Fresh off the back of gathering in Oslo for Katapult Future Fest, Kaj Löfgren (Strategy Lead, Regen Melbourne) is brimming with energy and ideas to tackle systems change. He tells us that the systems change conversation must involve approaches that are both expansive and localised: methodologies that get to the core of systemic problems by honouring place-based and community-led solutions. Kaj talks to us about leadership as facilitation, the importance of coming together in person and the emergence of systems investing.
What was it like being at Katapult festival?
Firstly, it was just wonderful to be in the world again and experience the remarkable feeling of the reawakening of things. There was this jarring sense that the world is still in chaos on so many levels with war in Europe and Covid and lockdowns and illness affecting so many people. And then also the joy of having the sun shining on your face at 10 o’clock at night while looking over Oslo harbour. Holding all of that at once is somewhat overwhelming.
Bittersweet.
Yeah. So we were lucky enough to be at the Katapult Future Fest, which has been around for around five years and is a gathering of creatives and entrepreneurs and investors and policymakers from all over the world who came to Oslo to talk about what is possible in reimagining the future. The highlight for me was being able to have face-to-face conversations about these big themes at a time when it feels like there’s a lot that’s possible now that wasn’t possible even a couple of years ago.
How important are those face-to-face conversations?
It’s interesting because I think functionally we can make a lot of things happen in the world without being face-to-face — the Covid experience has taught us that. But clearly we are all interconnected social beings and we gain energy and a sense of direction from the relational space between us.
The other thing is that for people who are lucky enough and privileged enough to be working on the world’s big or small problems, we gain our energy from closing the gap between the ideas in our heads and how they impact on the world around us. Because if that gap is too big we end up getting rundown and de-energised. So, I think building relationships with others is a critical element of the work. That’s how we stay sane and physically healthy enough to keep doing the work we want to do.
What are the things that feel more possible now than they did a couple of years ago?
Firstly, we’ve seen our system at its best and at its worst over the last couple of years. We’ve seen social and environmental challenges amplified by the moment of Covid and the series of natural disasters in Australia, so we can see how fragile our systems are, and I think that is revealing to people. It makes people feel an even greater sense of urgency, perhaps, and a realisation that we might need to be even more radical than we once thought we might need to be.
The other part is the realisation that we can respond to great and significant disruptions. On the one hand, you’ve got governments all around the world responding to Covid in a variety of ways. But we can also see the response on a very small scale — when we had severe flooding on the eastern seaboard, and before that, Black Summer, we saw how unbelievably willing people are to give up everything they have to support other people in the community. And that’s also a boost, to think, “Wow, if we channel that sort of energy into creating the world that we want to see…” — not just in response to disasters — then there’s huge potential for dramatic transformational change.
To seize that moment. I agree.
The other thing I’m always curious about is how short-term our future perspectives are, and how limited our memories are. We’ve been through dramatic transformations socially, economically and politically in decades past that we didn’t identify as transformations at the time, but of course with the beauty of history you start to create narratives around those transitions. And I feel like we’re very much in the midst of one at the moment. There’s a lot of energy to be gained by that realisation.
That doesn’t mean that it’s inevitably going to land in a positive place – there’s a lot of work to do to make sure that transition happens in the best way possible.
I was going to ask what the problem is that needs to be solved, but I feel like I could also ask what the opportunity is that’s being presented.
The list of problems is as long as your arm. But I suspect it’s probably more productive to think about it as one system rather than multiple problems. I think that’s the opportunity here: to be more holistic when thinking about all the problems that we face.
What I mean by that is the existing political, economic and social system that has bred a whole bunch of factors like loneliness and isolation and disconnection and ecological crisis and homelessness and all of these symptoms that have been born out of this system we currently live in. What is it that collectively holds all that in place, and how do we start challenging those assumptions at the core so that the system itself breeds different outcomes, rather than just trying to solve single issues over and over again?
And I should say here that the people who work on the single issues are unbelievably critical to this whole conversation. We need people to be treating the symptoms, otherwise people hurt and suffer, and that’s not okay. So we need to honour that work, and also have a conversation on how to challenge the system that leads to those outcomes.
Where do place-based approaches come in?
It’s initially about people being empowered to respond from where they are with what they know. So, community response or community-led recovery in the face of disruption or disaster is now more and more valued, rather than outsiders coming in to tell people what they should and shouldn’t do in their community. We can see that in communities around Australia that have suffered under fires or floods.
The second part of it is that we know that we solve systems problems as a collective — through collaboration and working together. We need more spaces, I think, that provide the opportunity to sit together, be together, and solve problems together across the usual alliances. So, you need businesses sitting with non-profits sitting with policymakers sitting with individual citizens of a place talking about how the challenges affect them and how they can be part of a series of solutions.
Tell me about the role of good leadership in systems change.
It’s such a huge question and even the word itself for some people is really challenging to hear talked about, I think, because we perceive leadership as a particular type — you know, coming out of the last few decades of a system that prioritises a hero leader.
I think what we’re talking about in the context of place-based responses and community-led recovery is a leader as a facilitator, or a leader as a convenor of spaces so people can come together and solve problems from their vantage point. And also a leader as a connector that sees the relationships between individuals and organisations within a system and provides opportunities for unique alliances to form among really diverse groups of individuals or organisations. I think that’s probably the most valuable role that leaders can have at a time like this. We need to have those people who can see the connections, bring people together and chart a course for something more hopeful.
And what about the role of systems investing?
Taking a systems lens is critical across all levers of change, including capital. The traditional way that money moves in society is to invest or contribute towards a single project. Whereas the idea of systems investing is a new investment logic that seeks to coherently channel different types of financial capital towards solving complex problems.
If you take a rehabilitation of a river, for example, you might say, “Well, what businesses exist along the river and how can I invest in and contribute towards the rehabilitation of the river by supporting businesses that want to regenerate the river?” At the same time, it might be donating to the local ecological community organisation who are seeking to rehabilitate the river, and supporting the convening of all the actors who have an interest in the waterway. As a portfolio of investments that are mutually reinforcing it contributes towards a systemic change rather than relying on single projects to do that work alone. That was a big theme coming out of Katapult: How do we be more systemic in all of our approaches?
So, it’s looking at how all the different parts fit together in the network that creates a situation.
Exactly. And then saying, “What are the paradigms that I need to challenge here? Where are the blockages in the system towards this outcome?” If you’ve got a group of ecological activists who are cleaning up the waterway but you’ve got a business upstream that keeps polluting it, then you’re never going to solve the problem. This is a really simplistic example, but hopefully it highlights the potential of an approach like this.
I should say that systems thinking is not new — systems thinking has been around for a very long time, but I suspect it’s making in-roads into various parts of our society off the back of the last three years more than it perhaps ever has.
Yes. It definitely feels that way. So, systems investing is this coming together of systems change and impact investing, which is quite powerful.
That’s right. And if you can add to that mix this idea of place-based responses, I think you end up with a really interesting mix of themes and trends.
Where are we seeing exciting systems change initiatives around the world?
I would point people to the Doughnut Economics Action Lab to find lots of examples of place-based responses that are using the Doughnut Economics methodology as a way of holding community conversations about the future of their places. Regen Melbourne, which I’m part of, is using this methodology to hold these complex conversations but make them accessible to people while creating community activation. Regen Melbourne is now 135 organisations working together on the regeneration of our city.
There’s also a project that WWF have created called Innovate to Regenerate, which is a whole bunch of initiatives to come up with regenerative projects in communities that have been struggling over the last couple of years. Another one is Fire to Flourish out of Monash University, which is looking at how to create community-led recovery models that can be used to create resilience in the long-term.
From your perspective, what’s the overall vision when we look at these ideas?
There are two parts to that question, because I think we need to be realistic. Part of me feels that we have to strap ourselves in and prepare for some really turbulent times. The utopian visions of the future are incredibly helpful to create directionality and momentum, and we’ve done that with Regen Melbourne. And yet, we have to be conscious that we’ve set in motion certain things — particularly ecologically, but also economically — that mean there will be real hardship over the coming years and perhaps even decades. So we have to acknowledge that first and foremost, I think.
And then we have to say, “Well, if that’s the case, how do we come together in unique ways to set more ambitious action than any one of us can achieve individually?” So, if you and I sat around and said, “We want to make the Yarra River swimmable again by 2030”, it would sound ridiculous. But if a group of 100 organisations came together and said, “We’re going to work together collectively to make our major waterway swimmable again by 2030”, suddenly it doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. It feels inspiring and exciting and energising and gives us that sense that anything is possible in the future.
It almost sounds like a Buddhist idea — that first we acknowledge there will be suffering, and then once we’ve acknowledged that we can get on with the work.
Yeah! I think that’s true. We have to paint a picture of the future state we want, and then we have to meet the world where it is. And we have to drag that with all of our energy and all of our might towards the future state that we want. I think that’s the work of all of us — whether it’s in our own family, our own street, our community, our cities, our countries, our world. Pick the altitude that works for you, and then identify where you want to go. Next, we meet the world where it is and start work towards our vision.
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