An Introduction to “Catalysing mass commitment to transformational change”

Andrew Gaines | August 15, 2019 | Leave a Comment Download as PDF

We are in an ecological emergency. Our challenge is to inspire mainstream commitment to turning things around.  Therefore, I’d like to ask you to do something unusual: talk to your friends and business colleagues about systemic change.

This article introduces a tool for one-to-one conversations called Kitchen Table Conversations, and shows a way to take it to scale.

Child on phone

 

Extinction Rebellion and the School Strike for Climate are great at raising the alarm. Kitchen Table Conversations are a natural complement. They enable people to come to terms with what we need to do to turn things around.

Engaging in Kitchen Table Conversations prepares people mentally and emotionally to support leadership for large-scale transformative change when it arises. Without such support, transformative leadership can go nowhere. Indeed, I think that a major reason why progressive candidates don’t do better politically is because their messages reach unprepared minds

However, there is much more to transformative change than politics. Collectively we must change the operation of our entire society to operate within planetary boundaries. 

People’s behaviour is based on their way of thinking. So, I’m not talking about just casual talk. The new idea here is to communicate in a in a way that improve people’s thinking.

Although we may be skilled at arguing, the idea of communicating to help people to think better is novel. This article shows a way. 

One more thing. If just a few of us do this, it won’t amount to much. So let’s catalyse a mass movement to inspire mainstream commitment to doing everything required to pull out of our ecological nosedive

I appeal to you to lend your influence to this. Just doing our own thing, our communication is fragmented. Aligned (while still pursuing our major projects) we can be more powerful than we ever imagined. Or so I suppose – let’s put it to the test!

We have set up a support platform. It is called the Great Transition Initiative. Our strategy is to engage the members of the millions of groups that care about environmental and social well-being as citizen-educators, and provide ready-to-use communication tools.

Read Andrew’s full text on Catalysing mass commitment to transformational change here.


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