A Harris poll found that a full 90 percent of Americans would change their lives dramatically if they could. The survey showed that most people don’t like the way they live now, but they simply don’t know how to change.

The statistic goes a long way toward explaining why advertising has become so heavily dominated by ads promising a better life. These days, a product, seminar or service has to hold out the hope of a vastly new and improved life to stand any chance to succeeding.

The publishing world is an especially egregious example of this. The industry is increasingly oriented toward how-to, self-help, and personal development literature (“The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Changing Your Life,” etc.).

To say that something has changed one’s life used to actually mean something. Today it has become so banal as to be practically meaningless.

The most radical act we can commit today, I believe, is to say: “I’m happy, I don’t need to change my life.” It represents a powerful shift of attitude, one that begins with acceptance of what is and opens up a space for appreciating what we do have. From there, it’s not hard to focus in on the qualities we love and want more of. What it does is focus our attention on what is right and good with the world, which ultimately creates more of the same.

When we refuse to accept the idea that there is something wrong with the present situation and that we need to change our lives, paradoxically we create a state of mind where positive changes are possible — perhaps even inevitable.

I was dazzled by Ken Wilber’s book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality when it appeared in the mid-1990s. Rarely had I encountered a writer and philosopher who expressed himself with so much energy and clarity of insight on the difficult business of human consciousness. His grasp of the complexities of evolutionary theory, systems thinking, metaphysics, contemplative tradition, postmodernism and other daunting subjects was not just impressive, but masterful. Here, I thought, was someone who could finally make some sense of our strange predicament at the turn of the millennium — someone who could help us distinguish between frontier and fringe thinking and clear a path through the thicket of psychobabble that makes up so much of what’s being written today about personal growth and human consciousness.

After finishing the book, I went on to read every book of Wilber’s that I could get my hands on. The love affair lasted several years. But by 1999 I found myself having increasing reservations about his method, and perhaps also about the man himself. I wrote about some of these in a review of his book One Taste that appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of Parabola Magazine (see my review here).

The questions I had revolved around the certitude with which he puts forth his views, the definiteness of his assertions. They were always explanatory rather than exploratory. I had thought someone with his intellectual gifts and spiritual insight would be more sensitive to complexity, to metaphor, paradox, mystery. If anything, I felt he did a violence to ideas that were, by definition, boundary-spanning — such as liberal political theory or ecopsychology or the role in psychology of myth — by forcing them into narrow categories that served his own theoretical interests. I was constantly amazed by his misrepresentations of great thinkers such as Huston Smith, Gerald Heard, Stan Grof and others. 

My initial euphoria upon discovering Wilber some years ago gave way to a deepening sadness that this was the man being heralded as one of today’s most original and significant philosophers. The notion that he represented some sort of “Einstein of the consciousness movement,” as somebody once said, struck me as preposterous.

Even so, I was excited when Wilber spearheaded the launch of Integral Naked, a website featuring audio interviews with brilliant and visionary thinkers, about five years ago. I was an enthusiastic early supporter of the site. But, again, my excitement gradually gave way to a sinking feeling that what Wilber and his friends had created was a little club of people calling themselves “integral thinkers” who used a common vocabulary but were in fact increasingly insulated from the world around them — not because they were uninterested or uninformed about the world at large but because they were convinced they had the best system or theory that could explain what was going on (exemplified by such grandiose book titles as A Theory of Everything and A Brief History of Everything). I eventually unsubscribed to Integral Naked. My reasons for pulling the plug are summarized in this open letter to the site.

In recent years, Wilber’s Integral Institute has become more firmly established and Integral Naked seems, from what I can tell, to be going strong. But Wilber’s critics have grown more numerous. And he himself seems increasingly insular and cantankerous. In a now infamous blog entry, Wilber embarrassed himself in front of the world, as his biographer Frank Visser put it, “by abusing and insulting those of his critics who did not ‘understand’ his work, and invited those who ‘did’ to come to his integral ‘sanctuary.’ His main complaint was the low level of the criticism he had received so far, especially from Integral World authors.”

It was a depressing blog entry, to say the least, and perhaps also a cautionary tale about what happens when we go too far in defending our own intellectual constructs. Ideas at their best are meant to edify and inspire, not divide and isolate. When we find ourselves growing hard and brittle in defense of our own theories, then we have given our own constructs more power than they deserve.

Read more:

• My review of Ken Wilber’s One Taste
• Why I Unsubscribed From Integral Naked
• A Roundup of Criticism of the Work of Ken Wilber — From integralworld.net
• Wilber Watch — Frank Visser’s Blog

Some 1,000 people came together in Canberra, Australia, over the weekend for a free-spirited “ideas summit” — a gathering of experts, activists, politicians, and celebrities aimed at soliciting innovative ideas to strengthen Australia’s future.

Over the course of two days, some 8,000 ideas were submitted. By the end of the weekend, the number had been narrowed down to 40. The proposals focused on addressing environmental sustainability, strengthening civil society, and generally promoting the common good. They included ideas for:

• A preventative health agency to be funded by a junk-food tax 
• Providing incentives to lure Australians to work in rural communities
• Delivering fresh fruit to schools once a week
• Making Australia the “greenest” economy in the world by 2020

The ideas summit — the first of what is hoped will become an annual event in Australia — is a beautiful example of how to encourage new ideas and innovative thinking.

Too often we expect bright ideas to emerge from corporate boardrooms, from forward-thinking political figures, or from the latest management books when, in fact, they tend to come from the grassroots. What we need are better ways to harness those ideas — by creating a context for conversations around pressing problems, helping people network, and ensuring that good ideas are given a propert hearing and some exposure in the media.

The Australians have shown that this isn’t an elusive ideal, but a smart and practical way of working for a better tomorrow.

Read more:

• Australia 2020 — Official website
• Australia ‘Ideas Summit’ Yields Wide-Ranging Proposals — From Huffington Post

Over the past six months, I’ve been talking with civic leaders from across the country about what it means to build community. The process has challenged some of my preconceptions. Community is not something you can build, they tell me. It’s a quality that has to be brought forward and actualized, in the same way a sculptor reveals a statue by chipping and hewing at the marble. Switching metaphors is important, they insist, because it’s only when we abandon the idea of “building” in favor of “sculpting” that we can see community where it already exists. You have to foster what’s already there, not attempt to create something from nothing. That’s the essential starting point for bringing about change and making a difference. 

It’s been almost a half-century since the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’sThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a slim little book that introduced the word “paradigm” into common parlance and shattered our conventional way of looking at change. Fifty years on, it still represents perhaps the best thinking on how transformation happens, who drives it, why it’s so vehemently resisted, and what it really asks of people.

The book explores the psychology of belief that governs the acceptance of new concepts and innovations in science. Kuhn showed that the history of science is not one of linear, rational progress moving toward ever more accurate and complete knowledge of an objective reality. Rather, it’s one of radical shifts of vision in which a multitude of nonrational and nonempirical factors come into play.

Kuhn showed that the theories of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein were all self-contained and “incommensurable” with one another. There was no steady accumulation of truth in the form of objective knowledge about the physical universe. Instead each theory was a revolutionary break from the previous theory, resulting in the arbitrary replacement of one conceptual matrix, or worldview, by another. Once the matrix changed, the way science was done and applied was fundamentally different.

Kuhn used the word “paradigm” to describe this conceptual matrix. A paradigm, in his formulation, is a constellation of facts, theories, methods, and assumptions about reality that allows researchers to isolate data, elaborate theories, and solve problems. Aristotle’s “Physica,” Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” Newton’s “Principia” and Lavoisier’s “Chemistry” are examples of scientific classics that gave rise to new paradigms. Each of these works triggered a revolution, rendering irrelevant much of what came before them. The chief characteristic of a paradigm, Kuhn argued, is that it has its own set of rules and illuminates its own set of facts. Because it is self-validating, it tends to be resistant to change.

Kuhn pointed out that as long as a paradigm is successful at explaining observed phenomena and solving problems, it remains dominant. But as new phenomena begin to contradict it, the paradigm succumbs to increasing doubt. And as anomalies multiply, it is thrown into crisis. At this stage, what is needed is the articulation of a radically new theory or insight, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, that can explain the apparent contradictions. In this way, long periods of “normal” science are followed by brief intellectual upheavals that reorder the basic theoretical assumptions of the field.

New paradigms rarely appear on the scene full-blown. Their early formulations are typically crude and incomplete. They are often the products not of deliberation or interpretation, but of “a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch,” Kuhn wrote. “Scientists then often speak of the ‘scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightening flash’ that inundates a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution.”

New paradigms are never immediately accepted by the scientific community. They may gain ground because of some dramatic and unforseen verification, or for personal or aesthetic reasons — they may appear “neater,” “simpler,” or “more elegant” than their older counterparts. But the choice between competing paradigms ultimately comes down to personal conviction since, as he put it, “the competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.” While the new paradigm tends to be more successful in accounting for and predicting phenomena, there is ultimately no absolute standard for determining whether one paradigm is better than another.

Kuhn stressed that a new paradigm is almost always the work of a young person or someone new to the field. After a number of years in a certain discipline, a scientist tends to be too emotionally and habitually invested in the prevailing paradigm. Indeed, the established leaders of the older tradition may never accept the new view of reality. As Kuhn wrote, “Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus death. Newton’s work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the ‘Principia’ appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on.” Adherents to the old paradigm usually go to their graves with their faith unshaken, Kuhn wryly noted. Even when confronted with overwhelming evidence, they stubbornly stick with the wrong but familiar.

The fact that Kuhn’s treatise — an academic essay on a fairly specialized subject, the psychological factors at work in the advancement of science — went on to win a wide audience is one of the great surprise stories in the history of ideas. But Kuhn had put his finger on something that was widely intuited, if not openly acknowledged or articulated, namely that change proceeds by upheaval. It’s not a smooth and gradual process. Transformations are violent because they necessitate the destruction and reordering of our most basic conceptual frameworks.

Not all of Kuhn’s conclusions have stood the test of time. For example, recent work has called into question the idea that scientific paradigms are “incommensurable” and that paradigm shifts are therefore essentially irrational events. For example, Canadian philosopher Paul Thagard says there is enough continuity in scientific revolutions to suggest that the process is not really arbitrary or non-linear. He likens a paradigm-shift to the process of learning a second language. (Read my review of Thagard’s book here)

But never mind. Kuhn’s basic insights stand and his service to our understanding of the psychology of change has been incalculable. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was described by Scientific American‘s John Horgan as “the most influential treatise ever written on how science … proceeds.” Philosopher Richard Rorty called it “the most influential English-language philosophy book of the last half-century. It sold the most copies, made the greatest difference to our ways of thinking, and was the subject of the most intense and complex debates.” “For a quarter of a century,” Huston Smith wrote in 1982, it was “the most cited book on college campuses and … turned ‘paradigm’ into a household word.” The book, in other words, is an evergreen.

More from scottlondon.com:

• My review of Conceptual Revolutions by Paul Thagard
• My review of Paradigms in Progress by Hazel Henderson
• Literature review: Understanding Change: Strategies for Innovation and Renewal
• Audio clip: The New Science with Elisabet Sahtouris and Willis Harman (Requires RealPlayer)

People often define genius as a set of character traits or a way of being. Books instruct us how to think like Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. But I see genius as the fulfillment of our true calling in life, as the flowering of our unique potential, whatever it happens to be. What good is thinking like an Einstein if you’re a Picasso or a Charlie Chaplin? Why act like a Mozart if you’re a Maya Lin or a Tiger Woods? Every genius inhabits a universe of his or her own making, so imitating the behavior of others is pointless.

Some years ago, I was asked by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change to prepare a review of the literature on how change happens and how to make it happen. As I began mapping the literature in the field, I was staggered by the sheer volume of writing on a subject we actually know very little about.

As one might expect, much of what’s been published on the subject falls under the banner of management theory. It’s not surprising, perhaps, given that organizations live and die based on how well they navigate the rapids of change. There was also a good deal of research on the fascinating topic of social and cultural change.

But I was puzzled to learn that very little has been written about personal change. How do individuals grow, develop, and renew themselves? Books on psychology, personal development, and even spirituality deal with the subject at some depth, yes. But not that many address the important link between how individuals change and how that in turn affects organizations, communities, and larger social systems.

As we know, large-scale change happens one person at a time. Or does it? I’m not so sure. 

Early in my research I hit on the work of management consultant Margaret Wheatley. In her endlessly thought-provoking 1992 book, Leadership and the New Science, she observed that, consciously or not, organizations tend to model themselves on Isaac Newton’s 17th-century depiction of the universe as a giant machine in which the parts move and pull one another in predictable and immutable ways. The assumptions of mechanistic science still prevail today, she said, despite the fact that quantum physics, systems theory, and the mathematics of chaos have rendered many of its principles obsolete.

A typical example of this is the fact that by and large leaders manage by separating things into parts. They believe that influence occurs as a direct result of force exerted from one person to another. They engage in complex planning for a world they assume to be predictable. And they continually search for better methods of objectively perceiving and measuring the world. But each of these approaches stems from the outdated assumptions of mechanistic science.

According to Wheatley, tomorrow’s leaders need to draw wisdom from the new sciences which offer fresh perspectives on age-old management issues like control, structure, participation, planning, and prediction. For example, quantum physics teaches that the atom is made up not of solid billiard balls, as the old models suggest, but of electrons, photons, and mesons that sometimes act like particles and sometimes like waves. Thus, at the quantum level, absolute prediction and uniformity are impossible. What is possible to ascertain, however, are patterns, or potentialities. In chaos theory, these are called “fractals” — simple mathematical formulas that repeat and repeat on themselves to create infinite diversity.

Similarly, systems theory — an interdisciplinary field aimed at understanding dynamic, living systems — shows that complex structures have the capacity to self-organize. As Wheatley pointed out, the idea that order arises spontaneously, rather than through direction and control, points to different kind of universe than the one described by Newton and his contemporaries. “Not the fragile, fragmented world we attempt to hold together, but a universe rich in processes that support growth and coherence, individuality and community.”

I sat down with Wheatley and explored some of these topics. She told me that she and her fellow management consultants would sometimes confess to one another that they didn’t really know how to effect lasting change. It was still something of a mystery to them — even though they made their living trying to help leaders bring it about in organizations and communities.

Recently, Wheatley has been exploring another concept with rich implications for those of us who care about effecting large-scale change. She calls it “emergence.” Emergence is the process by which “separate, local efforts connect and strengthen their interactions and interdependencies. What emerges as these become stronger is a system of influence, a powerful cultural shift that then greatly influences behaviors and defines accepted practices.”

Wheatley challenges the simplistic notion that change happens one person at a time. The principle of emergence shows that broad changes in an organization or among a large group of people requires that there be networks of influence and communities of practice.

But this idea still side-steps what I take to be the fundamental question at the core of all efforts to create change: Are people willing to change in the first place? Are they prepared to be open to new inputs, insights and understandings? Are they open to being changed in the process of creating change? (Marshall Goldsmith offers his take on this question here.) This is the issue, I believe, that lies at the heart of whether change efforts thrive or wilt. And it’s a topic I will be exploring further in this space in weeks and months to come.

Read more:

• Understanding Change — A review of the literature
• The New Science of Leadership — My interview with Margaret Wheatley
• On emergence — From MargaretWheatley.com
• When People Don’t Want to Change — Marshall Goldsmith at Harvard Business Online

In his new book, visionary physicist Peter Russell expands on the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, suggesting that humanity has advanced to the point in its evolutionary journey where it is poised to make the “next evolutionary leap” — the critical shift from personal to global consciousness.

With the latest breakthroughs in telecommunications and globe-spanning computer networks, we are already seeing the signs of an embryonic “global brain,” he says. “The interlinking of humanity that began with the emergence of language has now progressed to the point where information can be transmitted to anyone, anywhere, at the speed of light. Billions of messages continually shuttle back and forth, in an ever-growing web of communication, linking the billions of minds of humanity together into a single system.”

According to Russell, creating a planetary consciousness also involves transforming individual human consciousness. “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness,” he says quoting Vaclav Havel, “nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which the world is headed — the ecological, social demographic or general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable.”

The consciousness crisis we find ourselves in today, he observes, can be attributed in part to the Enlightenment view that the universe is composed of loosely connected and distinct objects. The notion of ourselves as atomized and separate individuals, combined with the cultural belief that we will find happiness by changing the world around us, is one of the critical dilemmas we face today.

Echoing the point he made in his book Waking Up in Time (see review), Russell argues that we need to break out of this mindset and develop a consciousness of ourselves as part of a grander system. The basic wisdom already exists in the spiritual traditions of almost all cultures. The challenge at the dawn of the 21st century, Russell says, will be to tap this wisdom and embrace it, rather than simply speak it.

All sorts of reasons have been advanced in recent years to explain the decline of community in America, from the way we design our neighborhoods to the increased mobility of the average American to such demographic shifts as the movement of women into the labor force. But the onslaught of television and other electronic technologies is often cited as a primary culprit. As Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam puts it, these technologies are increasingly “privatizing our leisure time” and “undermining our connections with one another and with our communities.”

In his essay “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” Putnam drew a direct parallel between the arrival of television and the decline of what he called “social capital” — the social networks, trust, and norms of reciprocity that are the essence of healthy communities. As he pointed out, a “massive change in the way Americans spend their days and nights occurred precisely during the years of generational civic disengagement.” It follows that technologies like computers and television which “cocoon” us from our neighbors and communities exacerbate the loss of social capital.

But with the rise of so-called “virtual communities” on the Internet, there are some who believe that electronic technologies can actually be used to strengthen the bonds of community and reverse America’s declining social capital. They stress that electronic networks can help citizens build organizations, provide local information, and develop bonds of civic life and conviviality. While the claims are no doubt overstated in many cases (as they always are when new technologies are involved), there is growing evidence that this may be the case, particularly in local community networks.

I explore this idea in “Civic Networks: Building Community on the Net,” an essay published in the new book Composing Knowledge, edited by Rolf Norgaard (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press). The piece looks at the role of online networks in building and strengthening community and tries to sort through some of the rhetoric — much of it overblown — about so-called virtual communities. My sense is that these networks can play a role in strengthening communities if they are used to augment social networks that are already in place. In addition to their obvious benefits as text-based information systems, networks can serve as public spaces for informal citizen-to-citizen interaction, they can support rational dialogue and, in some cases, deliberation, and they can promote the social connectedness, trust, and cooperation that constitute social capital.

• Read the essay
• More about the book Composing Knowledge

Some of my photographs are included in a show, opening today, in Santa Rosa, California. The exhibition, “Bringing Back the Fire,” is a celebration of art and community at the annual Burning Man festival. According to the show’s press release, Burning Man “turns part of Black Rock Desert in Nevada into the ‘world’s largest outdoor art gallery’ for one week each August. Much of the art shown on the site is intended to burn — but many pieces survive, to be seen again. This exhibit celebrates some of these, and the community of participants who have created them.” The show runs through March 22, 2008 at the Santa Rosa Junior College Art Gallery.

The 2008 festival, which ran from January 24 to February 3, drew some 70,000 people and featured over 200 screenings, along with an impressive line-up of tributes, award shows, and panels with industry insiders. But the big story, as always, revolved around the celebrities, the beautiful people who came to town and, for a few days, transformed the place into the epicenter of the entertainment world. I was on a different assignment in Miami and missed the first few days of the event, including award presentations for Cate Blanchett and Javier Bardem. But I was lucky enough to get a front-row seat at the Directors Panel, a session that crackled with talent, intelligence, fast wit, and wicked one-liners. This slideshow pulls together some of my favorite images from the festival.

Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007. They were in Oslo last month to accept the award and take part in three full days of festivities. The Nobel events coincided with the climate conference in Bali, which made the coverage particularly interesting and timely this year. Rarely has the international spotlight been focused more intently on the question of global warming.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Al Gore drew a parallel between leaders who ignore the climate crisis and those who failed to act as Nazi Germany rearmed before World War II. “Too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: ‘They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent,’” Gore said. He likened the current “planetary emergency” to wartime. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war.” Strong words. A powerful lecture. 

It was my fifth year covering the Oslo events. More photos and text here.