Drawing attention to issues and hoping that they will be fixed or solved is normal. It’s what we do every day: There’s a problem, like a dripping tap or a flat tyre or the mobile phone has no power, and we ‘analyse the problem’ and fix it easily. But when it comes to people, like interpersonal and social problems, things get complicated. That’s why I think we need to change our approach and focus on finding solutions. And that starts with the being.
The Being shapes our consciousness, socialisation and therefore behaviour. Every milieu, with its values and norms, influences how we grow up and act. For instance, green politicians raised in an academic environment communicate differently from those from a rural background, even though they share the same political views. Similarly, individuals who were not allowed to express their own opinions as children may struggle to do so as adults. Jumping over the shadow of one’s own socialisation and changing one’s way of being is a (un)learning process in which consciousness moves along with it. The Being is the door to consciousness, not the other way round.
The problem of changing thinking and behaviour
If you want to influence ways of thinking and behaving, you have to start with the being of those you are addressing. However, both NGOs and other movements usually tend to put the cart before the horse when we want to bring about transformation. Perhaps this is why we fail more often than hoped in our endeavours to change society for the better. By addressing a problem, we normally start with awareness. This is because we believe that the following three steps work and follow each other linearly, as in the mentioned daily experience:
- Informing people about the problem to be addressed
- leads them to awareness and
- from awareness follows behaviour change.
And so we try to educate with information about a problem.
About rainforest deforestation, marine pollution, under-performing team, climate change, fracking, palm oil production, staff retention, the ocean of plastic, meat consumption, pesticides in the soil. However, this kind of education does not warm up, but rather cools down those who are not already convinced. In this case, repetition has no, or even the opposite effect, on the being of those addressed.
From Being to Consciousness
To start with a solution-oriented approach to being, you need to stand upside down. Here is an example to illustrate what this might look like:
An NGO was commissioned by a Vietnamese ministry to investigate and eliminate a widespread disease among children in a region of Vietnam. The NGO staff used a different strategy than the usual “analyse the problem and fix it”, namely by first asking what the few but still existing families with healthy children were doing differently from those with sick children. They focused on the good behaviours that were already in place and found that the healthy children ate the same amount of food four times a day instead of twice, but in smaller tolerable portions and that these contain protein and vitamin-rich shrimps and sweet potato greens.
To teach the ‘solution behaviour’, the NGO people invited the mothers of the healthy children to show the mothers of the sick children what and how they cook. Following the principle of peer learning, i.e. “what my peers do is also possible for me”, the mothers of the sick children largely adopted the necessary behavioural changes. Six months later, 65% of the previously sick children in the village were healthy again and the problem was largely solved.
(from: “Switch”, Chip and Dan Heath, 2011).
Shifting from a deficit-orientated focus
This shift in focus is also familiar from psychology, which for a long time was primarily deficit-oriented. In other words, once the psychological damage had been done, attempts were made to alleviate the symptoms. Without lasting success, except that sales of psychotropic drugs increased! This repair approach was also used by most psychiatrists to deal with the problem of post-traumatic damage suffered by US war veterans, without really being able to help those traumatised by wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
It was in the noughties that Martin Seligman said to himself: “If 15% of veterans have post-traumatic symptoms, that means 85% do not”. He asked himself what can be learnt from these 85% for trauma prevention? And from this change of perspective he founded the “Positive Psychology” (from: ‘Tomorrowmind’, Kellermann and Seligman, 2023, p. 47ff).
Note: While positive psychology focuses on positive emotions and resilience and sees itself as a science. Humanistic psychology, on the other hand, which emerged in the middle of the last century, is concerned with the pursuit of personal growth. For instance Abraham Maslow, one of its founders, also turned the question “What makes people sick?” on its head and asked: “What makes them healthy?” However, both approaches aim to improve well-being and quality of life.
Every solution needs a problem
Solution-orientation does not mean ignoring the problem; it just means focusing on the solution. And it is basically about the attitude of prevention. As with health: prevention is better than cure. Strengthening what is healthy, so that what is making someone ill becomes less likely. Just as a medication can have strong side effects, the consequence of a mechanical, and therefore often apparent solution to a problem, is that further problems arise that have to be dealt with again. A social hamster wheel. “Away from endless problem solving and towards the creation of healthy connections”, propagates the “Zero-Problem Philanthropy” [1].
Look for the bright spots and clone them
Chip and Dan Heath call their above-mentioned approach “Look for the bright spots and clone them”. It is similar to systemic therapy, in which existing resources, i.e. healthy behaviours that have already been demonstrated before, are strengthened so that they occur more often, thus displacing the problem, so to speak. What works individually in therapy and coaching could be considered collectively: Creating, reinforcing, and spreading good practice — said bright spots — so that it takes over. These bright spots already exist: Traffic-free cities, 2000-watt housing estates, organic farming, peace villages. Thousands of them. Everywhere. These small fires just need to grow into wildfires.
How to spread the solution wildfires?
If the solution isn’t quite able to succeed (due to political measures, laws, bans, incentives), as it should. What else can be done?
- Fundamental: Starting with being means first and foremost offering people growing up an environment in which they can experience sustainability as a matter of course, i.e. housing estates with more playgrounds than car parks, heating systems without oil or gas and schools that are places of the future [2].
- Then: Start in the neighbourhoods and cities, as the Transition Town movement is doing, for example, with over 1000 Transition Groups on three continents. With the so-called Sundial concept, this movement starts with being and creates good practice through imagination. The concept is based on four pillars: ‘places’ for encounters, ‘practices’ that connect, ‘spaces’ for imagination and ‘pacts’ for collaboration — in which the participants experience self-efficacy that inspires. Imagination refers to the ability to see things as if they were different and thus be able to create them.
- Other approaches include trying to change social norms, nudging relevant actors with small, smart interventions (e.g. nudging), or promoting social innovation by sharing experiences.
If the ‘wildfire’ called for by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [3] is to occur, i.e. ‘far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’, It is important to stimulate the imagination and good practice in all areas and to start with being and not to want to inoculate consciousness. Consciousness develops with the changing being.
So what are we to do with the problem?
‘Look for the bright spots’ and strengthen and spread them. For example, if a team is not performing as well as it should, then wait to focus on the problem. Or at least supplement it with the question: “And what is nevertheless going well in the team?” Not superficially, but in depth with interviews and then together strengthen the good (and thus reduce the bad). Or learn from another team that works well: What are the success factors? Or if the problem is ‘high staff turnover’ — ask, “are there also bright spots?”, i.e. staff members who stay for a long time? Why? What can the organisation learn from them?
Sources:
[2] Good examples of this are the «Happy Schools» (holistic sustainability inspired by Bhutan) and the «Schools for Earth». More on this in the article «Climate of Hope» (in German: «Klima der Hoffnung», magazine ‘Weiterbildung’, 3/2023)
[3] See the IPCC synthesis report from July 2023
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