Dave Key / Natural Change Design: Themes

I’ve been asked quite a lot about the design of the Natural Change programme. ‘What do you do?’, ‘Where do you start with such a big subject?’.

The programme is structured around six themes. These provide a progression of awareness from the individual - where the loci of concern usually starts when people are initially brought together into a new group - out into wider cultural, social and ecological contexts. From here the themes move into practical issues of culture change, for example leadership, and awareness of change processes.

While the content of these themes operate most obviously at the conscious level, the way they are explored - the context, methods, techniques and style of facilitation - allows engagement with deeper psychological processes.

The themes are designed as threads to follow into the massive and diverse web of our human ecology. They are:

Human Needs
By confusing ‘needs’ with ‘wants’ and by attempting to meet fundamental psychological needs through mediated and distorted material consumerism (‘pseudo-satisfiers’), we have created a culture that consumes resources and creates pollution - while evidently decreasing individual levels of ‘subjective well-being’ (happiness).

It makes sense to start here, with our basic needs. What do we really need to be fully human? How can we best meet those needs? What distracts us from meeting those needs? What models, ideas and concepts are available to help us understand the way we meet our needs? How does meeting our own needs effect the ability of others to meet theirs?

Interconnection
Developing a sense of our own needs and how to meet them soon leads to a realisation that we are each dependent on other people and our ecosystem habitat. To deepen this awareness - and what it might mean to the way we think, feel and act - we explore the theme of interconnection.
In what ways are we interconnected with the world around us? Does interconnection diminish our individual freedom? Is it weak to depend on others? Where are the boundaries of our own responsibilities to others? What does our industrial culture tell us about our ‘ideal’ relationships with other people and nature?

Self as Ecology
As the groups’ awareness of interconnection deepens, we start to delve into the reality that we humans are part of the Earth’s ecosystems. Although relatively simple to grasp intellectually, the evidence suggests that in psychological and cultural terms we persist in believing that human beings are superior to, and separate from, the rest of nature. This belief leads us to act in ways that are not true to our own human ecology.
How can we make the jump from intellectual understanding of ecology, to a shift in beliefs about who - and what - we really are? Can this realisation lead to changes in our every-day behaviour? If so, how?

Making Meaning
How do we translate personal awareness into our daily lives? How do we live with other people who don’t share our values and beliefs?  How do we practice pro-environmental behaviour in a cultural system that seems to be working against us all the time?
Bringing things into our everyday lives - making meaning out of our own experience - is what this theme is all about.

Leadership
Being able to create change in a group of people is difficult. This theme explores the challenge of catalysing, motivating and supporting change processes, and the ethics and dynamics of power.
What is leadership? How do human groups and communities work? What is power and what issues does it bring up? Are all leadership styles the same? Are leaders ‘born or made’? Do we need leadership?

Change Processes
The final theme delves into personal and social change processes. What triggers change? What’s changed things in the past? How do we set about deliberately changing things and what are the ethics of engineering change? What concepts, models and historic examples might we use to better understand change? What are the barriers to change?

This progression provides threads into the web of human ecology, keeping the flow and direction of the development journey relevant, meaningful and firmly connected to real-life issues of sustainability.