(2021-08-09) Steffen Discontinuity Is The Job

Alex Steffen: Discontinuity is the Job. *This is When *it Gets Real, part two. (2021-06-28-SteffenWhenShitGetsReal)

Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its latest assessment report

If you’re wondering what this is going to do to your life, here’s one place to start—with what it’s going to do to your job.

A lot of people ask me for career advice. This is a bit strange

Often, though, I find that what folks really want—even if they’re not sure how to ask for it—is not so much career advice as professional foresight.

No one can offer us maps of the wilds ahead. We have to learn how to scout the way ourselves.

Here are a dozen ideas I’ve found useful in my own efforts at self-education.

THE PLANETARY CRISIS IS NOT AN ISSUE, BUT A CHANGE IN ERA

When we smashed an unsustainable economy into an immovable planetary reality, we broke our continuity with the past.

It is rewriting the rules for those of us with prosperity, but it is breaking the world for those without.

THE PLANETARY CRISIS TAKES PLACE IN INSTITUTIONS

It is a crisis in how our most important institutions are led, advised and managed

The big decisions—the ones that make our world more (or less) sustainable

are almost all made by people whose job it is to make them.

There is enormous resistance to recognizing the institutional core of this crisis. That resistance, I think, stems from hostility to two realities that frankly deserve our hostility.

The first is that, for at least three decades, many millions of people have been told we’re fighting for an orderly transition away from climate and ecological peril

set ourselves on a pathway where climate and sustainability goals could be met without unnecessary cost or disruptions

It is no longer possible to achieve that orderly transition

every approach that promises both bold action and the continuation of current practices and systems leads us inexorably into magical thinking

The second is that we’re surrounded by networks of institutions whose public credibility and moral integrity are in tatters, but whose power remains durable.

The meaningful fight is not against institutions, but within and between them.

Who makes what decision matters, though

We live, right now, with professional networks of expert decision-makers who are

expert at building and running the systems that surround us today. The decisions they’ve been making have brought humanity to the brink of ruin.

We desperately need better decision-makers—or at least decision-makers with better sets of incentives and interests.

A new era demands new systems—and in practical terms, new systems demand new leaders Are legacy institutions going to change leaders?

SUCCESS IS A BYPRODUCT OF ACCELERATION

When it comes to the planetary crisis, speed is everything.

we need, ourselves, to accelerate

I mean that in two ways

The first is that we need to learn what is true now, faster

The second is that we need to speed up our cycles of learning

DISCONTINUITY IS THE JOB

Being ready when the big shifts come—and they soon will—involves being able to work successfully in unprecedented situations.

In the real world, smart strategies are strategies for building new systems during economic upheavals, amidst ecological chaos, in ways that disrupt older broken systems—and do it in the face of determined opposition.

different sets of expertise are involved in designing and building an oil refinery than a wind turbine—and the business, political and cultural contexts of each differ in myriad ways. The context for almost all current expertise is that previous era,

STEEPENING CURVES DEFINE THE SPEED OF NEEDED CHANGE

The planetary crisis writhes with steepening problems—problems that not only get worse as we fail to solve them, but get worse at an increasing rate.

The everyday operation of the old systems around us worsens the planetary crisis every day

ACUMEN COMES FROM CENTERING WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED

We constantly fail to take the planetary crisis seriously enough.

a world that ran only on clean energy but was otherwise unchanged would still be a world ripping apart at the ecological seams.

Leave aside, even, that climate change is just one large driver of a vast, interconnected set of ecological problems, almost all of which are unraveling fast.

we still tend to act as if old things and systems, slightly improved, will do the job. They won’t

THE POLITICS OF TEMPO LIMIT THE SPEED OF CHANGE

Predatory delay is an ecological smash and grab

What those delaying change don’t want you to see is that the central political and economic competitions of this era are defined by their relationship to the speed of change.

Slow interests can only retain value by denying discontinuity and insisting that nothing much is likely to change.

An inevitable product of predatory delay in a time of steepening problems is, therefore, that as the pace of change required speeds up, the conflicts between the needs of Fast and Slow parties become more zero sum, and their differences become irreconcilable. The worse the crisis gets, the less common ground there is between those who want to act quickly and those who don’t.

A faster tempo of change benefits the overwhelming majority of us, but not everyone.

Here’s something you probably don’t hear enough: Action at speeds and scales we find hard to fully grasp right now is inevitable, and will likely arrive far sooner than our public debate would lead you to think, and in great force, like a glacial flood roaring down a mountain valley.

Action is not a matter of whether, but when.

The pandemic has given us all a taste of what large changes for which we were unprepared can feel like, but the planetary crisis is about to deliver a feast of them to our doorsteps.

THE EXPERTISE BUBBLE

The degree to which we expect things to change in accelerating ways is the degree to which that expertise is subject to a rapid repricing. (aka expertise that stays tied to legacy/obsolete system will become obsolete)

TRIANGULATION PROTECTS SLOW STRATEGIES

Climate and sustainability professionals should be at the very epicenter of innovation and strategic learning within institutions, businesses and communities. They rarely are. That’s because in most settings, climate and sustainability professionals are not getting paid to change important things, they’re getting paid to protect important things from change.

THIS IS A DANGEROUS MOMENT

Unfortunately, many professionals who think they’re preparing themselves for emerging realities by going to trainings and degree programs are only learning about old systems and outdated bolt-on ideas and solutions.

START NOW