The Nature of Human Change in the Real World

In this far-ranging and vivid dialogue, Hunter Lovins describes the reception to her most recent book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (coauthored with Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken). Although a major critical success, the book shared the fate of so many important reform initiatives: profound ideas, poor conversion into action.

Why? Why do so many important ideas fail to get traction in the real world? This leads Hunter and Ken into a deep discussion on human change and social transformation. Why and how do human beings change their course of action, especially when it comes to pressing, indeed urgent, environmental issues?

Several important conclusions emerge. A more integral approach to human change calls for a comprehensive assessment not only of the exterior factors that recommend the change (such as efficiency, profitability, and environmental sustainability), and not only the scale of exterior intervention (individual, organizational, global), but of the interior factors driving human beings to adopt or even consider those changes, factors such as stages of development, lines of development, and types of values. Failure to take all of those dimensions of human change into account almost guarantees that exterior solutions, no matter how cogent, will fail.

This dialogue will speak directly and compellingly to anybody interested in human change and social transformation.

This talk was originally recorded in 2003.