We organised a 3-day Creative Thinking Forum on Transitioning to a Viable Society in March 2010. Leaders of national organisations and other influential people attended, and we have the nucleus of a new national movement championing whole system change to evolve a viable society.

We are developing a team of Transition Leaders who can facilitate workshops on whole system change. When this group is ready we will start to work through large organisations to engage their members as Transition Leaders. In this way we hope to mobilise a growing self-education movement that will ultimately effect a presumed tipping point of about 2 1/2 million Australians.

We have put up material on catalysing mindset change to evolve a viable society on wikispaces.

If you wish, you can sign up for our occasional netletter Catalysing Good News. And you can become a supporter.

Read more below.

Transition Leaders

We think of a Transition Leader as someone who

• Develops their own thoughtful understanding of how the way our society currently operates makes things like climate change worse,
• Sees what is necessary for healthy change,
• And is willing to take action through their own initiative to catalyse the needed changes within their sphere of influence.

In addition to whatever else they may do, Transition Leaders devote part of their efforts to consciously working to change the mode of operation of our entire society so that we become ecologically sustainable and socially healthy. We work as creative activists to catalyse a ‘whole system change’ to viability.

Although the prospect of change at this level may seem daunting - and indeed it may be impossible - it is what is needed. The good news is that such a change is both psychologically and technologically feasible. Other material on this website (the Basic Orientation) will give you a means to make the complexities of this change intellectually manageable. It is a matter of

• Identifying the core values that drive either a healthy or self-destruct society,
• Understanding the technical changes needed to become ecologically sustainable as an industrial society (not hard in principle), and
• Recognizing the key role people's personal psychology plays in shifting out of our current untenable pattern.

Our dream of actually making an ecologically sustainable and healthy society is supported by the fact that in each key area we know how to do the needed changes. Many great thinkers and practitioners have already done the groundwork.

We don't know if we can tap in sufficiently to people's creative goodwill to actually make the changes. The point of the Alliance is for those of us who care, and who have not given up on life, to try.

Paradoxically, our prospect of succeeding is increased by the recognition that we are in a global emergency. I sometimes wryly say that death is on our side. Despite the blindness of many elected leaders, many of us get it: collectively we are doing ourselves in. This can lead to paralysed despair, a live-for-today mentality, or to attempts to build lifeboat communities. It can also lead to the recognition that we need to change our whole society if we are to become viable, and the commitment to contribute to this.

The core direction of society as a whole must change, or our local efforts will continue to be overwhelmed by the dysfunction of the larger system.

So we invite you to identify yourself as a Transition Leader. Rise to a new level of personal leadership and direct some of your effort to evoking a national commitment to healthy change. Materials on this website will help you do the necessary thinking to develop your own orientation as to what is needed, and there are many other excellent books as well. From this you can develop your own approach to contributing to catalysing the change.

Better yet, make personal contact with us to explore going through a series of four mentoring conversations that enable you to develop a robust mental framework for acting as a Transition Leader.

At the moment there are just a few of us working at this level. We expect that soon there will be thousands of people - and then hundreds of thousands - working for systemic change for Australia and other countries to become viable societies.

If we succeed, future generations will thank us for it. Profoundly.

Go to Transition Leader in the Navigation Bar on the left to download a 12-page article on Becoming a Transition Leader.

Go to Evolving to download Evolving a World That Works, a book that connects the broad spectrum of what we must do to become a viable society.

Evolving includes a key chapter on the core values of a healthy society - Partnership or Dominator? It also develops the Basic Orientation, an integrative diagram that shows the connection between industrial production, associated environmental damage, advertising, and people's psychological vulnerability. This diagram enables us to simultaneously grasp why our whole system needs to change, and what the leverage points are.

Making the goal of creating a viable society top-of-mind

The goal of creating a healthy society needs to become top-of-mind. It needs to be widely articulated in as many forums as possible.

You can contribute to this by simply mentioning the goal at opportune times. If you are a facilitator or business leader you can mention at the beginning and ending of meetings. You might open or close presentations with a statement along the lines of

We are in an ecological emergency. Our whole system must change if we are to leave a decent world for a grand children's children. Therefore I am committed to contributing to a transition to a viable society - a society that is ecologically sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially healthy.

I invite you to join me in this commitment.

If you are a writer in the areas of business, health or permaculture you can connect your topics to the goal of creating a viable society. Or you can write in-depth articles or create You Tube videos on different aspects of what it takes to create a viable society.

But the most profound thing you can do, and for many people the hardest, is simply to talk to friends and colleagues about the need to creating a viable society in today's world. This is one of the challenges Transition Leaders take on.

We hope that, starting as soon as you can, you will begin to operate as a Transition Leader. You do not need to be part of any organisation to do this. You do not need anyone's permission. And you certainly do not have to do it ‘perfectly’ at the beginning. Just get started.

If enough of us to this, we may just be able to turn things around, although we will certainly experience the consequences of the adverse environmental trends that are already well-established. As Buckminster Fuller said forty years ago, it’s Utopia or Oblivion. Let's make this a wonderful world!