Panarchy and tipping points...

Learning Centre - Sustaining Social Innovation

Growth and change don't happen in a step by step or linear way. There are tipping points - moments when structures collapse or ideas take off. These aren't continuities or predictable phenomena.

Change occurs because of trophic cascades, those sudden shifts that occur because conditions are ripe for change at multiple scales – this is the way to understand abrupt shifts in the environment.

These moments of alignment or tipping points are critical. They call upon different skills and competencies from social innovators. We often speak about "thinking like a movement". Thinking this way helps us to see that it takes the connection between initiatives to pull enough information into the system to see cross-scale connections happening. Each individual initiative is dependent upon connection with other innovations and initiatives.