The 30% Question
By Rebecca Hyman, LCSW
Originally published in Rebecca’s newsletter: Therapy for Social Change .
I don’t know if you were tracking this in the swirl of December, but there was a U.N. conference in Montreal, known as COP 15, to discuss the protection of the earth’s biodiversity. For days, the headlines about the meeting were grim. It didn’t seem like the countries would get it together to really grapple with the crisis. There was a lot of blaming and avoidance.
“It’s often said that people who live in cultures that are steeped in individualism struggle to wrap their minds around systems.”
Then the tone of the reporting changed. At the last moment, the nations who had participated agreed to protect 30% of the earth’s biodiversity. The “30x30” framework is designed to protect 30% of land and sea, in contrast to the current levels of 17% of land and 8% of sea. (The U.S. members had to watch from the sidelines because we are one of two nations that are not part of the Convention on Biodiversity.)
When I read about the agreement, my first thought was: Are you kidding me? That’s all you could agree to save?
I wanted to be told they’d agreed to protect everything, so that after all the carbon trading and the weaseling out of the agreement, we might actually get 30%. But if we started with 30%, I was certain, we’d get nothing.
A couple of days passed. I noticed that when I told myself I was thinking about the agreement I was in fact dwelling on my fear about what was going to happen if the agreement was a sham. I wanted to be rescued by someone else—some group of people with more power, more knowledge, more standing. I had no idea how to evaluate the agreement, and no actual sense of whether my cynicism was warranted. I wanted the entire problem to be someone else’s responsibility, so I could escape my feelings and check out.
Photo by Antenna on Unsplash
But then I had a different thought. What if COP-15 was actually a real agreement? What if the nations actually followed through on their commitments? Might this not only result in conservation, but also in the transformation of the relationships between and among the nations themselves? How would all those scientists, and activists, and funders, and ecologists come to know one another better? How would the conservation of that 30% impact the rest of the ecosystem, even if it wasn’t yet targeted for repair?
It’s often said that people who live in cultures that are steeped in individualism struggle to wrap their minds around systems. Individualist cultures see both the source and the solution to problems in the actions of individual people who are said to be rational, who know and understand their thinking and their desires, and who have the power and self determination to make changes, if they choose. Systems thinking is frequently derided as “too big” and “too emotionally overwhelming” because when there’s a problem there isn’t an individual to blame or supplicate or lock up.
Those who argue that it is overwhelming to think in systems usually speak about the “system” as a totality, a “thing” that we must be able to see in its entire complexity and range, if we are to transform it. We have to know in advance exactly how to tackle its every element.
In actuality, systems thinking is a highly nimble, optimistic, iterative method of problem solving, because it’s not the totality of the system, but rather the fact that systems are networks that is the key to thinking about change. Thinking of problems like population extinction, or white supremacy, or sexual violence as systems inaugurates a space of immense possibility, because a change made to one part of a networked system will inevitably impact the rest.
It’s hard to picture the network of a global ecosystem. It’s easier to start with a smaller system, one that’s familiar. In the 1940s, the psychiatrist Murray Bowen started asking questions about how families worked. Over the next decades, he studied families and he determined that a “family” was not a collection of individuals, but instead a system.
“The beauty of systems thinking is that it shows us that any change to one part of the system will impact other nodes.”
The family system was made up of alliances, either positive and loving, or negative and punishing, that bound the family together. The goal of the system, Bowen argued, was homeostasis. The system would fight to stay the same, and to keep everyone inside it, functioning in its usual way, regardless of what “function” meant to that family system.
One thing I find profound about family systems theory is that it refuses moral judgment about any particular family dynamic, because Bowen was tracking a system, not a collection of people. So if a family’s version of homeostasis is that everyone is passed out in the hallway on drugs, or that everyone spends their days gossiping and undermining the other people in the family, or that everyone is engaged in the zealous collection of academic degrees or the accumulation of wealth—so be it.
All of the systems are doing the same thing, which is frantically reinforcing themselves, conserving their energy, and keeping up the front that they are timeless, inevitable, and permanent. There’s a lot more to Bowen’s work than this, and a lot of it is incredibly sexist, and has been beautifully critiqued by people like Harriet Lerner and Carol Gilligan. But for the purposes of today’s post, I’m bringing in the family as a system because it’s a smaller and more manageable way to look at how systems function. The “family” in family systems theory is a network of alliances, of behaviors, of ideological and interpersonal narratives that exist apart from the people who are said to belong to (or be exiled from) its whole. It’s an entity with its own agency, its own story, its own function, acting upon and reacting to the actions of its individual members.
Bowen’s genius was in recognizing that if you wanted to change your family system, you could do so by changing yourself. The system would inevitably push back against the change, seeking a return to homeostasis. But because you were a node in that network, all you had to do was conserve your energy, enough to withstand the challenge to your change, and the entire system would change in return.
“Even though we are in an emergency that demands action, we cannot know the entire system at once. But what we can know is that making a transformation within a larger system will have ripple effects, beyond that of the initial intervention. ”
The beauty of systems thinking is that it shows us that any change to one part of the system will impact other nodes. But how that impact will occur, when it will occur, cannot be predicted. So the call to know how to change or “fix” an entire system is not only cognitively and emotionally overwhelming, it's actually impossible.
We cannot master the system, or dominate it back, the way it dominates us. But we can learn a nodal point, we can isolate a 30%, and in impacting that 30% we can be a catalyst for systemic change.
One thing I know from being a therapist and from my own life experience is that change doesn’t happen in one fell swoop. The lure of the New Year’s Resolution is wish fulfillment: that like a tiny emperor, we can demand a change occur and have it happen immediately, with no resistance.
I decided that instead of making a resolution, I’d try the 30% question, borrowing my method from COP 15. I started asking how I’d break down a task, a project, a change that was freighted with fear or risk; how I’d recognize and carve out that 30% of the whole.
I made a game of it, a puzzle. I’d wake up and think about a huge problem I needed to solve. I’d immediately feel demoralized and want to go back to bed. Then I’d ask myself to pull out just 30%. Or I’d ask myself: how could you make this problem just 30% better? What if you stopped there? What if 30% was enough? It helped.
Now, there’s an obvious difference in scale and difficulty between me talking myself out of a perfectionistic, productivity mindset and that of making systems-level change. But here’s why I think the 30% question is useful.
Even in the midst of the largest extinction event since the Dinosaurs, still we can only start by tackling 30%. Even though we are in an emergency that demands action, we cannot know the entire system at once. But what we can know is that making a transformation within a larger system will have ripple effects, beyond that of the initial intervention.
Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash
This is not to say that those ripple effects will be uniformly positive. We cannot know or anticipate the result of that 30% intervention. But we can track the energy flows in the feedback loop, and we can notice the ways what we think we know will come back to us, changed, by its interaction with the system itself. We can work together, in coalitions, in organizations, in spontaneous conversations in coffee shops, to overcome our fear of enormous challenges; we can accept our grief and our longing for change by locating ourselves within our own networks and systems, and by reminding ourselves that we don’t have to know the entire solution to make a tremendous impact: we just have to start with a small but significant change.