Change Resistance as the Crux of the Environmental Sustainability Problem

Abstract

Why, despite over 30 years of prodigious effort, has the human system failed to solve the environmental sustainability problem? Decomposing the problem into two sequential subproblems, (1) How to overcome change resistance and (2) How to achieve proper coupling, opens up a fresh line of attack. A simulation model shows that in problems of this type the social forces favoring resistance will adapt to the forces favoring change. If change resistance is high this adaptation response either prevents proper coupling from ever being achieved or delays it for a long time. From this we conclude that systemic change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first. An example of how this might be done is presented.

Overview

The paper PDF was published in the System Dynamics Review on January 14, 2010. Except for the section describing the simulation model, the entire paper is designed to be easily understood by non-specialists.

Below are a few extracts:

Until the “implicit system goal” causing systemic change resistance is found and resolved, change efforts to solve the proper coupling part of the sustainability problem are, as Senge argues, “doomed to failure.”

Problem solvers must therefore abandon the Sisyphean task of trying to strengthen the two lower loops, and change to strategies centering on how to weaken the upper loop.

After a patient has described her symptoms to the doctor, the next step is diagnosis. What is the root cause of the problem? The doctor and patient both know that if it’s a serious illness, then they absolutely must get the diagnosis right or the treatment will fail.

Despite the simplicity of the model, the root causes we are about to present are so deeply systemic (so rooty, we could say) that they appear to be the source of most large difficult problems whose solution would benefit the common good.

We have thus found one possible root cause, one so pervasive it provides a steady drip, drip, drip that erodes even the best-intentioned efforts to solve common good problems like sustainability.

Therefore systemic change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first.

But that is not what environmentalists have been doing, which leads to our most provocative (and potentially productive) conclusion:

This shows that problem solvers have spent the last 30 years trying to solve the wrong problem, which is a striking conclusion that should send shockwaves throughout all of environmentalism.

Key diagram

Model

Here's an image of the simulation model. Here's the simulation model ZIP . Please see The World of Simulation for how to run the model.

Comments

A special thanks to Joe Starinchak of U. S. Fish and Wildlife and Philip Bangerter of Hatch for help in creating this one page process oriented outline PDF . An even bigger thanks to Steve Wehrenberg for looking over an early draft and commenting it needed a model. I added one and that radically improved the paper. Without a model it would have not been accepted. And further thanks to Philip for going over every line twice as we worked on the second submission version, which was accepted.