KEY ELEMENTS

  • Its focus is on changing both individual behaviors and complex systems. 

  • A unifying principle of human values (compassion, fairness, honesty, and trust). 

  • Not being satisfied with interventions or levers to influence current systems.  Reimagined systems are the goal. 

  • Emphasis on finding, supporting and if necessary, creating pilots and living labs that demonstrate reimagined systems.

  • The importance of knowledge and resource networks to learning, facilitating collective action, and scaling. 

  • Developing and sustaining a workforce necessary to remove barriers to system change today.  Ensure they are enduring so human values have long lasting advocacy in our societal systems. 

A commitment to changing individual behaviors and societal systems simultaneously is essential.  Neither one can be achieved without the other. 

So is a commitment to our Cornerstones: Human Values, Humanizing Experiences, Principles of System Change and a focus on Specific Societal Systems. 

We will employ our current methods, and new ones we learn, to nourish and influence efforts that align with fundamental system change.  Interventions or incremental improvements to our current systems are not our goal.  We will work with others to understand and change critical system characteristics like the system purpose, its structure, interconnections, behavior and the bounded rationality of the people who are part of the system.  Searching for points of leverage to influence the behavior of our current systems is also not enough.  We must change the mindsets and mental models at the heart of each system, its paradigm.  Our current methods are: 

  • Learning from ongoing efforts 

  • Leveraging partnerships 

  • Use of system mapping and force field analysis 

  • Convening, catalyzing and cultivating leaders of system change 

  • Establishing knowledge and resource networks 

  • Fostering pilots and living laboratories 

We’ll identify and support those living laboratories and pilots based on reimagined systems, ones demonstrating a new paradigm.  This takes us from working in the theoretical to the practical.  To succeed, we believe form must follow function, so these pilots and laboratories should be organized so they are: 

  • directed from the bottom-up, where behavioral change occurs and barriers to system change are clearly visible. 

  • enabled, supported and where appropriate, guided from the top-down, where removal of barriers to system change can be accomplished. 

Connecting leaders of change and these laboratories and pilots in a knowledge and resource network is our approach to facilitating learning, and collective action within and across systems. 

Identifying and nourishing the collective top-down efforts necessary to remove financial, legal. regulatory, policy and other system barriers is no small task, and essential for sustained pilot/laboratory success. 

Encouraging the formation of enduring groups and institutions committed to developing and sustaining the workforce of financial, legal, regulatory, policy and other “engineers” necessary to remove barriers to humanizing our societal systems is vitally important.  The internal workings and opaque mechanisms of systems are the domains, the workplaces of such “engineers”.  It is in these domains that barriers to change are erected and torn down, where human values can be squeezed out and put back into societal systems.  These groups and institutions must endure over the long term as an adaptive, persistent countervailing force, advocating for the influence of human values in our societal systems.  They will be our self-defense, our counterbalance to the forces that created and evolved the inhumanity visible in the systems we have today.  Those forces of inhumanity will persist, they will not just disappear. 

We believe the systems we have created and the behaviors they interact with are both very resistant to change.  They are “sticky”.  Our approach is to provide focused, long-term efforts that can enable our collective opportunity and fulfill our mutual responsibility to change together.  We welcome all partners and efforts aligned with achieving that outcome.