The Art of Paradigm Shift

What if we’re trying to build a better future with the wrong tools?

Across the world, hundreds of thousands of committed people have dedicated their lives to achieving incremental policy change to make the world a better place. I’ve been one of them. In many ways, I still am.

A law passed here, a treaty agreed there. ‘Wins’ that take years to secure. Some feel big, some small. Almost none feel sufficient to address the scale of the challenges we face.

Their value lies in the fact that they make the world better than it was. Not good enough, but better.

Underpinning it all is an implicit assumption that enough incremental steps will eventually add up to deliver the future we dream of.

This might make sense if we had the luxury of infinite time. But we don’t. Everywhere we look we’re facing emergencies that require us to respond quickly, decisively and with real ambition.

At this point, it’s clear we need more than incremental policy improvements. To secure a future of thriving, we need much deeper transformation.

And that means those of us trying to build that future need to take a very different approach.

The Real Lever of Change

The big question is what this approach might be? How do we maximise the pace and scale of change? Donella Meadows, the systems thinker, studied how human social systems change, identifying the leverage points where – with relatively small changes – real transformation becomes possible.

Her conclusion was striking. The most powerful leverage point she found was not new laws or policies. It wasn’t changing the goals of the system. It was the ability to transcend the paradigm - the deeper worldview - from which a system’s goals, laws, power structures and outcomes arise.

Not critique the paradigm. Transcend it.

That’s not easy. A paradigm is something we can rarely see because we live inside it. It’s all the unspoken assumptions that underpin ‘how things are’. The stuff nobody argues about because it’s taken for granted.

So the first step is seeing the existing paradigm. But it’s not enough to see what is wrong with ‘what is’. Transcending it means actively building ‘what might be’.

Thomas Kuhn, writing about scientific revolutions, observed a similar pattern. A paradigm in scientific understanding doesn’t collapse simply because it fails to explain the results of experiments. For a scientific revolution to occur, the paradigm needs to be transcended: someone has to build an alternative that addresses the shortcomings of the previous model.

The Activist’s Dilemma

This raises a profound tension for change-makers.

If a paradigm shift is necessary, but it won’t happen until the new paradigm has been built, then we must ensure we’re not spending all our energy dealing with the consequences of the old paradigm on its own terms. We need to start building the new one.

Yet much of our work takes place inside the existing paradigm because we’re responding to the harms it produces - and that feels urgent. Whether we’re pushing back against the far-right, standing with victims of genocide and conflict, or fighting against the construction of the latest pipeline, our energy gets absorbed resisting the ‘way things are’, rather than being channelled into the way ‘things might be’.

I want to be really clear here: this resistance work is necessary. I can’t turn my back on children facing genocide in Gaza, or the Indigenous leaders of the Amazon, or look away as authoritarianism spreads. I know many of you can’t either.

But I don’t think we have to. Because the challenges of today don’t need to be distractions from building a better future. They can be the portal through which we reach it. It all depends on ensuring our response to the existing paradigm is fully coherent with the paradigm we’re trying to create. It’s not enough to see the change we want to make. We also have to be it.

Time Travel as Strategy

Here’s the thought experiment I’ve been playing with recently:

I imagine I’m a time traveller from the future we want – a future rooted in dignity, interconnection, and reverence for the living world.

Then I ask myself: in that culture, how would we respond to the crises of our own time? How would our instincts, priorities and goals be shifted? What would it look like to campaign as though we are already part of the future we long for?

This gets me thinking in ways that break with the worldview of the present and which root themselves in the values of the world we are trying to create:

• If we dream of unity, we won’t adopt strategies that deepen division and polarisation. That has implications for how we respond to the rise of the far-right.

• If we dream of peace, we’ll work for long-term peace-building, not short-term sticking plasters. That has implications for how we respond to conflict.

• If we dream of healing our relationship with the Earth, we’ll treat it as the living miracle it is, not some inert resource to manage. That has implications for how we respond to the climate and extinction crises.

• And when we choose our goals, we won’t settle for what’s ‘winnable’ now – we’ll aim for what’s needed.

These, I think, are ways we can change ‘policy work’ to ‘paradigm work’. And when we do that, we often achieve far more, far faster. It might be our best - maybe even our only - chance of creating the future we dream of.

A Dark Example of ‘Paradigm Work’

Unfortunately, most of the paradigm work happening right now is coming from the populist right. This is why foreign aid budgets have been decimated, why anti-migrant sentiment is shaping policy, and why we’re accelerating into the climate crisis.

Consider Donald Trump. Just a few years ago he seemed finished. Ageing, unpopular, legal battles closing in, January 6th seared into the public imagination – almost any other political figure would have conceded that their career was over.

But Trump refused to countenance defeat, even when it seemed obvious to everyone around him. He acted as though a different reality already existed, one in which the laws of political gravity did not apply, and in which he remained central and victorious. Using the tools at his disposal, he applied the (morally bankrupt) values of the reality he wanted to the world around him. And the ‘reality’ he was working from became, quite literally, real.

What Can We Learn?

Clearly we’re not going to build a better future by modelling ourselves on Donald Trump. But there’s something to learn here, uncomfortable as it might be, from this demonstration of the raw mechanics of paradigm creation.

I think these lessons are best expressed as questions:

• How would our campaigning change if we act as though we already live in the future we want?

• What would it look like to take the prospect of failure off the table?

• Where might we stop playing by the rules of the system we have, and start playing by the rules of the system we want?

• How do we embody the values of a thriving future while responding to crisis in the present?

• Instead of changing our goals to fit the world, what would it mean to change the world to fit our goals?

The key thing is this: the paradigm shift we need begins the moment we choose to live from the values of the world we long for.

And that is hard work. We have to know what that longed-for future actually is. We have to see it, and help others see it too. That’s why having a vision is so important.

And then we have to act in ways consistent with this vision, and do so while the world is serving up constant provocations that knock us off balance; when we’re swimming through a sea of grief, fear and scarcity; when our communities are being algorithmically engineered for outrage and division.

It’s not easy. But this is the work. The path to the future we dream of. And paths are made by walking...

These things got me thinking:

This newsletter by David Griffiths is twinned in spirit with The Other Side of the End of the World. It’s a great read - here’s to ideas whose time have come.

This report from the Freedom Together Foundation in the US argues that we are facing a ‘crisis of agency’ where too many are losing belief in their ability to contribute to meaningful change. It calls for a ‘Bigger We’ organising strategy to build belonging, bridge divides and unlock collective power in a sustained movement for change. Interesting stuff…

This video, of a little girl sobbing because her AI companion had stopped working, broke my heart. Both for her, and for what we are sleepwalking into by building machines designed to exploit our innate capacity for connection. It reminds me of Her, that weirdly prescient 2013 Spike Jonze film. Essential watching if you haven’t seen it.

And finally, two famous quotes that I thought about using in this post turned out not to be actual quotes. Gandhi never said: “Be the change you want to see in the world”. And Einstein never said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them“. Every day’s a school day!

See you next time.

Bert