Elena Bondareva is well known to many in the sustainability field. She is author of a new book on how to effect regenerative transformational change, Change-maker’s Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Create Meaningful Impact Through Business. In this new column, she wants to support others “tackling the world’s stubborn problems” and shares insights from her research for the book and her extensive experience in this emerging professional field.
Welcome to the first installment of this new column! I am thrilled to once again link arms with The Fifth Estate to advance the sustainability revolution within and beyond the built environment.
While some of you have known me for 20 years (I look forward to building on that!), others will be meeting me for the first time. So, this first column is an introduction, and I hope that it is mutual. I will introduce myself, the mission and likely topics of this column, and I invite you to do the same. Through comments, share your perspective and your hopes for this dialogue. Together, we will create something extraordinary that can benefit changemakers around the world.
What is this column about?
This column will address how we envision, plan, and execute regenerative transformation: major, holistic, wholesale, long term regenerative change across systems that govern our society that, if infinitely scaled, would enable all people to thrive in harmony with the planet.
Intentionally stepping further back than the inception of The Fifth Estate, I would illustrate this kind of transformation by kerb ramps: the ramps built into a sidewalk at intersections.
You may not know that the kerb ramps we now take for granted came about as a solution to a single problem, which was inhibited physical access across campus; for one group of people, who were students in wheelchairs; in a single location, the University of California Berkely. In time, as Angela Glover Blackwell puts it, kerb ramps “changed the way the country thinks about access and opportunity for a population that has faced barriers at every turn.”
Kerb ramps have since been universally adopted around the world because – with no cost premium for new installations – they maximise outdoor mobility for many people. Importantly, the impact of this solution has rippled not just through the built environment but also through social structures, processes, and culture. It has elevated and cemented – literally – the right of all people to navigate our cities safely and easily in wheelchairs or merely unsteadily, with prams or suitcases, on bikes or crutches. The ultimate impact of kerb ramps has surpassed their intended impact and improved lives far beyond those of its targeted stakeholders to the point that the term “curb-cut effect” has come to describe positive wholesale transformation.
However, “curb-cut effect” describes an accident. Those students did not envision, plan, or execute the transformation that occurred. “What if we could?” defines my focus of now 20 years across research and practice.
By reading this article, you represent the extraordinary community that leaves transformation in its wake. Today, low flow water fixtures, low VOC paints, water reuse, and improved indoor air quality are among countless benefits that have similarly extended far beyond the award-winning buildings of yesterday. Moreover, 24/7 carbon-free energy (CFE), grid interactive buildings (see my chapter in Extreme Green Buildings, page 102), biomimicry, rewilding, or the role of the built environment in health equity and reparations are no longer fringe ideas.
However, like kerb ramps, most of us have experienced transformation as the result of a gamble that could have gone either way, great personal cost notwithstanding.
Changing that is why I do what I do.
Why focus on transformation?
Because we almost always get it wrong.
Transformation appears woven through the history of the human species. There is broad consensus that most current systems are due for reimagining. And there seems no shortage of motivation of ideas. Still, effective transformation remains elusive. For the key reasons, refer to an extract from my book, Change-makers’ Handbook (2023), published by TFE in November last year.
Who is this column for?
When it comes to transformation, we play one of three vital roles. Changemakers feel responsible for problems they did not cause, see possibilities others miss, and dare to change the system. To do that successfully, they depend on tinkerers and stabilisers. Tinkerers thrive on continual improvement and are essential for transformation because most of the benefit realisation depends on meticulous recalibration of the system. Stabilisers are the risk barometer. “No” may be their first response, but the faster the car, the better the brakes have to be.
This column will tend to address changemakers. However, whatever your role(s) in transformation, this column will help you understand what is happening, why, and how to play your part to a standing ovation.
Why focus on changemakers?
Because our work sure is cut out for us but not so much the resources.
If you were a geneticist, your training would include everything we have learned about the human genome to date. As a chemist, you would start with Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, an exhaustive toolkit that both identifies all the building blocks of chemistry and explains how they interact.
As a built environment professional, you would have the building code, countless standards, rating systems, and industry associations to inform and support your innovation. How many practising architects or engineers would we have if they had to chance fire safety? If each one had to start from scratch?
Well, that is exactly what changemakers are up against.
A changemaker must identify, digest, and apply a breadth of fragmented knowledge: economics, social psychology, organisational design, marketing, entrepreneurship, game and decision science, perhaps with a touch of geopolitics.
To make meaningful, sustained change, you must understand the intersectional issues at play; know how to design a pathway to wholesale change that is as actionable as it is dynamic; be an expert entre- or intrapreneur; be charismatic enough to activate teams if not thousands of people to advance your vision and yet mellow enough to secure low-interest financing; spend money to make money but so well that they offer you more; know how to scale and how to let go; and be equally comfortable leading as you are falling into the background.
It is an awful lot. Especially since there is no structured way – no syllabus — for changemakers to build on each other’s progress.
Centuries into this, we still psych ourselves up for BASE jumping with a handmade parachute. Driven to make the world a better place, we jump off the cliff, under- (if not completely un-) prepared.
Still, if you fell short in any aspect of this – and how could you not? – it may feel like your entire vision will collapse. Given your wiring, you would probably feel guilty irrespective of how unrealistic your vision was from the beginning.
Unlike architects, engineers, doctors, chemists, plumbers, or even florists, we can’t even know with confidence if we’re any good at change-making.
We practice a trade that – despite being urgently and vitally needed – is not even recognised as such.
This ends now!
Whilst none of these challenges stop us – which still blows my mind! – it doesn’t leave us much by way of guidance, tools, or a community of practice. Which pretty much defines the reasons and the scope of the work at hand.
We can and must do better than to relegate change to chance.
What will this column cover?
I plan to bring into contrast what doesn’t work and why; offer a shared language for transformation; help you identify and vet ideas before dedicating your all to their implementation; introduce the building blocks of transformation and ways of manipulating them into winning combinations; guide you to launch, scale, and exit from transformational ventures; and – very important – support you in resourcing yourself for the vital work of changemaking.
One of the symptoms that you’re a change-maker is that you resent phrases like, “It’s just a job.” So, I will not bother with lines between life and work but rather help us explore how we contribute to the best of our potential. In doing all of this, we will draw on real life examples and your input.
In other words
Think of something that bugs you; something you are itching to change. Can you define the problem? Can you articulate the solution? Can you see the future where the solution is implemented? What becomes possible that is impossible today? What problems – besides the problem(s) you set out to solve – simply go away when you succeed?
Now. Is anybody (including you) already trying to solve this problem? If they are succeeding, do you understand why and what must come next? If they are not, can you diagnose the reason for their failure? Would you know how to intervene, to course-correct?
Would you know how to assess whether you should give this cause all you’ve got? Would you know how you must resource yourself to see it through, to avoid having to jump out of a moving vehicle, so to speak?
Let’s say, the future you envision is here. Could you describe how its leaders exit without sabotaging their legacy? How the very venture grows its impact as it changes hands over time?
If you said no to any of these questions, you’re in the right place. And I could not be more excited about this dialogue.
