By Frances Westley
Published in March 2020
For many people, in our community, the idea of dealing with the potential consequences of climate change is both frightening and overwhelming. The threat is real, but its very complexity makes it hard to tackle, hard to address. What can we do to protect ourselves, our children and the places that we love and want to preserve?
For many years, the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience has been exploring what we, as individuals and communities, can do to address complex issues. Some of our work was summarized in the concept of Getting to Maybe, and the idea that while change in the face of such challenges as climate change is not in itself an ordered and predictable process, it is nonetheless possible and we are surrounded by groups and individuals who have taken on such challenges and won.
Getting to Maybe is about acting deliberately and intentionally in a complex and uncertain world by virtue of being in and of that world. For as the social innovators we chronicle climb each mountain of maybe and reach the summit of realized possibilities, a new mountain of maybe inevitably becomes visible in the distance.
The examples we studied, through multiple conversations with social innovators in most cases and careful study of autobiographies in others revealed an archetypal narrative that goes something like this. Sime active caring person becomes increasingly distressed by some problem (HIV/AIDS), injustice (racism), or situation (gang violence). That person decides that something must be done. The impossibility of things staying as they are gives birth to the possibility of change – what we’ve called getting to maybe – and that moment of recognition and birth is the beginning of the social innovation journey.
By determining to take action this person becomes what we’ve come to call a social innovator. The cases we studied suggest that those who are ultimately successful begin their journey by more fully understanding the situation and the system that is the source of their discontent. As they observe, think, analyze, ponder, they also act. They look at where they are, who they are, where they might find allies and what scope of change is needed, and in so doing, they encounter the entrenched powers that benefit from and hold in place the existing system – the very system they want to change. That encounter with “powerful strangers” helps them discover, reframe and unlock critical resources
Then the pace often picks up, sometimes dramatically, as our social innovators find themselves in flow, in sync with others, moving rapidly forward in unexpected and unpredictable, even previously unimaginable ways. They thought they were looking for something and suddenly find that it has found them. “Maybe” suddenly has the feel of “will be” or “must be.”
But remember, this is a story of nonlinear dynamics and the unexpected – it does not unfold smoothly. New barriers emerge. Threatened powers fight back, for they too see what may be coming, and they don’t like it. Resistance is aroused. Things start falling apart. The premise that things will likely get worse before they get better becomes fact, not theory. Doubt surfaces, grows, overwhelms – well almost. It certainly feels that way. In this phase of the journey, the social innovator has descended unsuspecting into what we call “cold heaven”.
Then, sometimes at the darkest moment), “hope and history rhyme”. What seemed like a local, personal social quest suddenly connects with larger forces. It turns out that the timing is right, the moment has come, not through planning, not through rational goal setting, not through careful management and forceful control, but by being in the right place at the right time: a historical moment made conscious and intentional (not simply accidental or serendipitous) by the prepared mind. Intentionality joins possibility joins historical forces and becomes, in the words of poet Seamus Heaney, “the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term.” In our words, social innovation has succeeded.
Looking back, the social innovator has a sense that a door opened – however briefly. At the beginning there could be no certainty that the door would open. Still it opened. Knowing it had opened, seeing it open, having the will to move through it was made possible by intentionality, the consciousness that comes from paying attention to real-world dynamics, and the vision of the possible.
This year at the Mayors’ Dinner, we will look squarely at the likely consequences of climate change for the Kitchener Waterloo area. Despite our best efforts to reduce emissions and energy use, we are likely to experience not only climate warming, but also an influx of climate refugees, that will fundamentally challenge our notion of community. However, there is time to prepare and if we use that time well, we can meet that challenge. The world as we know it will change, but that change need not be catastrophic and can, maybe, augment our humanity and enrich our experience of community.
The sections above are copied (with minor modifications) from Westley, Zimmerman and Patton, 2006, Getting to Maybe; how the world is changed. Random House, Toronto
