The Value of Anticipating Resistance to Transitions

A conversation last night had me thinking about different things that need to be visualised, or at least anticipated, when trying to map transition pathways: a) a motivating vision

b) connected-up current ventures that could start redirecting how things are now toward that vision,

c) but also all the things that are going to obstruct and even resist that redirection.

Earlier in the evening Dreu Harrison had asked me, as part of the 'Organisational Design' subject that he is teaching in UTS's Master of Design degree program, how I understood 'the value of design.' I had tried to differentiate the design involved in building out a vision of radically different ways of living, from the design involved in envisioning the nearer-term product-interaction that would make that long-term vision not just preferable but plausible. These second designs might still be speculative or not able to be quickly prototyped, but seeing them suggests that people might be helped to begin to break existing habits and expectations and so be on the way toward new ways of living.

I used the example of a mocked-up household device (a Design Fiction in the Near Future Laboratory sense, just not done cynically), being used on a Sunday evening in the garage or living room, to decide on the energy settings for the Distributed Energy Resources in the household, with a more inclusive interface than the techbro-oriented smart-energy-money charts-and-dials dominant now. The point would be to make credible an actually distributed energy system, with people having non-arbitraging social practices around times of energy abundance, for example.

I meant this as an answer to Dreu's question about the value of design in the sense that such 'ontological designs' show that values, as envisaged in some vision of preferable way of living, can be made practicable - not value capturable, but value actionable. The value of designs, of design fiction versions of design, lies in how they can show that we can design our way to what we value.

The transition pathways from here to the preferable that you can begin to plan with a series of these kinds of 'ontological design' interventions, and that therefore start to seem viable to undertake, need nevertheless to be held lightly - not only because of complexity-emergence, unanticipated events and consequences, etc, but because they will be resisted.

My second conversation of the evening involved tales of larger scale transition projects that were derailed by:

i) coordinated resistance to change

ii) corruption

iii) individuals in crucial positions making personal career decisions

Most significant societal problems go undealt-with less because of their 'wickedness' and more because people benefit from the status quo. Those beneficiaries will defend the current setup from transition efforts (i). It should be uncomplicated to identify who those people or corporations will be for any aimed-at transition, though it is not as easy to anticipate how they will undertake that defending - how fiercely or deceptively they might fight back.

This need not be at the evil level of Smoking/Fossil Fuel Merchants of Doubt. It could just be split-incentives. In the context of my distributed energy example, it is apparent that those at the centre of the current Energy System (often recently privatized, but though in the position of an oligopoly if not monopoly), no matter how 'customer-centred' they try to make their business, will not be keen to have their shareholders feel displaced by the coordinating actions of neighbourhoods. Their resistance takes the forms of legitimate concerns about electricity grid security and the cost of investment in re-infrastructuring. Recognising this however should allow those concerns to be negotiated with a view to a more participatory energy system rather than a continued corporation-centred one.

To tackle incumbents then requires larger-scale, networked efforts at change. But those systems often enlist participants with only weak ties to the overall transition effort, people who are often incentivised to betray the network and its resources for their own shorter-term gain (ii). This can be difficult to anticipate precisely because what is involved is creative malign intent.

Big or small, transitions are allied initiatives trying to effect systems change, and each of those initiatives involve this or that person, a liaison officer. Those representatives of a node in a transition pathway are individuals who might choose to, or have to, do something that withdraws that initiative from the transition as envisaged (iii). Their switching-out is not a corruption, just a personal circumstance that is contrary to what they are being relied upon to do. I have complained somewhere before for example about how many significant projects I have been involved in that have come to nothing because the project sponsor at corporation or institution X changes job to go to organisation Y or Z. (At those points, you glimpse how the career hustle of LinkedIn is not just nauseating to behold but a direct obstacle to much of the significant societal changes we need to be undertaking). This also is difficult to anticipate more because it means having to treat every trusted partner in a transition pathway plan as potentially unreliable.

Again, it can be a matter not just of individuals being conventional-career-ambitious, but perhaps more tolerably finding that a transition project is going to involve them also having to transition out of what they find satisfying about their current job - being an energy infrastructure engineer who is good at complex problem-solving having to become someone spending more time listening to householders wanting more autonomy about how they use energy.

I recount all this because I started to glimpse the need for visualisations of backcast transition maps (or collective impact investing theories of change) that were not just optimistic, best-case scenarios, but 'realpolitik' about resistances and obstacles. I do not mean that Transition Designs need to manifest as Sung Zu War Rooms. But it is necessary to acknowledge that having values means not only designing for the materialisation in everyday life, but for defending them from those who do not share those values.

I am keen to know of any these kinds of 'if-then' counter-resistance plans/maps?

The header image is taken from the Climate Risk Ready NSW Guide published in 2021. I was intrigued by the way it plotted current initiatives that at particular moments might need alternative initiatives to be started just in case the current initiative failed. The point is to identify things that might need to have already been started before what you are currently doing proves to be insufficient, at which point it might be too late to try anything allied but different.