On the 13th of June, Keith Johnston took us into the challenging world of environmental managers in New Zealand. Keith prised open the black box that encapsulates the overwhelming complexity of ‘managing’ the environment as done by people whose cognitive abilities and organisational (social structural) context is of widely varying ability.
Keith’s own background was within a government environmental organization and he had, over many years, noted how the context in which environmental management was occurring had become increasingly complex as bracketed by legislative aspirations of a high order (in New Zealand). This complexity included the shift from environmental management to sustainable development, increased accountability, rise in the extent of group participation, more litigation, larger scales of impact, intensifying exploitation and so on. Inspired by the work ‘In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life’ by Robert Kegan, which suggests that the demands of modern society outstrip (as a generalisation) peoples’ ability to actually deal with it, and using the work of another cognitive/educational thinker, Michael Basseches (‘Dialectical Thinking and Adult Development’), alongside his own experience, Keith asked the question: if we need more complex approaches to the complex problems we face do we have in our (environmental) organizations and the people within them the actual capacity to meet that need?
If I was to sum up Keith’s presentation, the answer is no. Keith took us through his empirical research with 31 managers of environmental organizations and of the organizations themselves, and showed the way in which environmental managers could be grouped into a small number of cognitive levels and how developmental processes may operate to encourage people to increase their thinking and practical capacities. These levels, to compress a broader discussion, ranged at the low(er) end from straightforward thinkers who accepted the order of things without much questioning of such, internalised organisational ideology, did not break through or re-organise boundaries and had minimal self-reflection, to an upper end of complex thinkers who were comfortable with chaos and complexity, sought to question assumptions, saw connections, were open to learning, found self-reflection easy and where able to re-order boundaries as necessary. The ability of organisational contexts to foster complex thinkers was minimal (effectively only 1 amongst all the managers), although organisational
capacity existed to move people from lower level thinking upwards to some degree, it did not exist to move people more fully towards truly complex thinking.
Keith’s research was of a high order and reflected the inherent complexity of the topic. It will be with great interest to see what he does with it in the future and hopefully too, we will see Keith back in the forum again sometime down the track for a further installment on this topic.
Do we need people with more abilities in environmental management? Or do we need a whole system of different values? Managing environments for multi-use is always going to be a difficult task if people share different values. However, the oil crisis and climate change are making ordinary people [as opposed to experts] reconsider their values and priorities. For example, in Melbourne there are now 12 municiple councils opposing the logging in water catchments. These catchments, maininly in the Yarra Valley, are the water supply for the City of Melbourne. Similarly, country people are opposing a pipeline to carry their water reserves to the City of Melbourne to make up supply. Stop the logging and the Govenment may not need the pipline. But does common sense prevail. ‘No’. Further, much of the beautiful coastline of Gippsland is designated for mining gas and oil. The dredging of Port Phillip will see bigger ships and Victoria will up its economy towards more industrialisation. Money before people! How do we stop this madness? It is all very well to have an elite who work in the areas of sustainability [ I am one of them] but they carry so little weight. What we need is a shift in consciounsess amongst the mass population.