Got any small change?

I’m a changemaker. Apparently. (I’m listed as one on this website.) And I want to be an active participant in the process of social change. But how much change do I want to make? And how much am I prepared to change who I am and how I live in order to see society change in the ways I think it needs to? Those are the key questions which Ezio Manzini’s recent presentations as part of the SIDialogues series raise for me. The challenge is real. Professor Manzini’s starting position is the recognition that our way of living is unsustainable. Some things will have to change or every thing will have to change. But which things? Well, we can’t be completely sure – although many of the usual suspects will have to be among the things that do. Fossil fuel dependency. Depletion of natural resources. But beyond that, it’s not so clear. “The transition towards a sustainable society is a massive social learning process,“ Manzini has written in a paper published on his blog. “The radical nature of the objective (learning to live better ,leaving a lighter ecological footprint) requires vast experimentation, a vast capacity for listening and just as great a degree of flexibility in order to change when it becomes evident that road embarked on does not in fact lead in the desired direction. “A social learning process on this vast scale must involve everybody... What is required of everybody is not only a little incremental improvement on what the normal model of life proposes. What is required is [...] a change in model. “A radical change that if it is to take place, does not require the acceptance of a new duty (the duty to make an effort for the good of the Earth and/or to help the poor). On the contrary, it requires a drastic re-orientation of the idea of well-being.” Oh. Is that all? Right, we’ll just get started then. But hold on. What if my idea of well-being differs from someone else’s idea? Somebody like say, ooh, Marius Kloppers at BHP for example. We’ve just had a shock-and-awe display of the power of an industry whose idea of its well-being was threatened. The Minerals Council of Australia is reported to have spent at least $7million dollars on buying TV, radio and print media space for an advertising campaign against the Resources Super-Profits Tax. The same reports indicated another $90m remained in the industry’s war chest when that campaign was suspended. At which point, after an estimated industry outlay of $250,000 a day, the government’s back- down on the tax boosted the value of BHP by $600m and Rio Tinto by $1.2billion. In one day. Phew. Right. We’ll let that sleeping dog lie then! If a single sector can engineer a backlash of that order against what was essentially an administrative re-ordering of its taxation arrangements, what could a whole range of industries working together achieve? Mining. Manufacturing. Retail. Insurance. They’ll all be threatened by any moves to tackle climate change, the bellwether issue of sustainability. But moves are required. Bold moves. Very bold moves. “We can do it [tackle climate change] if we mobilise ourselves in the way society has mobilised itself in Great Wars,” Australia’s Chief Scientist Penny Sackett was quoted as saying last week. Which echoes Ezio Manzini’s injunction: what is required is not only little incremental improvements. What is required is a change in model. On the face of it, you’d have to say that the context for such a transformation isn’t promising. But it’s what Penny Sackett goes on to say that echoes another strand in Professor Manzini’s writing. “We need flexibility. We need to be resilient. We need to build infrastructure that’s resilient. We need to have more resilient ways of thinking and in our social structures.” A fundamental re-ordering of the ways we think and the things we value is required. But incremental improvements are also useful and necessary. Can we turn our heads, Janus-like, in the two directions at once? Making service system improvements, yes. Tinkering under the bonnet. But also changing the ways we live. Facing the inevitability of giving up some things we value because we realise they are part of a way of life that has to change. Meaning that we do too. We may also be called on to give up other things we take so much for granted that we don’t value them. They are so embedded in the collective background, we don’t realise the extent to which we rely on them. Cheap power, for example. Reserve Bank Board member, Warwick McKibbin, this week warned in the online business newsletter, Business Spectator that power bills are going to rise dramatically because we need to fund the backlog in distribution facilities and the increase in renewable energy generation. And those power price rises will be so steep they will reduce consumption and delay a looming crisis in base-load generation. As Robert Gottliebsen wrote in his commentary on that interview, “if McKibbin is right and we are indeed headed for power charge increases that change the consumption of energy in Australia then we are facing an enormous change in both the industrial and consumer fabric of our society.” At one level, this crisis is a symptom of the deeper failure of the country's political leadership to put a price on carbon. At another, this failure is paradoxically creating a situation in which market (and other) forces may be engineering an outcome with the characteristics of sustainability we seek. So sometimes the forces that drive the kind of change required work like Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. But whether we choose to change or other forces just make change happen, the effect will be disruptive. The experience of power shortages or increases in price will not be evenly shared. The people with the least will suffer the most. As always. In this context, I don’t think we can talk of social innovation as if it was a domain of its own. Designing or building sustainability makes for an exciting project. But if change happens “when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change, we really need to focus on raising the costs of the unsustainable systems that represent the unsustainable status quo,” Alan Webber has written. “It’s more ‘innovative’ to talk about bright, shiny, new sustainable systems but before we can even work on the right side of the change equation, we need to drive up the costs of the unsustainable systems that represent the dead weight of the past.” Driving up the costs of unsustainable systems will be the measure of our seriousness. Those higher costs will require us to pay a price – individually as well as collectively. So while it’s nice that the invisible hand is working its magic, that doesn’t let us off the hook. If we believe in the need for change (as opposed to ‘change we can believe in’?) perhaps we’ll have to do more than just let the invisible hand do all the work. We may have to take a stand ourselves. Risk things we value. Which of us is ready to face down BHP? The automobile industry? Any of the other vested interests whose sense of their own well-being is threatened? Which of us are ready to pay higher taxes ourselves so that the impact of this sort of disruptive change is not felt disproportionately by the people with the fewest resources to cope with it? And how many of us, while we’re doing all of these things, will simultaneously be capable of that ‘vast capacity for listening’ and ‘those degrees of flexibility required to maintain a social learning process that must involve everybody’? Which will include those vested interests that are fighting to keep what they have and the world we all know. It seems to me that many of our discussions as social changemakers have proceeded without much conscious thought being given to these questions. We say we want change. But what sort of change? And how much of it? Does it require any change by us? Or are we just changing things for other people? Professor Manzini’s sessions have left me with some unsettling questions for myself. Anybody else feeling a little less ‘relaxed and comfortable’?