Systems, Not Symptoms: Rethinking Environmental Challenges Through The 55 Minutes
Event Details
Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” Join this webinar to hear from James Stauch, lead author of The 55 Minutes, about how to use those metaphorical first fifty-five minutes wisely. If we want to be successful when we innovate, act, or try to “change the system,” we need to get serious about understanding the problem. Unfortunately, the world that most of us inhabit is focused on those last five minutes—rushing headlong toward a “solution” without having understood the problem. But the kinds of problems we face in our workplaces, institutions, and society at large are the results of systems. For those who lament that “the system is broken,” “the system is rigged,” or “it’s a systemic problem,” this is a guide to understanding those systems and hopefully feeling less helpless, alienated, and confused. But the world is not linear, binary, or static. As those who are ecologically-oriented know, the world is rich with complex systems, and it is changing rapidly and radically. But in order to keep up, we need to slow down and think.
This webinar will focus on this under-developed area of “problem understanding,” providing an overview of how to use your “55 minutes” wisely. It will cover a range of key questions, frameworks, concepts, and dive into a couple of the 30 tools outlined in the book to help you spend more time identifying, framing, observing, and listening to the system(s) that created and sustain a conservation or other environmental challenge you are working to address. The webinar will help environmental activists, organizations, funders, and policy makers spend less time “solving the wrong problem precisely” and more time navigating the complexity of the challenge and asking more beautiful questions that may point to new directions, alternatives, and possible places to leverage change.
Order your hard copy, or download a free PDF of the book, at https://the55minutes.com
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