Click here to save the world

How many people do you know, yourself included, who want to do something about the dreadful state of the world but just don’t know where to begin? When Irene, for example, a Canadian finance manager, read an early draft of my book Rebalancing Society, which described imbalance across the public, private, and plural (community) sectors, this was her response. And after the book was published, I kept hearing the same comment so often that I labelled it “The Irene question.”

How to be part of the solution instead of the problem: to fix societies that have tilted so far out of balance, especially in favor of private sector interests, to reverse the degradation of our climate, the disparities of our wealth, the demise of our democracies, and the depreciation of ourselves?

Every time I came up with an answer, back came: “Yea, but what can I do?” The more answers I suggested, the more people wanted more. So I decided to pull together all the answers I could find, plus imagine, and order them into one big table that can be available to every Irene and Irving. Not only what I can do myself, but also what we can do, in our communities and associations, businesses and governments, and all of us together, worldwide.

Here is the table. It lists what we can do in three respects: to reframe our beliefs, reverse what’s wrong, and renew what’s right. Click on the dots and you will find about forty suggestions in all, many with explanatory links.

Play with the dots: click on one or two, choose a possibility or two, then take an action or two. Better still, come up a better one or two. Let’s leave no dot unclicked.

Until we rebalance our societies, we will make no headway with climate change.

Please see RebalancingSociety.org for further details.

© Henry Mintzberg 2022. No rights reserved: This has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.