The Global Phase-Shift

OUR WORK REVEALS THAT THE WORLD IS AT A HISTORIC TURNING POINT…

Governments, businesses, corporations, nonprofits, philanthropists, local authorities, media outlets, researchers, activists, managers, employees, citizens from all walks of life and at all levels are facing the rapidly changing dynamics of a global system experiencing a systemic phase-shift - a transition from one system, to another emergent system whose contours are still not clear.

Understanding this global phase-shift, and generating strategies to adapt our behaviours, beliefs, values, societies, institutions and organisations to this shift, comprise the overarching mission of our times. Governments, businesses, nations and communities which adapt to the phase-shift successfully will play leading roles in designing the emerging system. Those that fail to do so will face the prospect of systemic failure, breakdown, decline and collapse.

Our work has helped us to delineate the challenge and opportunity of this civilizational inflection point as follows:

1. We often don’t understand the scale of the challenges we face from a whole-systems perspective, but instead come at it from fragmented silos and narrow interests. This means we don’t really understand the crisis, because we don’t even perceive the nexus of behavioural, cognitive, energy, economic, ecological, cultural and socio-political systems that are generating them.

2. This epistemological and disciplinary fragmentation means that we have difficulties envisaging viable alternative whole-systems visions of a prosperous future that are grounded in science. We end up with a failure of imagination not only about what is possible, but also about what is reasonable. The disciplinary fragmentation of science as a function of prevailing economic structures also raises questions about the inherent paradigmatic, epistemological and ethical limits of conventional scientific approaches.

3. We therefore suffer from organizational incoherence and fragmentation, responding piecemeal to various facets of the crisis without holistic thinking and joined-up action, and in a way that is frequently dislocated from ‘other’ ways of knowing (spirituality, ancient wisdom) and relating to life via emotions, humour, arts, dance, music, and so on. To the contrary, precisely when we need more than ever to correctly understand and respond to the crisis, our sense-making apparatus is breaking down; our capacity to engage in meaningful, generative and constructive dialogue and creativity to facilitate collective learning, problem-solving and co-creation is becoming increasingly impaired. This, too, is a major symptom of the crisis.

4. The result is that as our information processing capacities degrade – despite ever increasing volumes of information – we lack the capacity to translate huge volumes of disparate data into empathic wisdom underpinned by whole-systems intelligence (intelligence-based action by which we can adapt constructively to rapidly changing environmental conditions). As the capacity to properly process information and translate that into action is a fundamental precondition of successfully adapting as a collective at species-level, our adaptive capacity is being undermined and we are finding that we lack effective organizational strategies to co-create viable futures by identifying, prototyping and scaling the right strategies, innovations and processes in the right contexts.

Our work suggests that the declining capacity to accurately process intelligence about our environment (and ourselves - encompassing social, economic, political and other relationships), and to empathically translate that into adaptive action, is a key symptom of the current crisis – and the keystone ‘solution’.

The System Shift Lab is a consultancy whose core goal is to develop ways to upgrade this sense-making and adaptive action capacity. We work to understand and promote public networked empathic intelligence across individuals and organisations.

We do this through a combination of joined-up transdisciplinary research, strategic communications, and organisational change consultancy, to cultivate the capacity for ‘learning to learn’ through empathic systems thinking, and on this basis to empower people and organisations to pursue transformative system change in their own contexts.

We are formed based on the insight that unless we develop a living, supportive, connective infrastructure, community and ethos capable of overcoming the challenges described, we will have little chance of responding effectively to the crisis. These will encompass a living, ever-evolving pattern of relationships oriented around common purpose and enlivened by individual passion. For this, we might take inspiration from the metaphor of a garden to be tended, community capacity to be cultivated, a practice ground to be created.

That is why as a critical step, the System Shift Lab seeks to inform its consultative practice by drawing on the pioneering work of some of the world’s leading experts, scientists, designers, thinkers, creators and doers - along with people from all walks of life.