Current Status
1. Our General Strategic Plan
2. The Cracking Academia Strategy
3. Publishing of Papers
4. Establishment of the Sustainability Forum
5. The Collaboration Project
6. The Diagnostic Project
7. Analysis
There's a lot going on at Thwink.org. Here are our main active strategies and projects, as of May 25, 2008:
1. Our General Strategic Plan
This is ambitious but going well. See this section for detail on the first six years of our strategic plan. This plan started in mid 2001. The main phases are:
1. Getting acquainted with the problem, 1st and 2nd year.
2. Analysis and development of original contribution, 3rd and 4th year.
3. Continuation of 2 plus begin working with others, 5th and 6th year.
4. Continuation of 3 plus waiting for the new paradigm to take root in others and a little small scale artificial world experimental proof. Estimated to take 1 to 2 years.
Phase 4 is where we are now. Once the clear potential of these new concepts causes influential early adopters to step forward, with the intention of initiating serious projects centered on the new paradigm (all of which will not come from Thwink.org), phase 5 begins:
5. Launch of one or more projects based on the new paradigm. Estimated at 2 to 5 years before serious results start to emerge.
Things start to get a little murky after that. The following are thus more speculative. But note the logical progression from the small to the large, as the equivalent of a radical new technology evolves and spreads:
6. Serious, small scale real world proof the new paradigm works (via experiments done at local levels) as well as a more detailed and convincing analysis of the complete problematique.
7. Further iterative evolution of analysis and solution, along with a successful scaling up of small scale solutions to regional and national levels.
8. More integrative evolution of analysis and solution, along with integration of multiple solution strategies, and continued scaling up to the global level. At this point, or when a satisfactory trajectory to the goal state is underway, stable, and predictable, the problem is solved.
2. The Cracking Academia Strategy
The nature of the early work at Thwink.org is basic and applied research. Traditionally this is the bailiwick of academia. If such work is not published and taken up by the academic community, it's like a tree fell in a forest but no one heard it, so it didn't make a sound. Thus is it vital to get elements of the new paradigm published in peer reviewed journals and to form relationships with some of the movers and shakers in academia.
The obvious place to start is the field of system dynamics (SD). One reason is the second most important tool of the new paradigm is SD modeling. The other is the most famous and influential SD model is the World3 model of the Limits to Growth project and book. Since this model identified the sustainability problem and SD is an excellent tool for solving difficult social problems, SD seems to be the most receptive field possible.
In November 2007 Jack joined the System Dynamics Society mailing list. Most of the posters are phd's, usually in SD. It's a low volume, high quality list. Jack lurked for about four months and then started posting. The goal was to very gently introduce elements of the new paradigm to the SD community.
This endeavor is starting to go well. There have been long, controversial threads on these ideas. (See this thread on root causes as a typical example.) The usual resistance to a new way of thwinking has appeared again and again, but these are on the whole flexible minds. These folks are nearly all as sharp as razors. When they see that a better way makes sense, they usually start to change rather than dig in their heels, as was the case with environmental NGO managers.
Also on the list, the SD community is attempting to examine and reinvent itself in an effort to achieve its latent potential. Jack is an active participant in this project and having some influence. Here's a reply from Kim Warren, the coordinator of the effort. We were brainstorming goals and visions:
"Thanks everyone for the replies received so far - folk are clearly giving the issue some serious thought. There seems some reluctance, though, to address the question as posed, as Jack does well with his suggestion 'to have developed the ability to reliably solve large pressing social problems.' Rather we are getting a lot of debate about whether it's the right question."
So as you can see, the seeds of paradigm change are being planted, and are beginning to sprout here and there.
Also related to the SD field, in mid May Jack completed modifications to a Vensim PLE version of the World3-03 simulation model, the one used in the third edition of Limits to Growth. The model now lets the user easily run all the scenarios, see the output on graphs instantly, and page through the model while it's running to examine the structure of the model and fiddle with it -- all using the free version of Vensim. This has never been possible before and will open the model to a much wider audience. When I emailed Bob Eberlein at Vensim about this, he got excited and cc'ed Dennis Meadows, who as you probably know was the manager and coauthor of Limits to Growth. The model will be released in the next update to Vensim later this year, probably in June.
3. Publishing of Papers
This is part of cracking academia. On March 16 the short version of the Dueling Loops paper was submitted to the System Dynamics Review. No word back yet.
The paper will be accepted or rejected, probably with extensive suggestions for improvement. This will be done. Eventually the paper may be accepted. This will be a major milestone, because it will be proof that portions of the new paradigm are acceptable (?) to part of academia.
After that a second paper will be improved and submitted to the same journal. This paper has been complete for months. It deals with "The need for a standard high yield process for solving difficult social problems using system dynamics," which is the working title.
More papers will appear after that, but they are unplanned. We hope to by then have good relationships with experts who can help us design a publishing strategy.
4. Establishment of the Sustainability Forum
This is an important strategic goal. Consider the exact goal, as stated on the About the Forum page:
Our vision is to offer the environmental community a place
where mature, productive, cutting edge discussion on solving
the sustainability problem can be found.
Imagine how much more effective the environmental movement would soon be if this vision was realized. Presently there is nothing close to this type of virtual community. I've looked and looked for years. Yes, there are environmental forums with a number of specialties, but they are all either technically focused on details of the specialty, such as renewable energy, or if they are more general, they are dominated by the mind set of Classic Activism.
The latter is the case for most. Since Classic Activism skips anything close to an analysis step and is not driven by a formal, continuously improved process, it is incapable of generating anything but intuitively derived symptomatic solutions. That's what these forums discuss, although they don't realize it. There is no concept whatsoever of the change resistance, proper coupling, and model drift subproblems. This gigantic blind spot means that on these forums, the only way change resistance will ever be overcome is when catastrophe is upon us and people, corporations, and governments become desperate for solution. But by then it will be too late to avoid major, prolonged environmental and economic collapse.
So it's a critical goal to establish an alternative to these forums. But this has not been easy, because progress at Thwink.org is so slow. People tend to join the forum, post for awhile and help out here and there, and then, when nothing big happens in less than a year, they move on. A few have stayed longer, and are quietly working on long simmering projects, such as Philip and Joe. They will eventually be posting on the forum again when something develops. And then there's George Turner, who continues to advise.
See the How You Can Help page. That page plus this one contain the kind of things the active members of the forum, like Jack, Bill S, Bill R, and Jeannie are doing. We're having serious working conversations as we struggle forward together, on a path that's never been taken before....
The important thing is our dialog is on the forum. This will slowly but surely attract others, who will be astounded by our dedication and enthralled as they see the new paradigm evolving and being applied right before their eyes. Plus this greatly reduces the middleman load on Jack. That's why it's important for us to use the forum for communication, rather then email.
5. The Collaboration Project
This project was launched on January 25, 2008 by Joe Starinchak of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Joe is an innovator and has been successfully getting private sector based initiatives going, which is extremely unusual for a member of the US government. He's escalating his sights to a project that would have a group of large corporations collaborate on applying the new paradigm. Of the several dozen he contacted, about 8 said they were in, which is pretty good. Presently he's working with the most influential members of the group in an effort to transfer the organizer role to them. This would be a major milestone.
6. The Diagnostic Project
This project was never launched but proposed in January 2007. The initiator is Philip Bangerter of The Hatch Group. Hatch is a global mining and metals consultancy, with a staff of over 7,500 engineers, of whom 5,000 are engineers. Philip lives in Australia, while Hatch is headquartered in Canada.
Philip is committed to the new paradigm. He confided, in one of his two visits to Atlanta to meet with me, that of all the approaches to solving the sustainability problem that he and his staff have examined, the only one that seems capable of solving the problem is the one at Thwink.org.
Current status is Jack is working on an internal problem solving project for Hatch, using the System Improvement Process and of course, simulation modeling. Philip's strategy is that if the project succeeds, it will dramatically prove to Hatch management that the new paradigm works. After that, Philip expects to get all the support he needs to launch a well funded applied research project, based on the new paradigm.
7. Analysis
Where Jack is attempting to put most of his time is in analysis. Currently this involves finishing Part Three of a book in progress, Process Is Everything. Part three is the Proper Coupling subproblem of the sustainability problem. The crux of getting this right is getting the analysis right, especially the root causes. The first iteration of this was written up in The Proper Coupling Package paper. The second iteration sample analysis and solution is what Jack is working on now.
Already the analysis is going well. It's much deeper and hopefully more correct than iteration one. A breakthrough is the World3-03 model will be extended as part of the analysis, rather than building a new model from scratch. This should underscore the fact that this work takes up where Limits to Growth left off, as well as giving the analysis much more credibility.
Current status is this is stopped while Jack works on the Hatch problem.
When the Proper Coupling analysis is done, a reasonable analysis of all three subproblems will be complete. Then attention will shift to polishing the Process Is Everything book, and later to getting it published.
Comments
So thwink about it. What can you do to help us move forward in any of these areas?
For discussion see this thread.
