Vi måste utveckla sammanhängande berättelser

Förändringsledning krävs för att driva utvecklingen i en övergripande önskad riktning. Berättelser om hur vi konkret skall genomföra förändringen behöver vi för att var och en skall kunna hitta sin roll i förändringsarbetet.

Jag erbjuder ett exempel på en berättelse på hög nivå kring omställningen.

För att åstadkomma stoskalig förändring i företag eller av samhällssystem krävs förändringsledning. Det räcker inte att en idé är klok, logisk eller nödvändig för att människor i stor skala skall förändra sitt beteende på ett önskvärt sätt. Det är för de flesta människor ett ganska långt steg från att hålla med om att vi måste reducera vår energianvändning och gå över till förnyelsebara bränslen till att förstå vilka förändringar vi själva måste genomföra i våra liv för att detta skall bli verklighet. De flesta människor ser till sin omgivning och kalibrerar sina egna åtgärder efter vad omgivningen gör i olika avseenden. Detta är till stor del likadant för alla.

Hållbarhetsalarmister, företagsledare, allmänheten i stort, politiker och andra grupper lyssnar till stor del in omgivningens signaler. Detta är ett av skälen till att vi ofta observerar gruppbeteenden på finansmarknaderna, men också vad gäller konsumtionsmönster, politiska åsikter och inom andra områden. Det finns bland dessa ett antal ledare av en förändring som andra lyssnar på och kalibrerar sig emot. Få tar åt sig ledarnas budskap bokstavligt, utan de flesta anpassar detta efter sin egen situation.

Det finns nog två olika sätt som vi skapar oss en bild av hur vi skall agera på:

1. Analys och genom att tänka logiskt och sätta in saker i sina sammanhang.
2. Genom att ta till sig resonemang och berättelser och känna in oss själva och våra värderingar i dessa berättelser.

De flesta av oss använder oss av båda dessa på olika sätt. I en intressant studie av hur experter bedömer risk frågade forskare ett antal experter på riskbedömning i försäkringsbolag vilken av två försäkringar som skulle ha störst värde. Frågan ställdes före avresa från en konferens om riskbedömning. Frågan var vilken försäkring som skulle ha störst värde för deltagarna på konferensen, en försäkring som skulle falla ut i händelse av en persons bortgång i samband med terroristdåd under flygresan, eller en som skulle falla ut vid en persons bortgång, oberoende av orsak. En majoritet av experterna bedömde värdet på försäkringen mot terroristdåd ha störst värde, trots att den andra omfattar denna orsak, men också en mängd andra orsaker. Detta är naturligtvis inte logiskt, men vi kan här se att de resonemang och berättelser om terroristdåd som låg långt fram i experternas medvetande påverkade deras förmåga att objektivt bedöma värdet i denna snabba situation.

Berättelser som beskriver får verklighet påverkar hur vi tänker om den och vilka beslut vi fattar. Vi behöver berättelser som förtydligar hur vi skall genomföra den förändring som vi behöver gå igenom och vilken roll som olika deltagare kan ta i denna. Det behövs berättelser på hög och övergripande nivå och mer detaljerade beskrivningar av hur vi kan agera, eller vilka roller vi kan ta i specifika situationer. Dessa kommer att växa fram över tiden, men i dagsläget råder till stor del förvirring om hur förändringen kommer att drivas och hur resultatet kommer att se ut.

Här kommer en berätteles som illustrerar vad jag menar. Den ingår i min bok "Overcoming Overuse":

Today is the day of the great parade. I couldn’t have been more excited and proud. It is not pride on behalf of me or my friends. No, it is pride in what we, as a society have achieved together over the past thirty years. In fact, the work began even before I was born, but on a small scale. It was not until thirty years ago that it was expanded and intensified. The President at that time set a number of challenging goals for our nation and he started to build awareness of the formidable task that lay ahead of us. He also built an international consensus about the goals and the principles for the Global Energy Transformation. This led both to the initiation of similar programs in a number of other countries and an effort of international collaboration of an unprecedented scale.

I was in my late teens then, hopeful, but also a little cautious. I did not see how I could contribute, and the work seemed both technical and abstract. My father talked about the need to organize the effort and apply change management techniques to the program. I don’t think I got that at the time.

As I finished my education at one of the larger universities on the east coast, I applied for a job with the agency in charge of managing the program. It was expanding rapidly at the time, something that was fiercely contested by the opponents of “big government.” They wanted to minimize the involvement of government and they were entirely opposed to planning. That was, to a large extent, the sentiment of the time.

Nevertheless, the President managed to secure support for his program. It was hard at first, and the program started as a number of separate efforts in different sectors, run by different government agencies. I used to work in one of these programs -- the one dealing with solar power. We were assigned with the task of expanding our nation’s research in this area and to make sure that we had both the technology and the financial capacity to increase production to 10 percent of our total electricity demand in five years. When we started, hardly anyone believed that we would succeed.

There were similar programs for the expansion of wind, wave and geothermal power generation. Some of them were initiated after we started in the area of photovoltaics, which means technologies for the generation of electricity from solar energy. There were also teams that were responsible for the overall co-ordination of efforts. The manager of the electricity generation team, David Robson, was a terrific person. I worked together with him when I was responsible for co-ordination of the expansion plan for the production of solar panels. I simply had to make sure that the companies that were working in this area were keeping to their investment and development schedules. There was another team responsible for the purchasing and installation of the early batches in order to secure that expansion schedules for panels and for solar power were met. Later in the program our projects were dismantled and I started to work for one of the utilities companies that were built around renewable power. But before that, I was recruited into the team of David Robson and got to work with him for more than two years. He later became president of one of the largest utilities firms on the west coast. He had all the characteristics of a great leader: a tremendous capacity to digest information, he was always ahead of the rest of the team and could see both opportunities and challenges more clearly than any of us.

I sometimes think about David’s courage. He dared take a number of decisive steps at the beginning of the program. I dare say that it was no picnic for him later on, either. It’s funny how things sometimes turn out. There was so much to do, and things were complicated by a number of setbacks at the beginning.

The program, however, taught us a lot. Before it started, many people had the impression that only business created value in society in an efficient way. People put in all efforts to improve companies and business. At this time, business and government activities were completely separated. This seems to have made government to grow. The checks and balances that were provided through a tight co-operation between business and government were not in place at the time. Few people realized that government also had a kind of market, and that this could work as a counterbalance to the expansion of administration.

Many other things have changed, too. We have developed a deeper concept of democracy. There are now more tools that people can use in order to influence the future of society than the elections that we had to rely on in the old system. I know, you have to wonder… Yes, The Constitution is still in place. It serves its purpose as well as it did fifty years ago.

There have been a number of Amendments, but the main difference is that the improved understanding by citizens of the interaction between business, government and society have given us the tools of improved influence on local, regional and national issues that were previously to a large extent out of reach of most people.

Today is the day of the great parade. We have held a parade now every year for the past ten years to celebrate the successful transformation of society to sustainability. Today, we are going to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the beginning of the transformation program.

Washington DC on the 4^th of July 2041