Social Sculpture: Enabling Society to Change Itself

by Jeff Barnum

In our work at Reos, we help stakeholders from across an entire social system come together to see their challenge from a whole-system perspective. With the whole picture in view, they then design, test, and evolve ideas for initiatives that they believe have the potential to address their challenge.

A key part of this process is uncovering and identifying the mindsets deep within the fabric of the social challenge: core beliefs, paradigms, assumptions, world views, dogmas, and identities that in turn shape behaviour, relationships, policies, and other structures that profoundly shape our lives. These vary from culture to culture, challenge to challenge, but they are always present. Systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows pointed out that changing a mindset is a powerful leverage point.1 Imagine, for example, if we all believed that money in the bank became less valuable over time—a negative interest rate—or if nature had rights. Our use of money and natural resources would look very different.

Identifying the key mindsets that shape a particular system affords stakeholders the possibility to shift those mindsets within themselves, their organisations, and their constituencies. Doing so can radically push a large social system in one direction or another. For this reason, in our Dinokeng project, leaders from across South Africa addressed the relationship between the people and the state, the issue at the heart of that country’s future.2 When facing a large-scale challenge, we need to affect the dominant mindsets in thousands or millions of people.

Therein lies the challenge I’d like to consider in this article.