about

There is nothing permanent except change. Heraclitus

Cha-nge is the vehicle for its founder Alex Morrison's activities now that he has stepped back from full-time work at Cogapp. Exactly how it develops remains to be seen, but it grows out of a sense of great need.

That sense of need has been growing since the end of 2016. This was the moment when a newly elected President Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement; a wake-up call. Using online sources, notably the excellent community of climate commentators and scientists on Twitter (and latterly Bluesky), and connecting with people and organisations including Mike Berners-Lee at Small World Consulting, we started an in-depth investigation of the climate crisis. The results, based on over twelve thousand articles, can be seen on our website The Elephant.

The more we understood about the climate crisis, the associated environmental emergency and the forces that are acting to excacerbate them, the more we learned and understood. In summary:

• Fixing our problems is not just a matter of reducing our carbon footprints (necessary though that is).
• The forces that are driving climate and environmental destruction are also causing social, economic and political problems including obscene wealth inequality and political corruption.
• The nature of the change that lies behind all this is non-linear and multi-dimensional. It is accelerating and increasingly disruptive.
• Understanding the roots and mechanisms of change requires a new set of tools: the core of this is goes by the name of Systems Thinking.

The conclusion of this analysis is not hard to grasp. People, organisations and communities are going to have to adapt to a new environment and an increasingly uncertain world.

As a society, we need to shift away as quickly as possible from a fragile 'wealth and growth' mindset - the kind of thinking encapsulated in Mark Zuckerberg's dictum 'Move fast and break things' and exemplified by recurring financial crashes like the events of 2008. And we need to replace it with a 'resilience and prosperity' mindset - one that prioritises foresight, preparedness, adaptability, healthy systems, good governance and relationships.

Cha-nge is here to play its part in this adaptation by training, publishing, consulting and undertaking projects.

As a micro-scale organisation we can only hope to have a small effect. Our approach is to work collaboratively and concentrate our efforts where we can have maximum impact with our limited resources.

If this resonates with you and you would like to discuss or work with us, please get in touch.