First of all we need to know that change is starting a new activity or stopping a current. If I am running for example and my goal is to change that activity, starting to walk or stopping to standing still will create a change but continuing running will not. Fairly simple.
But someone running, even though that person consists of systems of cells creating organs and other body parts, is in the context of human society on the planet is just one human being, one element and when adding around 7 billion elements that are making connections between them and their surrounding environments and its resources it gets a little bit more complex.
Thankfully there is a science for this. The brilliant Donella Meadows has given us a handbook in pointing to where we should intervene when the reality we face becomes an increasingly complex system and if you have read this far you have maybe already read about two of the most important leverages of a system, world view and goal. Meadows summarizes Thomas Kuhns thoughts on how you change a current worldview/paradigm/mindset:
“keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”
And on changing the goal Donella Meadows points at the
“the high leverage of articulating, meaning, repeating, standing up for, insisting upon, new system goals.”
So if we all human beings, alone and together (civil society organizations, governments, municipalities, companies), update our world views and articulated and stand up for a prosper-within-limits-for-everyone-goal we would start a change, a change that will bring all the systems elements and interconnections along with it.
The systems are as mentioned very complex and ever changing and it requires all the knowledge, information and doing we can get. We also need all the diversity we can get to be able to evolve from current destruction of the planet to a here and now prospering of planet.
So if your worldview and your goal are already updated and you want to continue being a part of the changefeel free to use the inspiration from the blueprint's sketch of a system and here collected ideas of others and add your knowledge, imagination and doing to help other elements create the required change in the system!
The very least we will create a painting for posterity of some of those human beings who tried!