The solutions to many of our most pressing social and environmental problems require large-scale change to our social systems. For example, effectively mitigating and adapting to climate change requires coordinated changes across our food, transport, industrial, finance and other social systems. Complicating matters is the fact that these systems are interlinked: what happens in one affects what happens in another. Faced with such daunting and high-stakes challenge, it is crucial to ask: what can be done to make such positive systemic change more likely to be successful?
In this research paper, Chad Lee-Stronach and Rory Smead develop a dynamic model of systemic social coordination to answer this question. They discover the surprising result that approaches that are reliably effective in isolated cases of coordination are often ineffective, even counterproductive, when scaled up to cases of systemic coordination. They identify other approaches that, according to their model, may be more reliably effective. This research is part of broader research project on understanding the dynamics of systemic social change.
Read the paper here
