Tipping Points
During my last review, Alex mentioned tipping points in relationship to some of the concepts I presented. Malcolm Gladwell discusses tipping points as the moment when mass in a system shifts.
The relationship to sustainability is that you don’t have to convince each and every person of the merits of sustainability. Rather, if you can reach the tipping point for a system, then once the system changes, everyone has to go along with it. As an example, if enough people (say, 51%) petition for a bus schedule to change, then the other 49% are going to use that system regardless of whether they wanted that system of not.
Clearly, this is both a good and bad thing. But in this case I’d like to look at the positive side, which is that by reaching that tipping point (which is comparatively easier to do than changing the entire system), we can effect large-scale change relatively easily. I wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of tipping points, but in retrospect I think this was what I was trying to achieve by framing my concept around the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.
The US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and tipping points are similar in that through their implementation they both preempt certain discussions. The hard-core constituencies which would fight tooth and nail against implementing certain resolutions or achieving critical mass become less of a concern because in the end it’s the implementation which matters. Once a system is in place, it becomes both harder to argue against it and harder to resist.
Thinking this way gets me out of the morass of trying to shift an entire society over to new systems and ways of thinking. Now it’s just a matter of shifting the right people, or piggybacking on the best opportunities.
I originally read The Tipping Point last year while working on the service design project, and I found it really helped my approach at the time. So all of this came back to me while I was reading this article in GreenBiz about investors who are filing shareholder resolutions to investigate corporate energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions. The connection to the above? It’s not about ALL shareholders filing these resolutions…it’s about enough shareholders filing. Granted these resolutions are largely on behalf of large institutional investors, but it doesn’t really change the point: get enough of the right people to effect change, and the rest will follow.