As leaders on scales both large and small, it's our job to grapple with hard problems. At times, with the mere mention of these problems, we feel a weight settle upon us. One such weight looming large for many world leaders is climate change.
You can probably feel the difficulty of the whole situation. Time is short, uncertainty is high, and the stakes may be even higher. Competing business and political interests collide every day. The tensions run deep, driven by conflicting values and differing needs. This is the nature of the hard problems of our time: they are densely interconnected, emotionally-charged and complex. They also change rapidly, often without warning. In effect, these are what scientists call "adaptive problems" (or "wicked problems"), where the problems may actually evolve by the day. (In contrast to adaptive problems are technical problems, which tend to have a static solution where the skills, needs and capacities to solve them are known.) Climate change is immensely difficult because it is an adaptive problem, and requires adaptive leadership to address. Confronting an adaptive problem takes more than a bag of tricks, it takes a whole new way of being with a broader and more complex mindset on the world—a way of being that is naturally able to:
* Step outside one's ideology and value system in order to re-craft a more complete view of a situation
* Understand the evolutionary nature of the people, culture, behavior and systems that contribute to complex problems
* Quickly grasp the complexity of a situation
* Build trust between diverse interest groups
* Stay grounded amidst the constant demands for change
* Find the confidence necessary for courageous action
And here's the bad news: less than 1% of all college-educated adults have all of these capacities. At the core of these capacities is the ability to readily take other perspectives while adapting your own to the context of the current situation. Dr. Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, provides an admirable example in the field of climate change.
Om författaren:
Michael Zimmerman is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Tulane University. He is also a Professor of Philosophy, as well as Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry in Tulane Medical School.
In the late 1970s, Zimmerman began publishing essays on environmental philosophy, and in 1983 wrote the first essay interpreting Martin Heidegger as a forerunner of Deep Ecology. In 1981, Zimmerman offered one of the first courses on environmental philosophy ever taught in the United States. During this period, he worked closely with George Sessions, one of the leading figures in the Deep Ecology Movement.
Encountering Ken Wilber's book Up From Eden in the mid-1980s was a conceptual turning point that enabled Zimmerman to appreciate the noble aspects of modernity, as well as its dark side, including Western humanity’s tendency to dissociate itself from and to dominate the biosphere. In 1987, disclosures about the depth of Heidegger’s relationship with National Socialism led Zimmerman to rethink not only Heidegger's thought (in Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, 1990), but Deep Ecology as well (Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity, 1994). Wilber’s Integral Theory, especially in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality and A Brief History of Everything, proved particularly helpful to Zimmerman in sorting out the promise and pitfalls of contemporary environmentalism. He uses these books in college courses.
In 1990, Zimmerman asked four leading eco-philosophers (J. Baird Callicott, John Clark, George Sessions, and Karen J. Warren) to join with him to publish one of the first anthologies on environmental philosophy, which will appear this summer in its fourth edition.
Michael Zimmerman and Sean Esbjorn-Hargens have co-authored a book called Integral Ecology,