Glossary: Event Oriented Thinking




	Event Oriented Thinking Event oriented thinking sees the world as a complex succession of events. An event is a fact that happened or will happen. Event oriented thinking assumes that each event has a cause and that changing the cause will correspondingly change the event. At first blush it seems that each event must have a cause. Otherwise, how could the universe function? Well, each event does have a cause. But that cause can have another cause, each event can also have more than one cause, each cause can have more than one cause, events can have probabilities rather than certainties, and event causes can change over time. Furthermore, in a complex system events or causes are usually part of feedback loops that cause effects elsewhere if the system is tampered with. Causal relations can be nonlinear, delayed, and highly non-intuitive. Putting all this together, one can quickly see that event oriented thinking is such an oversimplification that it is doomed to failure in all but the simplest or most familiar situations. But event oriented thinking predominates in the human mind. Why is this so? Because the the brain and culture evolved to handle situations that were almost always simple or familiar. Examples are fight or flight if you are threatened, plant food in the growing season so you can eat during the winter, harden the point of your spear so it works better, and if you don’t recognize someone as being part of your group, be suspicious. Event oriented thinking is even the basis of all logic: if A then B. Event oriented thinking is fast and efficient. Much of it is hardwired in our brains. Only in modern times has event oriented thinking become a dangerous liability, because complex problems requiring a deeper level of thinking have now become commonplace. Event oriented thinking fails in any problem requiring understanding of emergent properties. Thus most problems involving complex social systems cannot be solved with event oriented thinking, such as the global environmental sustainability problem. The alternative to event oriented thinking is systems thinking. The great difference between these two ways of thinking is shown below:

Dueling Loops Paper

The most popular page on the site by a factor of 3. This paper presents a simple model showing why activists have been unable to solve the sustainability problem, and an alternative solution strategy based on high leverage points.

The Phenomenon of Change Resistance

This is the key concept that starts people thwinking, and causes them to explore the rest of the site. The concept is subtle, but has the potential to change the sustainability problem from insolvable to solvable.

The Powell Memo

The most eye popping short read (7 pages) on the site, if you have never heard about it. The memo was written in 1971.

Dueling Loops Videos

These average 8 minutes. They give a quick introduction to the Dueling Loops model and how it explains the tremendous change resistance to solving the sustainability problem.