CLA, Change, and After Capitalism

The more significant the change, the longer it takes. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s not. All change tends to get lumped together in “today’s rapid pace of change …”

In our case, the path to After Capitalism is likely to be a long slow one – despite what the increasing volume of pieces coming out about its imminent demise might suggest. It is refreshing – even encouraging – to see more and more people realizing that something is very wrong.

Nonetheless, we need our eyes wide open on the process of change. I have written about the slow pace of change. Let’s look at it today through the lens of the popular foresight tool Causal Layered Analysis developed by the great futurist Sohail Inayatullah.

For those new to CLA, it is helpful to think of it like an iceberg, where the top layer, the litany, is peeking above the surface, but 9/10ths of the iceberg is out of view underneath the water. Each layer then gets progressively deeper, more foundational, and harder to change.

The litany, or headline level, is characterized by almost continuous change. When you think of the big stories of the day, they change pretty quickly – weekly if not daily. Today’s crisis is forgotten in a week, and a new one replaces it. This is the layer the most people pay attention to, and since it does indeed change rapidly, people naturally think that all change is therefore rapid.

What CLA suggests however, is that you can connect the day’s headlines to more deeply rooted trends in the second layer. The trends in turn are connected in systems. Trends and systems change much more slowly … over the course of years. So when futurists see headlines, they immediately think of the relevant trends and systems and situate the headline as an indicator or signal of a longer term change they have been tracking.

We’re not done yet. What trends and systems get paid attention to? Here we see the layer of values and worldviews. We After Capitalism folks have as our #1 needed shift … values and worldviews. The timescale of change here is decades. There is good news here – perhaps excellent news! There have been shifts brewing at this level for decades, and we are not that far away. It is true that right now, it may look like we are heading in the wrong direction. But a way to see this is as the last gasp of the old order, which is currently drowning out the slow steady changes that have been taking place at this level.

The bottom level, the myth-metaphor, has the deepest and most foundational level of change. I can think of several foundational myth-metaphors being challenged. Growth. Consumerism. Need for environmental stewardship. Jobs, work, competition. We can take these on later – too much for this post. But we can take some comfort that this many changes at this foundational level is quite extraordinary … but slow. Patience, my friends! – Andy Hines