How to create change in the world?

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
~ Buckminster Fuller

Harmonodes are that model

The word harmonode fills a gap or void in the lexicons of economic development, community planning, architecture and landscape design, and so forth.

If civilization was built decently from the beginning, in harmony with the Divine, and to facilitate harmony among neighbors, then we wouldn't be in this position and there'd be no need for this word harmonode.

Systems theory emerged as a scientific discipline last century and harmonodes gives us a focal point for a systems-based approach to solving the humanity's problems.

Strategic leverage points for systems change

Donella Meadows' excellent book Thinking in Systems describes 12 leverage points, ranked from least to most effective way to change a system.

  • Numbers — constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, standards
  • Buffers — the sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows
  • Stock-and-Flow Structurs — physical systems and their nodes of intersection
  • Delays — the lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes
  • Balancing Feedback Loops — the strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct
  • Reinforcing Feedback Loops — the strength of the gain of driving loops
  • Information Flows — the structure of who does and does not have access to information
  • Rules — incentives, punishments, constraints
  • Self-Organization — the power to add, change, or evolve system structure
  • Goals — the purpose or function of the system
  • Paradigms — the mind-set out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises
  • Transcending Paradigms

These leverage points give us a framework for evaluating/developing strategy, effective strategy, we want our efforts to be fruitful not futile.

Consider for example in climate/environmentalism's the 350 campaign:

Central to the 350 Campaign's inability to create any meaningful change thus far is that the campaign's axis is the least effective leverage point: numbers, in this case the number is how many parts per million of carbon are in the atmosphere.

350's failure to understand and strategize around these leverage point continually results in failure for campaign goals. 350 campaign is designed to fail.

350 fails to represent a paradigmatic improvement to the status quo (leverage points #1 and 2).

It fails to promise improvement for primary/legitimate goals of system (leverage point #3) which is to meet human needs.

Governments and NGOs make the same kinds of failures, always.

Central in all the failures of the status quo is: failure to create decent human habitat in a context that's not money-worshipping or money-enslaved.

Harmonodes give us that liberation.

5-point harmonode methodology

With harmonodes, optimal human habitat, at the core of the focus, this 5-point spiral-leaf graphic gives us a model for planning campaigns around harmonode development:

  1. make harmonodes!
  2. teach&learn about harmonodes!
  3. organize around harmonodes!
  4. legislate harmonodes!
  5. celebrate harmonodes!

In systems theory you could describe each of these as reinforcing feedback loops, where education, coordination, legislation, and celebration contribute in greater orders of magnitude to the transformation of civilization into optimal human habitat comprised of harmonodes.

Applying 5-point model to existing movements

20years ago I emailed Bill McKibbin (one of 350's founders) about the need to have Transition Towns and 350 occurring together in a coherent way. He didn't get what I was saying, mentioning something about the impossibility of effecting sufficient change one Transition Town at a time and I was too confused why he would interpet my comment that way and didn't know how to clarify. The spiral-flower-graphic above in this harmonode context explains now what I failed to describe by email back then.

Neither campaign is achieving harmonodes in any way, neither is developing optimal human habitat, neither has achieved an awesomeness worth striving for. What does an awesome, ecologically sustainable society look like? Show us so we can see how awesome it is then we'll want it! But neither are doing that and both movements have painfully failed to deliver the kind of changes we need.

In the spiral-flower graphic:

Had Transition Towns possessed a coherent development plan (or rather, more realistically: a stategy/framework for creating community-specific development plans) for building harmonious communities 20 years ago, all Transition Initiatives that existed would have engaged in implementing these plans, then we would have 20 year maturations of grand developments, and all the while 350 organizers would have this profound network of demonstration sites to show world leaders how vastly superior this economic strategy and paradigm is.

Both movements have been failing, woefully inadequate, qualitatively insignificant in the overall scope of today's civilization, due to these strategic errors.