Buckminster Fuller decided early on that trying to change people was a waste of time.
He decided instead to change the environment (i.e. the choices people have) such that people would spontaneously choose to change themselves. To illustrate his point, he imagined people living along a river, risking their lives daily to cross the fast-moving water in order to get to a job or deliver goods to the other side. While some might try to convince those people to stop swimming across the river, he would build a bridge, confident that they would spontaneously stop risking their lives and start using it.
We’ve seen that strategy work dozens of times over as millions of people spontaneously abandoned typewriters, Rolodexes, address books, CDs, tape recorders, desk calendars, newspapers, and many other specialized tools in favor of apps with the same or better functionality on their computers and smart phones.
If you offer a much better option to people, they’ll use it. If you have to convince people (or worse, force them) to use your tool, it’s not good enough.
We’re now in an unusual place. We know that many of things we do, they way we make things, the way we throw everything away, the way we treat other people and the planet, are not sustainable. We’re starting to really understand that we need something different—a different kind of world—but we don’t know what that’s going to look like yet. We just know that things need to change pretty quickly.
In the face of that kind of uncertainty and urgency, it’s tempting to go with the first thing that we think will work, and to force it on people if that’s what it takes to save the planet. But the work is more nuanced and more difficult than that. Our new world must be better than the world we have now or it won’t last.
We need to do the difficult work up front. We need to create work that elicits spontaneous cooperation.
