The Real Conditions for Change
We all see that telling people what or why to change doesn't usually make that change happen on its own. It should make sense that there's a better way to protect what we love.
I made my way through an exhibit about coastal marine life, and looked around at the other visitors.
Families, children, older couples were wandering on a rainy Saturday through a space full of tiny glass worlds. Each one was full of crustaceans, fish, coral, replete with friendly signage and the usual educational panoramas about life cycles and ecosystems.
It was a typical natural history museum experience that millions of people have every year around the world.
What was I doing here? What drew me here? And the deeper question: are my awe and wonder enough? If I visit these spaces, is it helping protect, restore and preserve our planet’s precious web of life?
I stepped away and found a quiet bench. I gazed at a case of white cloud minnows, moving iridescently in unison, and wondered:
Is this a space that can catalyze and grow movements for change?
Is that even a reasonable ambition for an informal science-based institution, such as natural history museums, aquariums, and the like?
If so, is this enough? If not, then what could we change about our changemaking?
This question—if and how our spaces can actually catalyze action—is on the minds of many climate and environmentally focused institutions.
That is, the ones who are paying attention are now asking these questions.
We’re in a collective moment of reimagining what it means to be alive and caring for our world today.
It’s not a small thing. It’s a “rough initiation.” This has profound implications for each of us, and especially our institutions seeking to catalyze a deep and abiding care for our natural world.
How will we rise to the occasion?
It depends on who you ask.
Musing at the Museum
Scott Sampson, the Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences, believes that museums can help people envision a more hopeful future for the natural world, and “inspire a movement” to regenerate it.
He believes this can happen by shifting the narrative to one that is more hopeful, putting people “in the drama of the natural world” so they see their own role in a thriving future for all life on earth.
However, what it means to put this into practice is a whole other matter.
Especially if you are a hundred-year old, science-based institution, whose roots stem from the Victorian era.
Such museums initially were intended to house collections and specimens. Their origins are arguably rooted in a paradigm that we’re actively seeking to mend, repair and evolve into a regenerative, systemic and ‘rhizomatic’ worldview.
What’s new?
Museums have been evolving over the last few decades, with the intention of fostering connection and relationship with the natural world.
Yet, such spaces are facing an existential crisis: what does it mean to invoke awe, wonder and connection with our natural world—and not also catalyze a movement for change?
California Academy of Sciences is one institution taking this question very seriously. It’s not straightforward by any means. You have to challenge a lot of our assumptions and ways of being, thinking and working. Many people won’t like it.
And still we must ask: How are the role of our institutions today changing, in service of life on our planet?
Not only has our world changed profoundly since these institutions came into being, our theories of change are evolving, too.
Many of us are having to go through the uncomfortable task of ditching old models that no longer work for our world. Researchers are increasingly challenging the notion that teaching people about the wonders of nature and the threats we face, while a key ingredient to driving action, is enough to shift our policies and behaviors at scale.
Seeing potential
The Smithsonian Natural History Museum in the United States alone had an approximate 4.4 million visitors in 2023. That should be plenty for a society-altering movement, but here we are, without such a thing. And with a climate crisis intensifying.
How could we catalyze people’s curiosity and fondness to actually change our world? And how do we help those witnessing helplessly while it diminishes day-by-day?
To step into this inquiry fully, we inevitably rethink our roles as organizations and institutions. It means looking closely and honestly at the theories of change at the heart of our work, accepting what no longer fits with this moment, and becoming curious about new practices that may look very different from what we currently do.
What does this really mean, though? Practically speaking?
We need to evolve from Educators, into Conveners and Guides.
First, the tough part. Education and information is not sufficient to change the world.
There, I said it.
We do need information and knowledge, and people need skills and awareness. However, unless we also provide contexts for metabolizing this content, and doing something with it, it’s hard to translate into tangible change.
This is why we need to adopt a more relational approach to changing our relationships with our biotic world.
Given this is the case, and the state of our world—If you are connected with an institution or organization, (and most of us are, in some form or another), there is a new standard being set.
Step into the role of convener, host, lab, hub, whatever it is…
Bring people together. Facilitate and enable dialogues and difficult conversations, facing hard truths while providing tangible steps for repair, care and restoration.
If you have a physical space, such as a venue that can host and bring people together, it should be expected that you put it to use. For this. Starting now. And train your staff, supporters, volunteers, docents, etc, to develop convening skills.
To understand why this is essential, we need to expand our theories of change: to reflect what human wisdom, traditional practices, and science and research tells us.
We need relational homes to process hard stuff.
We need other people present to metabolize stories, wisdom, skills and best practices. We do our best in communities.
What moves the needle on behavioral change is cultivating the conditions that enable and support humans to process, integrate, metabolize and translate what we now know about our ways of living, into new ways of being.
These conditions are largely relational, contingent on how well we provide spaces for sense-making and reflection … on our way to activation and impact.
As I like to tell my clients: reflection is the precursor to skillful action. That’s just science.
The Guiding Principles: The Playbook
This is why I created the 5 Guiding Principles of changemaking. I know there are a lot of frameworks out there. There are plenty of people with “changemaker tools” to share—including myself!
Still, I want you to see these as principles and not as a framework. They are touchstones, reminders and invocations of different ways of being, working and healing our world. This is a simple reference to apply our best available psychological understandings to your own work.
In future pieces, I will unpack these principles and offer some concrete practices you can try out.
In the meantime, here’s what you can do.
Tell your favorite institutions to start hosting gatherings, conversations, and events. Volunteer to run or help organize. Urge creative programming beyond the usual panel or film screening—get people connecting with each other. Experiment. Have circles where people can share their feelings. Train people to evoke guiding questions.
And consider a new era of museum and natural history experiences, that enable the capacity to metabolize, process, and reflect on what we are learning, sensing, feeling and experiencing—so we can each become the changemakers our world needs us to be.
With care,
Renée
Hi Renee,
I just wrote a nice response here before and the damn login req bumped me out. I hate tech sometimes! But anyway, tech rage aside, here it is in brief, because I also have to cook supper!
So I've just helped the brilliant @Lucy Hawthorne from Climate Play in the UK to do her 3rd Lego Serious PlayxClimate training.
As you know the engagement and cut through of the LSP method is extraordinary. People can't help but engage with it. The light playful touch, the small-ing-up of big issues (usefully disassociating them from big emotions) the judgement free zone, the vision-eering. Yes so that's well documented and useful.
(I believe that the dissasoc' is partic useful when it comes to climate so that people can find their deeper motivator, it's an unintended reframe that some of the most powerful coaching techniques use and the neuroscience behind it is superb.) But anyway.
I really wanted to ask how you would integrate play and humour into the change practices model you give here. It's not implicit, but you might mean it to be?
I ask because I ahve a background in tourism - particularly managing lux self catering houses. I both ran the company that marketed them, designed the customer experience in the house (style/set up/signage) and myself managed and hosted/ delivered alot of the stays. Hundreds nad hundreds. I basically smuggled my testing of susty practices into these holidays. I found plenty of patterns.
Holiday-hedonism is a big change prob. No one wants to have less/do less/eat less/shower less/be told a 'no' on a holiday. This is about the worst thing you can sell/say in tourism. However as an industry we gotta change.
I found humour and purposeful play was a superb enabler. Plus choice-editing. And more humour. Authenticity was a massive enabler as you pick up. Any BS was a killer of action. As was any bad design - it had to be easy. We got some huge cut through in some areas.
So - Q please! How you would integrate play and humour into the change practices model you give here. Could you clarify please!
(Running for the potatoes now...!)
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