Going from A to B – overstating your goal

Let’s talk a little bit about the importance of overstating your goal or why it’s important to State ambitious goals in order to achieve what you want. We’re going to look a little bit at some basic nature of systemic Transitions and persistence change. So let’s just simply start with whatever your system is that you’re looking at could be a city or an organization or whatever it is, and it currently is in state A. If you don’t do anything over time the system will simply continue to what we would call position a ‘ so this is just a transition in time.

And this is where it would end up if you did not now our ambition is of course to create a sustainable system and let’s call that position be that’s where we would like to system to go. So in order to do that we have to Apply some kind of change to the system for it to arrive at position B that all sounds great. However, there are such things such as System Dynamics for example, historic momentum and other system of systems dynamics that basically cause once you do this to resist that change, so if you simply aim for B, then what’s going to happen is it’s going to end up.

Probably somewhere in between and B ‘ it’s not going to end up at a tapestry either. It’s going to end up in some situation between the idealized state and the state of doing nothing at all. So just as for example when you work with archery and you’ll get wind from one side you compensate in order to counteract that wind and still hit your target. Same thing happens when you are aiming for systems change you go to

let’s call it be hash and that’s what you’re aiming for and because that’s what you’re doing. You will always have to reduce and compromise and you have to deal with the systems Dynamics and so on to try to lower it to achieve State B. And this is exactly why we promote that you choose ambitious goals. It’s because you will always have to compromise in the process. You will always have to make some kind of changes that will force you to reduce it. So even if your goal isn’t to be 100% self-sufficient in energy or water 100% socially just and so on but you hope to make a big change.

We still promote that you choose that higher ambition as an actual goal because of this situation. And that’s why it’s important to overstate or choose highly ambitious goals every single time because very rarely your home to meet them. So you’ll have to adjust them down and still end up in a great place.