With us, we have Karen O’Brien, who’s a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oslo in Norway, and the Cofounder of cCHANGE, a company committed to empowering and activating organizations and people to engage in equitable and sustainable transformations. She has written a wonderful book called You Matter More Than You Think. She has this very beautiful way of communicating complexity, which is inspiring and very actionable. With passion, commitment, and eloquent pen, she’s one of the most cited researchers in her field and a sought-after lecturer. Karen’s goal is to contribute to a quantum leap to an equitable world, where all life can thrive.
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You Matter More Than You Think With Karen O’Brien
Quantum Social Change For A Thriving World
With us, we have Karen O’Brien, who’s a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oslo in Norway, and the Cofounder of cCHANGE, a company committed to empowering and activating organizations and people to engage in equitable and sustainable transformations. She has written a wonderful book called You Matter More Than You Think. She has this very beautiful way of communicating complexity, which is inspiring and very actionable. With passion, commitment, and eloquent pen, she’s one of the most cited researchers in her field and a sought-after lecturer. Karen’s goal is to contribute to a quantum leap to an equitable world, where all life can thrive.
by Karen O’Brien
Welcome, Karen. I’m happy to have you with us. The first time I saw your book, You Matter More Than You Think, was that time when, as you say, you use that as a little experiment and still is an experiment for the world, an invitation to these new ideas. They’re quite bold in how you framed it from the beginning, how you entered the space and put it out there. More than 850,000 people at that time took a moment and downloaded the book. I was one of them.
I remember taking it in my hands and saying, “This is exactly what I have been researching and bringing these ideas together.” Karen coined it. She brought it together. It’s needed in our academia. The work that Bonnie and I do and the coaching program looks at paradigms and worldviews, bringing these new ways of being and thinking. I feel like this book, which we used for the program, was a great way to start getting people to think about the inner work and how that is important to quantum social change.
I’ve said a lot but I would love to start a bit with you, because you’re at the University of Oslo in Norway, and you’re a Professor of Sociology and Human Geography. I’d love to learn a bit more and hopefully the readers would want to explore more. What does Human Geography mean where you come from? As you speak to it, how did this quantum social change come to be for you? How is it different from the regular social change concept that we’re used to?
Thank you for inviting me here. I’m a human geographer. With a very interdisciplinary background, I studied International Relations and Environmental Sciences before finding Geography and seeing it as a discipline that connects the human environment, relationships, nature, society, and space plays. It’s about the idea of how we are on this planet. Having worked with climate change for decades was a wonderful home for opening up inquiries into how we are together on planet Earth. That’s how I approach it and how it attracts me.
In my research, I’ve looked more at the human and the social dimensions of environmental problems and tried to think about, “How do we organize society? How are we thinking about the problems and the solutions? How to respond to them?” Understanding all the implications, in terms of the limits to adaptation, the implications for human security, implications for biodiversity and ecosystems, it’s not about mitigation or adaptation. It is about transformation.
Years ago, I got very interested in what we mean by transformation and how we do it. You can’t just throw away the inner dimensions. It has to be an integrated approach where you start to think about my own worldviews, beliefs, and values, and the way I see the world also has to transform. That’s where I leave no stone unturned. I read lots of different books, and topics and think that everything has something to contribute to the way we’re framing these issues.
I came across some social scientists. We’re working with quantum social theory and new materialism, different ways of challenging their own approaches to other international relations, language, decision-making, etc. My question was, “What does this mean for climate change? What does it mean for social change?”
Often with social change, we think in a very mechanistic way. We are looking for the leverage points, that we need the social movements and we need to descend from what is existing to replace it and everything. I was thinking that we are one in tangles, organisms, and species. What does that mean with how we show up, and how we contribute to systems change and cultural changes in a way that produces results here now?
It’s been an exploration and an inquiry. Getting back to the title of the book, You Matter More Than You Think, I also think it’s showing us who we are and how we show up does matter much more than we think cognitively, but it’s also about being in the world in relation with other species and ecosystems and things. In a nutshell, it’s about who we are, and our capacity to unleash this potential that exists and is urgently needed right here right now.
I hear from my friends and people all the time, “I recycle. I do this and that, but I can’t make a huge change.” We both read You Matter More Than You Think. It speaks to the work we do, which is promoting individual change leads to organizational change and change within the whole system. Can you talk about the book itself, what it’s about, and give some examples of how people matter?
Quantum Social Change For A Thriving World is the subtitle. I wanted to go beyond this reductionist approach where we limit ourselves to these individuals. It’s very popular to point fingers at people and say, “You need to recycle. You need to treat people as objects to be changed in the name of environmental sustainability.” It limits and underestimates our collective capacity for social change. The individual is the collective. We are the systems. They’re not like separate and out there, but we are constantly engaged intra-acting.
If you think about it as a whole system, we’re the ones that are creating these situations. We’re contributing to our own vulnerability and to risks within this context of global challenges that are existential for many people, species, and ecosystems. Exploring what if we step back and look at change from a whole different dimension and recognize that what you do and say, it’s not necessarily that you recycle, but it’s how you engage with the whole process of recycling. Do you speak to your neighbors about it? Is there a system in place in your town? Is it an effective system? Who benefits from that?
We start to see ourselves in a bigger picture. The idea with quantum social change is that our connections were always connected non-locally using the concept of entanglement or where information. For when we take a measurement on one part of a system, you get information about another part of the system. If we think of ourselves as entangled through language, meaning, shared values, and even through emotions, in the United States, recycling, and then someone in Norway’s that you don’t know, having the same inner conversations in their heads, wondering whether they matter and doing things differently, but we’re also at the same time we’re contributing to a larger systems change.
It’s to help people to see that we are part of this bigger picture. It is very easy for us to see how little changes like land use changes add up to large scale and changes at the global scale. It’s much harder for us to see how our individual actions make a difference and our individual inactions also make a difference in terms of not moving us in the direction we want to go.
It’s like slowing down, but also paying attention because you are speaking about relationality. It’s not what you do, but it’s how you do it.
That is because we focus a lot on the meaning. What we need to do is the checklists, and the technical dimensions of every problem. We need more knowledge, know-how, expertise, technologies, and behavioral changes, but it’s the manner. It’s the quality of agencies, and how we show up in relation to each other. If we are deeply entangled, then do we need to enter that space, recognizing that oneness or the connections rather than the disconnections.
That means looking for values that apply to everyone like equity, justice, or compassion such as, “How do you transcend polarization and fragmentation?” It shifts the way we’re seeing ourselves and our relationships. In the world of quantum social change, we’re not dealing with environmental problems. We’re dealing with relationship problems. It goes into, “How do I relate to myself, to others, to the environment, nature, systems, and to change itself?”
I was at a panel a few years ago at the UN. We’re talking about sustainable development goals. I know you referenced that in your book as well. We talked about these goals as if they were these things that are going to move us forward. They’re good. You can see them. They’re good things, eradicating poverty, and achieving education for all.
I remember sitting there and saying, “We need the eighteenth sustainable development goal, on which is about inner transformation. It’s the shift in the narrative and the paradigm.” It’s a bold idea when you think about it, because the system that we’re in, or the dominant, social change, or social science system is much about the measures and, “I want to see where we’re going,” the goals, and that’s not a bad thing. At the same time, we need both.
We need to have some sense of tangible and yet being in it, as you say, from the book, “It is the I and we, and knowing that we are in that entanglement in that space together and, ‘I’m an extension of you. You’re an extension of me.’” The question that comes with that, especially as I think about organizations, as one form of organizing it’s about the inner transformation of the system and how that one individual can transform the system. Can you speak more to it, and maybe examples in the stories that you might have?
It’s important to think of the one who can transform the system, but we’re limiting ourselves to one end rather than thinking of the I and we, which is hard for us, in English, to make that distinction. A group has come out with inner development goals that are complementary to sustainable development goals. The point here is that we can’t separate those from systems, structures, rules, power, interest in politics, and things. It is the personal transformations in action towards that we have to create new patterns.
We have to disrupt patterns that are unsustainable or inequitable. How do we do that? If people always say, “What does this look like in practice? What are examples of this?” It goes back to what you’re saying. It’s about the quality of the agency. It’s about how you show up. In the book, I give the example of the alternative UK, which is practicing fractal politics, and looking at the Cosmo local, working on community action networks and building that collective through conversations and different ways of being together.
Often, we’re trying to look for when we say, “I want to see a transformation. Tell me a story of an example.” It’s very hard to find the big examples, women, voting, and changes in smoking laws and things. When you start to look at all the millions of different actions that are taking place around the world, there’s a lot of momentum there. Yet, we’re still investing in fossil fuels. We still have authoritarianism. We’re not reaching those goals that have been very clearly defined what’s in the way.
It comes down to that we’re trying to solve these issues from the same paradigm of, “Little old me in little Norway.” We’re seeing ourselves not as connected, but as entangled. That’s unleashed a lot of energy and power if we start to think that everyone has a sphere of influence. Everyone is part of multiple systems. It could be a household, a soccer club, or a basketball team. It could be a church group, community garden or workplace cafeteria.
We’re all part of multiple systems. When we start to do things differently within those systems, recognize that connection and talk, speak, act, and design differently, a change could happen a lot faster than we think because we’re not alone in this. It’s happening in many ways. It’s like changing the whole narrative and the discourse of social change.
What keeps coming up for me is, “What is my image of myself in relation to this issue, to nature, or myself in relation to the community.” In the world, it’s very difficult to see how connected I am, particularly in cities because it’s enormous. I live in the rural countryside. I have this on an underground river. It is more like a stream. It’s not huge. All of my neighbors are on the same thing. We’re all gardeners and eat at least one season of what we grow for ourselves.
A person came in and put in a chicken farm up the river and our wells went dry. It was obvious what one role can make good and bad in our communal living together. You put images in your book, and you’re talking about the image we hold, “Am I connected? Am I not? How do I see myself? Do I see myself as an agent of change or not?” Can you talk a little bit about the image and how you might work with that?
It’s great because a lot of these concepts are very abstract. How do we see ourselves as systems, the story you’re describing is from a systems perspective. What happens here influences. What I do here is influencing people in another part of the world. It’s also influencing future generations for hundreds of thousands of years. Those connections are often invisible to us and to make them more visible to have them show up is that challenge. That’s where artwork and visuals can be helpful.
In my collaboration with Norwegian artist, Tone Bjordam, for the artwork for the book, it was like a dialogical process, “What do you mean? There are systems wiring diagrams. How do you put entanglement into a picture?” It speaks to a different part of our brains and hearts. It connects with us differently. I’ve had a number of people say, “I didn’t understand all your concepts, but when I saw the artwork, I got it.”
Going back to mattering more than you think, it’s not just a cognitive process. It’s an embodied process of recognizing ourselves fully as beings in the world together with soils, water, air, and all the things that you are farming and gardening. You experience that but many of us are disconnected from our relationships with everyone. We have social media. We know that there’s the Internet of Things that shows that connection, but that our connection is much more than bits and bytes of data flowing over to the internet. It’s much more foundation to that.
That’s where in the book, the raise thing that consciousness matters. We don’t bring that into global change science very often. We talk about the atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere, but we don’t talk about noosphere or mental thoughts about shared ways of thinking about ourselves in relation to the biosphere.
If we think we’re going to solve these issues as these cognitive problems with more data, graphs, and things without focusing on how we imagine ourselves in the world or if we’re thinking of ourselves as these little particles or separate marbles that clump together, sometimes it’s not going to be surprising if we all ended up rolling down and going to keep on the same path as we’re heading.
To tag on to this thought, there is an organization ClimateVisuals.org. It is an evidence-based photography project. They’ve been working for years to see what images provoke not just change, “Okay, great. I get it,” but more engagement. They have found that seeing people in a situation is the most provocative. Seeing people trying to eat dinner with their table floating because they’re in a flood there’s no other place to go or anything else to eat, these types of images. Seeing myself in the world and as a part of the world is very important, but also, how do I see the future of our world? Do I see it as still little industrial chunks or a different future for what’s possible?
That idea of visualizing what a sustainable world would look like is something that I asked my students to do because it’s something that we can talk about. How do we visualize it? When we do sit down and visualize it, often the future 2030, 2040, or 2050, but if we bring it right here and visualize it, then a lot of the qualities that we’re looking for exist now. That new paradigm is here. How do we occupy, live, and be that paradigm so you have more weight to that?
In terms of social change, it’s not just about how many people but it’s the quality that we’re creating new systems and alternatives. We’re collapsing a wave of potential right here and right now again to be aligned with that future that we want, but also the present that we want because where we’re at, we’re seeing a lot of losses. We have a lot of attention to regenerative ecology, sustainability, and things. It’s what we do now that matters.
I keep thinking how this paradigm is a paradigm of faith, of hope, of letting go of knowing what we know, and trusting. That’s what was coming up. Bonnie asked you about images. This was another thing in your book that attracted me. They were beautiful. Image is another way to get to a concept to embody it. I wondered because the other thing I noticed from you, in your process and your own writing, it felt like you were in an embodied process.
The song Wildflower Meadow by Eternal Page page kept you company as you were writing the book. I’ve done a little bit of research around aesthetics and ways of being, because it’s connected in a different way to our beingness. I want to read this quote and then build on a question. It says, “Aesthetics opens up the field of being. For example, one’s hand, touching one’s other hand means the body’s an objective existence. It’s also subjectively experienced.”
This is from Merleau-Ponty, “I’m both sensing and I’m being sensed. In other ways, we rather feel the things with our eyes, and the gaze itself envelops them, clogs them with its own flesh. This circularity does not produce identity, but instead an opening and the possibility for a meaningful life.” The question I want to build, is mattering and meaning?
I think that meaning and mattering are the same. We’ve separated mind and matter, and done the enlightenment project and everything. Matter refers to substance but it also refers to significance. Part of mattering is that we’re creating immaterial experienced reality, but the significance also of mattering of what is important, not just to me and myself but to all of us. That idea of meaning and mattering being very much tied together is an essential part of it.
It goes beyond even hope and trust, no idea of uncertainty, which is foundational to quantum physics. It shows us that there’s that room for potentiality. It’s not that we don’t know everything. It’s that some things are unknowable not until we make a measurement and collapse. Going back to what Bonnie was saying about images that activate that sense of agency that have us show up differently. They get us to care about ourselves in the world and others.
The whole idea of uncertainty, which is foundational to quantum physics, is it shows us that there is that room for potentiality.
That’s when we won’t have an equitable and sustainable world that is partial. That works for some people and not for others because one person’s adaptation is another person’s vulnerability. Until we can take that big picture into account, then we’re likely to be solving some problems and creating bigger problems. While that’s the nature of systems change, we can design it better so that it also responds to when we learn. That’s transformative learning and critical thinking. All of those things are essential parts of this. As you’re pointing out, it’s an embodied practice as well.
What’s coming up for me in that question, “Is meaning and matter the same?”. I think about the way that climate change is characterized often. It’s a thing. It is a problem to tackle, which feels physically in an embodied sense, as well as mentally, very different from, “I love my trees. I love walking out into my garden at night and looking up and seeing the Milky Way.” That is a relationship.
Climate change to me is a problem to solve. That feels very different to me. For me, Ina’s question means that this is the heart of my own sense of being in the world, the trees I love, and the Milky Way I love. That’s meaning. My whole ground is there. Mattering is how can I, as a person, deal with this problem called climate change? I’m feeling it comes up with me.
The way I understand is what has meaning for you also matters to you. It is substantial, significant, and, “Get rid of those trees,” and you lost something or if you don’t have a view of stars because of light pollution or something like that, you’re losing something that matters to you. Connecting with what matters to all of us is at this very deep level, it goes away from this deterministic, atomistic, reductionist view of the world where, “It’s just a tree,” to, “It’s a relationship.”
We can start to see how getting rid of trees here, and that we’re affecting the hole all the time, positively and negatively. That brings in like, “How can we consciously, creatively, collaboratively, and courageously transform at this rate, scale speed in depth that is called for right now?” In many ways, getting out of our heads, looking for the solution in everything, and engaging with it in a relational way.
That’s the world that we want and the things that we love. Put those into account rather than fight, tackle climate change, and do this because the amazing thing with climate change is we’re starting to become self-aware that we are transforming large-scale systems. When you start to think that we can affect the climate, social, economic and political systems, it is about thinking of ourselves and being connected. There’s nothing more dangerous to vested interests in power than people united towards a common goal for the benefit.
You saw that in terms of the social movements to rewrite the Constitution in Chile based on equity. I didn’t go through with the referendum, but they’re still young people who are saying, “We still want this. We want nature to have rights. We want water rights.” It was very visionary and experimental to say, “Should we be together on this planet right now? It’s the radical dimension of the changes that we need right now.” Much of what is being proposed right now is very business as usual. It doesn’t address the depth or the scope of the problem.
You are talking about social system transformation and the idea that this individual has the capacity to transform the system. I love what you said earlier about potentiality. Not that we don’t know, but it’s unknowable and allowing for that to emerge. I’m curious, how would you bring the complexity work into this, or is it part of the quantum social change? How is it different?
In complexity, it describes our world very well: complexity, theory, emergence, non-linearity, and all of these things. Quantum social change brings consciousness into the picture and agency. Complex systems are often systems that are out there, and they’re complex. When we start to bring ourselves as participants or agents in the system, and you’re talking about potential realism and participatory reveals, there is a world there, and temperatures cause ice to melt and we see that there are classical cause effects that are going to happen, but there’s also then our potential to intervene in these systems.
It’s that difference rather than just watching a system saying, “It’s all very complex.” It’s like, “How do we enter that complexity?” Often we think about individuals who influence the system. We’ve seen that lately in politics more for the worse than for the better. If we think of individuals just not as separate, but as connected, then we see our own responsibility or our ability to respond than if we’re talking about autocratic government systems and things.
If we think of individuals not just as separate beings, but as connected, then we see our own responsibility or ability to respond to the world’s issues.
We can look at our own complicity in that through arms sales from our own one country to another, financial flows, monetary things, through what we say, and what we don’t say. If you look at the coup in Myanmar, it hasn’t been called out at an international level. There is so much more potential that we could be allies in social change processes in Myanmar and instead, it doesn’t matter or at least, that’s the impression that they get from the Western world. To look in terms of solidarity, equity, social justice and things and take that literally to heart of, “What are we doing that is fragmenting and polarizing the world?”
It goes again to all other species because biodiversity loss, climate change, and global inequality are one big relationship problem. It’s not a separate problem. If we’re going to solve one successfully, we’re going to solve all problems. It’s going to be a very different world. That’s the message that many people are feeling that this is this pace. The world we’ve created is a result of a paradigm that does maybe not value life or not for everybody. For what matters to me, that’s problematic.
How did you come to this?
It was more, “Leave no stone unturned.” I’ve always been interested in integral approaches. I’ve seen my own worldview change several times. When I was in graduate school, I was focusing on atmosphere bias for interactions and general circulation models and what that means for food security in Mexico. I was very in love with the Earth system science part of the equation, but also as a social scientist, I was like, “What does this mean in practice?”
I eventually had to dig deeper into my own meaning-making and thinking about my own leg and seeing that, “It was invisible to my blind spots, and now I can see those. What are my other blind spots?” I like starting to challenge everything that’s asked different questions. When I saw other researchers asking different questions or saying, “What if social science were reinvented now? What would it look like?” It wouldn’t be based on classical Newtonian Physics. We wouldn’t be having this cost-benefit. Our whole language reflects a certain way of seeing the world.
If we were to redo it now from scratch, coming from a fresh place, it would be based on quantum physics as the most successful theory in physics and with a lot of interpretations and pluralistic interpretations. It would very much align with indigenous worldviews and wisdom traditions. We have so much more information at our fingertips now through the internet, through sharing of information and to be aligned on that and use all our faculties.
I’ve seen many changes in science itself when I was younger, “You have this many brain cells.” After you hit twenty-something, it’s downhill from here. We know about neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and many things that were not part of the narrative of being human years ago. My question and what drives me is also to think about, “In the future, what if people look back and go,” because it was right in front of their noses. They couldn’t see it.
I probably would say, “They couldn’t see that they were connected. They had the internet, telephones, and all these different things. They couldn’t see their deep connections.” I’m hoping that they’ll look back and say, “I’m glad that they got it. They saw their connections, and they were able to change course,” because we will be remembered. We are entangled with the future, as we are with the past. To break with those patterns that are literally killing us, it is a responsibility for all of us who are here.
We are entangled with the future just as we are with the past. It is a responsibility for all of us who are here to break the patterns that are killing us today.
Mattering isn’t just an option, because it matters if we don’t think we matter. It matters if we think that it’s game over, and we’re going extinct, because if that’s what we’re betting on for the future, that’s the world we’re going to be creating. We need enough people to feel that life matters, “This matters to me,” and that we are willing to do things differently and have better outcomes. To be able to look up and see the stars, hug a tree, or eat fresh fruit, there’s a value in relationships. It ties into what matters to us and why. Asking different questions is necessary to get front-to answers.
For a long time, you’ve built your career there. Even in your book, you speak to how seldom this idea of this quantum social change paradigm is not embraced in the academic curriculum, and the education. I see a little bit of movement at our university at GW. In our program, we bring some of these ideas. What are you seeing as a trend? What would be the picture? What is your hope in that space?
Sometimes I feel like giving up on that, but then when I do read a chapter in a book about education at George Washington University or things, I go, “It’s happening. What you’re doing there inspires me to keep going and thinking, ‘What are they doing?’” I think that the work I do gives other people courage to look into it and younger students already or people who are like seeing, “This makes perfect sense,” or people like, “We’ve been talking about this forever in narrative or indigenous studies.” The most amazing thing that I’ve learned through this is all of this stuff has been said for so long by so many.
Everything goes back to William James earlier and you go, “It’s about waking up and making those connections, connecting the dots, and seeing like, ‘How does this affect how I show up? Do I have the courage to speak out?’” You can see the power of social structure, sculptures, and things because of the ridicule like eye-rolling and things like, “Do not put quantum and social together.” I’ve heard that again. The physicists are critical of using weather metaphors, methods and meanings from quantum physics and in a social context. Social scientists can be critical that you’re using physics to try to ascribe society. At the end of the day, as opening up an inquiry and asking, “What if we got it wrong? What if there is a different way?”
Education should be about exploring and opening our minds rather than shutting them down. I find it very frustrating, but I also understand because I know from earlier that I’m talking about it as a process. Sometimes in terms of embodying, I’m like, “I get this. I see it all.” Sometimes I am a classic like, “What did I write? What am I writing about here?” Being okay with that, clarity, certainty, and recognizing that we are human, but that we are also where we’re at right now, that we can do better in terms of how we are together collectively.
Education should be about exploring and opening our minds rather than shutting them down.
My hope is that this book will generate conversations and people to think, talk about these things, and have different conversations. I very purposely didn’t put climate change in the title because I think that it’s the entry point for me, but it could be related to anything like COVID, the law, or the devastation of oceans. We could use it for anything and have the same type of things that matter like paradigms matter, beliefs matter, relationships matter, metaphors matter, agency, fractals, and you matter. To help people to see themselves in this larger picture is important at this time.
You’re also talking about uncertainty and transformation. It’s also about, “What is my relationship to uncertainty? Is it something I’m going to try and tiptoe into or am I willing to leap?” I’m curious what allows you to put a puzzle together, take it all apart again, not know if the pieces fit, and maybe put in new pieces. How do you play?
It is this determination because of my own climate anxiety. There have been times when I was working on it like, “Why am I reading about the physics and philosophy of this?” but then realizing something like, “I have to do this.” To be able to say, “Let’s try this.” It’s easier sometimes other times because sometimes playing isn’t introducing new ideas, throwing in things that people are uncomfortable with. I can very much feel the discomfort in the room and everything when I talk about this stuff.
I also think that at least you plant seeds, or I can make people think and they might come back later and it might hit them at some point. Now I get what entanglement means. Let’s remember to take both end perspectives and get away from this Black, White, either/or duality, holes and parts to see both end perspectives.
One of our real challenges in education is to be able to hold paradoxes and hold things lightly and get to that point where there’s a lot that we don’t know, but there’s a lot that we do know. We have to take the size of what we do know and be able to think about, “What is the biggest impact I can have right now or the biggest positive impact?” If you have 8 billion people seeing themselves as the solutions rather than as the problems, then we can solve many problems.
It sounds like what you’ve been doing is what Einstein used to talk about and called combinatorial play. You bring things that are seemingly unrelated, and then allow the process to unfold. That’s what he always encouraged. Some ideas that sometimes might not go together are crazy, but to follow that, stay at it, and say, “What if?”
That’s what a lot of science is about. Especially the attraction to interdisciplinarity where you can put a ring in, put like psychology together with music. That’s where you see things and why metaphors matter. That’s why we need to have groups thinking together. One person can’t hold it alone. All I’m doing is synthesizing what many people have said and trying to language it in a way that makes sense to me in a context that matters to me, in terms of the environment.
In your book, you talk about questions and practice that matters. What is a question you’re in and/or a question you might want to live in this space as we continue to ponder in the conversation?
The question I wake up with every day is, “What can I do now? What can I do to have the biggest positive impact? How do I use my time? If I’m writing and saying that we’re in the decade that matters, what do I do this decade?” It goes back to Buckminster Fuller, “If the future of the world depended on me, what would I do and how would I be?” I wake up and, “Is research and teaching as usual, the solution? Is anything, as usual, the solution when we know that we are close to many tipping points that will have devastating consequences for many people and species?”
For me, the questions are like, “What next?” In trying to ground myself being here, and in theory, seeing that potential. That’s where I get a lot of inspiration too. It’s not just me. It’s we that are involved in this. There are many people who are doing such amazing things. Often it’s off the radar or off the script from the mainstream media or academic journals are anything, that idea that social change is a nonlinear process and we can be very close to that inflection point.
There are a lot of people talking about these tipping points. In the social world, they don’t just happen. We have to have that agency. We have to disrupt systems and cultures, and play a role in it. The more people can accept that role and take a role that it’s not just any type of agency. Let’s put it to geoengineering of the atmosphere or something, but showing up with quality, caring, and based on an understanding of what works for the whole. There is no separation from what my well-being and the well-being of the whole. That is a real shift for many in a world where we still perceive winners and losers. Many people think that they’re going to be fine. “Put me in a bunker.” That thing is hard to imagine.
It sounds like the foundation of the practice, “How is that I matter at this moment? How do I show up in ways that matter right now?” I loved that in your book, you use the quote of Teilhard de Chardin when he says, “When for the first time in a living creature, instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.” It feels like when we engage in our own self-reflection, mirroring, answering, responding, and being in that question, that’s our work to do.
That’s why the work you’re doing is important because coaching and teaching people how to coach rather than to tell is a collective effort that we need. The practice is in how we can be together and where our education systems haven’t given us the tools and skills. We bring it all together through coaching programs and thinking about how we can collectively work together is essential.
“Being tiny traces of element,” is another one you quoted in your book, and how we can collectively do that. Bonnie, do you want to say anything as we close?
I’m super grateful for your time. I’m honored to speak with you. One thing around this idea of questions because I do love that you put many questions in your book, coaching is predicated on questions, not only just, “What can I do?” but questions if we’re brave enough to hold them that do break apart paradigms, put us immediately into uncertainty, and also that play of new ways that things can come back together. I appreciate the chapter on questions and all the questions you ask.
That is the way forward, keep asking questions, and the what if. Going back to visions and imagining the best world we can, then how do we realize that? It’s very easy to imagine a dystopian future because it’s right in front of us. Many people have been experiencing it for so long. We will have these losses collectively. How do we ask the right questions? That goes to get some interpretations of quantum physics. It’s the questions that we ask that determine the answers that we give and where reality will head. There’s a lot of room for optimism, but it takes action and practice. It’s a cycle.
This book is a great experiment. I would invite anyone to take a look and play with it because it’s very rich. It’s got many ideas and entry points you can get into. It’s like you can open the page and go somewhere and there’s richness. It can challenge and help articulate these new questions. Thank you for being with us. We look forward to playing with you.
It was great to talk to you and good luck with your work.
Thank you.
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About Karen O’Brien
Karen O’Brien has a beautiful way of communicating complexity in an inspiring and actionable way. With passion, commitment, and an eloquent pen, she is one of the most cited researchers in her field and a sought-after lecturer. Karen’s goal is to contribute to a “quantum leap” to an equitable world where all life can thrive. She has been thinking and writing about climate change for a long time, starting when she lived in Bangkok in 1968. Karen O’Brien is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oslo in Norway, and co-founder of cCHANGE, a company committed to empowering and activating organizations and people to engage in equitable and sustainable transformations. She has participated in four reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2020, she was a co-recipient of the prestigious BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Awards for Climate Change. Karen has written and contributed to scores of articles, books, and book chapters, including the recent “Climate and Society: Transforming the Future” for educators and students.