To celebrate our newest online learning challenge, the Youth Activation 4 Week Sustainability and Make Change Sprint, we are sharing some highlights of the content with you in this week’s UnSchool Journal.
Designed for 12-18 year-olds wanting to gain the tools for making positive change in the world around them, the content is all about agency activation, systems thinking, sustainability sciences, cognitive science and ideation. The program is jam-packed with daily activities and brain expanding content perfect for any young changemaker.
Designed as a 4-week sprint, the format has daily content with quizzes at the end of each week to unlock the following week’s content.
Who is the program for?
This program is designed for young people interested in activating themselves to become leaders for social and environmental change.
We believe young people are critical to designing a positive future, and we also know that much of the mainstream education system doesn't give us tools to dissect the complex systems around us all and then activate our agency in order to effect change.
Everyone has the capacity to make a positive impact, and we are committed to helping people all over the world uncover and activate their capacity to help design a future that works better than today.
You will get a lot out of this program if you are:
between the ages of 12 and 18
have a deep desire to be a positive force on the world around you
get frustrated by inaction and want to gain the tools to create change
want to understand how the world and the human mind works
love to read, learn and think differently (or want to be challenged to develop these skills!)
Parents, if you are keen to support your young changemaker, then this program is for you, too. There are lots of great learning experiences that will support you and your young person to develop tools for effecting positive change. We have made this content easy to digest, without taking away from the complexity of the world. If anything, this toolkit will help anyone discover how to love and appreciate the complex world we live in and to design creative ways of helping make it a better place.
Overview of the Program
Week 1: Activating Your Agency and Making Change
Here we explore how you, yes you, can find the power and tools to activate your agency, expand your sphere of influence, develop reflective and critical thinking skills, expand your mindset and be a positive force on the world around you!
Week 2: Sustainability and Systems Thinking
From unsustainability to the sustainable development goals, the circular economy and the tools for exploring complex systems in the world around us, this week we will dive deep into the issues and the opportunities for exploring and changing them!
Week 3: Exploring the Human Experience
Humans can be very weird, which can make it hard to understand, empathize and effect change. So in this week's content, we cover how the human brain works, cognitive biases, social norms and the odd things that affect how we each engage with and ultimately impact the world around us.
Week 4: Activating Change
Here we explore all the creative ways you can develop projects and initiatives that support positive impacts on the world around you!
A Sneak Peek at the Content
Week 1: AGENCY
Let's look at how to activate agency for ourselves and in others by working on identifying and expanding your sphere of influence. The first part of the Design Systems Change Handbook goes into this in great detail, and here is the summary version.
Agency is the capacity of an individual to take action in a particular environment. For most of our lives, we are taught that we don't have impacts on the world around us. An agentized individual, however, is aware of their influence and the dynamic relationship they have with the world.
Every action we take or don't take has an impact: the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe - it all has an impactful relationship with the world.
Your agency is about your capacity to act independently and make free choices. These choices are affected by your worldview and the way you see yourself, formed through your experiences with the world, society in general and the things you chose to learn.
Social structures and circumstances have a huge impact on one's agency, and the life you are born into can increase or decrease your “given” agency. Many of these social structures and circumstances are out of our control, yet they have a huge impact on our agency. The most critical thing is how you interpret your experiences and what they do to your sense of self. Thankfully, we are also seeing seismic shifts in access to the resources that support individual agency development.
Design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller said, ”Call me trimtab,” (it’s even engraved on his tombstone) because he, like many other changemakers, identified that the smallest part of the system can make the biggest change. A trimtab is a tiny part inside the rudder at the back of a large ship. When the ship’s steering wheel is moved, the tiny trimtab shifts in direction and (re)directs the whole trajectory of the ship. Often, the smallest part of the system can move the biggest parts.
This analogy is important to consider when thinking about your personal sphere of influence and the agency that you have to make change in the world around you. Many people fall into the trap of deflecting responsibility to others or blaming the large obvious parts of the system, deferring change to elements that they have little control over. But it’s often the small inconspicuous parts that have the most power and influence over the system dynamics to affect change. Our job is to identify them and unlock their potential.
Integrity (especially as we deploy what agency we have and develop) is the backbone of our sense of self. It is about having a moral stand that you can refer to and being “whole” or complete when you come to making decisions. As author C.S. Lewis says, integrity is "doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”
Expanding Your Personal Agency
Developing agency goes hand in hand with developing a firm adherence to a set of values, honesty to yourself and the world around you. Fundamentally, it’s a code of conduct or moral compass that you use to set up your practice and govern your decisions as you grow your sphere of influence in the world.
Individuals who have a strong sense of personal agency believe events are a result of the actions they take, and they praise or blame themselves and their own abilities. Those who see agency external to themselves will praise or blame external factors. For example, someone with a strong sense of personal agency will credit their study habits for passing a test, whereas someone else may attribute their success to the teacher or the exam. Likewise, if they don’t do well, the person with the stronger sense of personal agency will blame themselves rather than the teacher or exam (Carlson, 2007).
reference: Carlson, N.R., Buskist, W., Heth, C.D. and Schmaltz, R., 2007. Psychology: the science of behaviour-4th Canadian ed.
Week 2: WHAT IS SYSTEMS THINKING?
Have you ever thought about how you think? Albert Einstein famously said, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Truth-bomb, right? It just makes sense that when we look at solving a problem, we should employ a different level of thinking to avoid the issues that created the problem in the first place!
But what is that level of thinking... and how do you do it? We believe that Systems Thinking is the answer. Systems Thinking is a way of seeing the world as a series of interconnected and interdependent systems rather than lots of independent parts.
But before we go deeper into what systems thinking is, let’s talk about what it isn’t.
What systems are NOT
The main way we are taught to think is linear and often reductionist. We learn to break the world down into manageable chunks and see issues in isolation of their systemic roots. This dominant way of approaching the world is a product of industrialized educational norms – in one way or another, we have learned, through our 15 to 20+ years of mainstream education, and/or through socialization, that the most effective way to solve a problem is to treat the symptoms, not the causes.
Yet, when we look at the world through a systems lens, we see everything is interconnected. Problems are connected to many other elements within dynamic systems. If we just treat one symptom, the flow on effects lead to burden shifting and often unintended consequences.
Not only does systems thinking oppose the mainstream reductionist view; it replaces it with expansionism, the view that everything is part of a larger whole and that the connections between all elements are critical.
Systems are essentially networks made up of nodes or agents that are linked in varied and diverse ways. By using systems thinking, we identify and understand these relationships as part of the exploration of the larger systems at play. Everything is interconnected, every system is made up of many subsystems, and is itself a part of larger systems. Just as we are made up of atoms with molecules and quantum particles, problems are made up of problems within problems!
Every system is like a Matryoshka doll, made up of smaller and smaller parts within a larger whole. Seeing things in this way helps to create a more flexible view of the world and the way it works, and it illuminates opportunities for addressing some of its existing and evolving problem arenas.
The three key systems at play
Although the world is made up of endless large and small interconnected systems, there are three key systems that should be considered: social systems, industrial systems, and ecosystems. These three major systems keep the economy churning along, the world functioning for us humans, and our society operating in order (sort of, anyway!).
Social systems are the intangible rules and structures, created by humans, that create and maintain societal norms, rituals, and behaviors. Industrial systems refers to all of the manufactured material world, created to facilitate human needs (and all of which requires natural resources to be extracted and transformed into stuff). And the last big system, which is arguably the most important one, is the ecosystem. It provides all the natural services (such as clean air, food, fresh water, minerals, and natural resources) needed for the other two systems to exist.
Ultimately, approaching life from a systems perspective is about tackling big, messy real-world problems rather than isolating cause and effect down to a single point. In the latter case, “solutions” are often just band-aids (that may cause unintended consequences) as opposed to real and holistic systemic solutions.
Looking for the links and relationships within the bigger picture helps identify the systemic causes and lends itself to innovative, more holistic ideas and solutions.
Participants can take the course at their own pace as well as run through it as the 4-week sprint. They get access for six months and can download lots of different activity sheets + The Design Systems Change handbook as well.
