and that the extent to which the theories that have held for the last 500 years are getting pretty shaky under our feet. Most people don't know what's going to come next. And that's one of the most difficult times in social change. People would rather stick with something that they know is harmful than jump into the unknown. It seems to be something about how the, and you know, people, as a generalization, we're all, all, we're all different. But I believe that we're in the tensions of that and the sense of so many things not making sense in the world right now, particularly things coming from political leaders or investments in technologies that don't seem to be really providing human value. My guess is that if you were a scientist right before the breakthrough of a new theory, it would have that similar kind of like, like not solid ground. A lot doesn't make sense, but no one's quite willing to say the emperor has no clothes. Which is why I think it's important for people to stand up and be truth tellers the best they can and to even in small ways, try to inhabit a different paradigm. Whether that's how you run your small company more democratically or equitably, or trying to have a small ecological footprint, even if you're one person or a small town. I believe those things are kind of seeding the ground for the kinds of transitions frankly we need to survive. This current foundation is not going to a life sustaining place.
- [50:21]
Michael Simpson
So let's touch upon capitalism just for a second because I would characterize it as a global scaled system system and it has been shown to have pulled millions out of extreme poverty. But there is a huge disparity of income and with the growth of the population there's actually going to be a growth in poverty. How do you manage to influence or leverage the capitalistic system since it's now become just lines and webs all over the world?
- [50:59]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah, well, I'm not an expert on capitalism, but a few thoughts I have. One thing I've been thinking about lately is that markets and capitalism, they're often talked about as though that's all one thing. But markets as systems for exchanging goods and for driving innovation doesn't necessarily require also capital being allowed to grow exponentially and being allowed to get concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. So one thing that I'm finding interesting is to think about pulling those pieces apart a little bit. Capitalism versus markets. I'm pretty interested in things like the well being economy and different frameworks for navigating decision making that are based on indicators of what we really want, which as you say include things like reducing poverty, protecting biodiversity, protecting water. We can measure all those things in very powerful ways. And systems need decision making goals we can orient toward those. And I don't really think there's a good explanation for why we think we're going to get to all of those goals by making decisions keyed to either GDP or the stock market. Have faith. If the stock market grows, we'll get people out of poverty and the water will get cleaner. We could just make decisions towards those goals that we actually wanted. Those seem like good experiments to try to me, and there are places where, where people are experimenting with it.
- [52:50]
Michael Simpson
That was an elegant response. Thank you. So can you provide any final thoughts you would like to share with our listeners?
- [52:59]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Yeah. One that I've been talking about a lot lately is that when we look at bright spots of multisolving around the world, more often than not they were a response to a crisis. One experiment or example we talk about a lot in Japan was called green curtain curtains, which was vegetative structures on the south sides of factories to reduce their cooling needs, so basically shading the buildings. They also provided food for employees and for company cafeterias. Those got started in response to the Fukushima disaster and the energy crisis that came after that as Japan turned off its nuclear power plants. We talk about an example in New Zealand. It was called Warm Up New Zealand. It was about home weatherization was a response to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis and there was a downturn in the construction trades. So it was a program to retrofit buildings, but the real purpose was get the construction sector back to work. So it did that. But it reduced greenhouse gas emissions, it saved money for people living on a fixed income. And when they did a health impact analysis, they saw that it reduced emergency room visits and medication costs for the people living in those homes that got retrofitted. So it was a health intervention. So arguably we face crises and emergencies everywhere. But what multi solving studying it has taught me is that we can meet those crises with an attitude toward what other needs can we meet at the same time. And if we can stay calm and not afraid and find ways to pull together, I think out of the crises we're facing, there is actually potential for really beautiful things and a lot of progress. So I've been talking about that a lot lately.
- [54:54]
Michael Simpson
The book is Grading System Change in a Fractured World, published by Island Press. Thank you so much, Beth.
- [55:02]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Thanks. I've really enjoyed the conversation. And Doug, here we have the Limu.
- [55:21]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Imu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [55:34]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [55:38]
Michael Simpson
They see us.
- [55:38]
Blinds.com Commercial Voice
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry, underwritten by Liberty Mutual.
- [55:45]
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.