Transition Plan for a Thrivable Civilization
Many people feel trapped in a world that has little to do with life. Our mainstream societies are driven by algorithms, models, and technologies designed for extractive economic growth, not evolutionary growth and planetary wellbeing. The ways we have modernized and developed our societies, although bringing short-term benefits, have also created immense harm and division. This raises the question of whether these mechanistic models can truly deliver the ‘progress’ they were once designed for.
Other choices are available that can promote genuine progress and collective wellbeing. To access these choices, we’ll need to learn how to think, sense, grow, evolve, and develop as living systems. Life is thrivable and regenerative by design.
The word ‘thrivable’ combines the words ‘thrive’ and ‘able’, to emphasize how thrivability is a developmental learning process through which we develop the capacities for actualizing our potentials in ways that are generative, life-affirming, possibility-increasing, and future-creating.
Essentially, thrivability is sustainability plus a sense of aliveness, joy, empathy, and flourishing — expressing the consciousness of life. The cosmological conditions of life enable thrivability as the underlying evolutionary driver, instead of mere sustainability or survivability by win-lose, zero-sum game competition.
Developing a Transition Plan for Thrivable Civilizations may seem like an enormous and ambitious endeavor — and it is. It’s a mission I’ve dedicated my life to, including my Ph.D. research as an external researcher from 2014 to 2019 at the Maastricht Sustainability Institute of Maastricht University, the Netherlands. This work culminated in my Ph.D. dissertation Into the Heart of Systems Change.
Before summarizing this research, I’d like to provide some context. In the years leading up to it, I worked with companies and schools to develop sustainability competencies, evolutionary leadership, and ecological literacy. During this time, I became increasingly aware of subtle systemic barriers that were obstructing the systemic transformations needed to address these challenges. These barriers also hindered the implementation of emerging competencies and heightened awareness.
I wanted to better understand the origins of these systemic barriers and how they were connected to the root causes of our worsening sustainability crises. I also wondered if these barriers were present within mainstream governance institutions, hindering solutions and leadership needed to address the greatest challenges of our time.
Despite growing awareness of the sustainability crisis, the expected behavioral shifts to resolve it were not occurring. Simply warning people about the potential collapse of their (our) world or the risk of humanity’s extinction wasn’t enough to prevent it.
I also observed that the dualistic approaches many elected leaders and corporations took to address the sustainability crisis often reinforced these systemic barriers. This realization motivated me to embark on my Ph.D. research, where I investigated these issues further, using my work with companies and schools as case-studies for this research.
Into the Heart of Systems Change offers a diagnostic framework for making the systemic barriers visible that result from the growth archetypes of mechanistic systems, worldviews, and models. This article provides a brief overview of this research, as well as its proposed Transition Plan for a Thrivable Civilization.
The Problem with Mechanistic Systems
Every system has an archetypal structure that gives rise to its behavioral patterns and events, and which informs how a system grows, develops, and possibly evolves. Mechanistic growth archetypes are characterized by singular goals, dualistic drivers, and imposed objectives that are decoupled from the evolutionary process of life. In other words, mechanistic systems behave in opposite and often contrary ways to living systems. The video below provides a summary of some of the key characteristics of living systems.
Mechanistic thinking became dominant in Western societies through the spread of Newtonian-based sciences that portrayed a deterministic universe of random parts and particles, held together through immutable mechanical laws. Newtonian sciences were particularly suitable to drive the agendas of classical economics and its equivalent rational-choice-based models. The belief in human superiority over nature spread, driving technological developments that sought to manipulate and control, rather than align with, the natural world.
Newtonian sciences and classical economics became the engines and worldviews for industrializing the human world, in particular the Western world. This mechanistic worldview was simultaneously adopted by social scientists, economists, politicians, judiciary, and policymakers, and gave rise to mechanistic governance models that divided much of society through win-lose competition dynamics and the pursuit of power.
However, since the mid-1920s a new paradigm in science and research has started to emerge, propelled by the rise of quantum physics, followed by evolutionary systems sciences, evolutionary biology, consciousness research, and complexity sciences, among others. This new paradigm scientific worldview reveals a universe that is informationally unified at deeper implicate orders of reality, which inform the evolutionary process of life.
Although this new paradigm scientific worldview is not yet accepted by mainstream science, economics, and governance, it does offer essential keys for how to resolve the sustainability crisis. In particular, for how to design for regeneration and thrivability. Into the Heart of Systems Change explores some of these groundbreaking new scientific perspectives of an informationally unified and holarchic universe, and how to apply this to our societal development.
Furthermore, the new paradigm scientific worldview confirms what indigenous people have lived by for thousands of years; namely, that the universe behaves as an interdependent web of life that evolves by learning and working together.
Our mainstream societal systems remain rooted in the mechanistic growth and profit-driven paradigms of the industrial age. These outdated models perpetuate unsustainable and divisive growth systems, driving our world closer to collapse. While mechanistic systems have provided short-term benefits, such as rapid modernization and technological advancement, they lie at the heart of the worsening climate and biodiversity crises.
Moreover, these mechanistic growth archetypes create systemic barriers to thrivability, hindering our ability to evolve as a species. They trap us in behavioral loops that are characteristic of juvenile species.
The evolutionary process of life is a complex learning journey, guided by systemic boundaries that regulate the healthy growth and development of living systems. For instance, your body’s systemic boundaries maintain your temperature by responding to changes in both internal and external environments.
Mechanistic systems, however, fail to replicate these intricate feedback loops. They lack systemic boundaries to curb harmful growth patterns and are missing vital learning capacities. As a result, they remain predominantly growth-oriented rather than developmental, integrative, or adaptive.
In other words, mechanistic systems create systemic thrivability barriers by imposing goals and activities that undermine our self-regulating, adaptive, and transformative capacities as living systems.
One of the key systemic barriers of mechanistic systems is blocked collaboration and coherence, which further undermines the systemic transformations necessary for resolving the root causes of our worsening sustainability crisis.
Mechanistic systems, by design, are not equipped to respond to the thresholds of vital planetary carrying capacities or social ceilings. Classical economic market mechanisms, which operationalize these mechanistic growth engines, are fundamentally incapable of addressing the climate crisis. They lack the essential balancing feedback loops needed to regulate growth in ways that support and sustain life.
To halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of our natural world, we need economic and governance systems that function like living systems — aligned with and responsive to the planetary conditions necessary for a thriving world and future.
Focusing solely on sustainability targets, however, overlooks the deeper drivers of the sustainability crisis. This narrow approach blinds us to the transformative changes required to transition to a truly thrivable civilization.
To address our systemic blindspots, it is essential that we make the systemic barriers visible and couple this to policy making and institutional design for a thrivable world and future.
Also, growing up in a mechanistic universe does not inspire care for life, or stewardship for collective wellbeing. Instead, it makes it easier to rationalize exploitation and domination. We cannot resolve our sustainability crisis from the same worldviews and systems that are at the root of the problem.
Our sustainability crisis is essentially a systemic barrier issue that reveals a deeper crisis in human consciousness.
Systemic barriers also hinder our maturation process as a species, by ignoring the feedback that is necessary for evolutionary learning and locking us into harmful competitive behaviors that are characteristic of juvenile species.
Diagnosing Systemic Thrivability Barriers
Systemic thrivability barriers are widespread and can be found in almost all of our societies — politically, economically, socially, educationally, and culturally. The three case-studies that feature in my Ph.D. research for mapping out these barriers were based on three different types of training programs that I developed for educational and corporate organizations.
The method for making these barriers visible was through quantitative and qualitative evaluations with the participants of the case-studies, which included the making of system maps with causal loop diagrams.
Participants reported how making these barriers visible through the system maps empowered them to communicate what they had sensed for a long time, but often couldn’t describe in words. Below is an example of one of these system maps for the case-study of the financial institution.
A common response from participants of all the three case-studies was their sense of feeling trapped by goals and objectives imposed by hierarchical power structures, and feeling undermined in their sense of self-worth, value, and agency. I decided to name these barriers systemic thrivability barriers, to emphasize that these are not just personal or individual barriers.
Other indicators for diagnosing the presence of systemic thrivability barriers are: dualistic polarization, hierarchic power structures, distrust between people, rigid learning and action tasks, lack of qualitative indicators for growth, dominance of progress indicators via achievements of preset goals, deliverables, standards, divisions, fragmentation, and lack of internal collaboration. These systemic barriers also affected the ways people approached issues, made decisions, and were able to learn, grow, and develop in their organisation.
Wherever systemic thrivability barriers were present, it often fed narratives of blame, victimhood, and division. As such hindering collaborative solutions and the development of trust, mutuality, and reciprocity.
The integral framework that forms part of my dissertation provides principles and guidelines for designing a deliberate and strategic change process, based on evolutionary learning and development.
7 Key Systemic Thrivability Barriers
Through the case-study evaluations various kinds of systemic thrivability barriers were identified, which I grouped into 7 types as summarised below:
- Collaboration and coherence are blocked — Competitive win-lose dynamics, either-or thinking, and dualistic choices force a sense of separateness from life and inhibit healthy collaboration. This causes divisions, distrust, conflicts, and disunity between people and their communities, and polarises our diversity.
- Interdependencies are harmed by mechanistic goals — Economic goals for maximizing extractive growth and development are imposed on, and harming, our interdependencies with life, and the planet’s capacity to support populations.
- Reciprocity with living systems is blocked — By treating life and our planet as mere commodities, mechanistic systems are degenerative and block our reciprocity with living systems and nature.
- Distorted informational loops — By not accounting for the real costs and impacts that our mechanistic growth models create, and by not including essential planetary feedback loops in the ways we govern our development, we create illusionary models of progress and distorted worldviews.
- Thrivability learning and development are blocked — By creating cultures of competition, division, and narrow educational goals, our learning and development capacities for regeneration and thrivability become blocked and are underdeveloped.
- Empathy and love are blocked — By incentivizing domination and duality, and by blocking the development of thrivability consciousness, our capacities for empathy and love become blocked and diminished. Accordingly, people feel isolated, disconnected, disempowered, and alone.
- Responsiveness to pain is blocked — By ignoring essential feedback in the governance and cultures of our human development, and by numbing ourselves to the pain we inflict on our planet and each other, our responsiveness to pain becomes blocked and we fail to learn from the vital signals that pain provides us.
The research further revealed how operating and learning in mechanistic systems contributes to feelings of depression, isolation, and degradation. Our sustainability crisis is essentially a crisis of identity, values, and meaning. We are living systems — not machines.
A Transition Plan for a Thrivable Civilization
After 5 years of researching, mapping out, and addressing the identified systemic thrivability barriers, a transition map started to emerge for transitioning to a thrivable civilization.
This Transition Plan can be summarized in 7 steps:
- Diagnose and make visible the presence and impact of systemic thrivability barriers that result from mechanistic systems, models, and growth archetypes.
- Address and transform the systemic thrivability barriers through transformation strategies that address the dualistically polarising dynamics of mechanistic systems, and transform degenerative behavioral patterns that undermine the transition to a thrivable civilization.
- Develop future creative capacities through evolutionary learning processes that are embedded within evolutionary learning communities and evolutionary learning ecosystems.
- Apply evolutionary growth archetypes and thrivabilty patterns for our societal and human development. For example, the 5 Future Archetypes that feature in my Ph.D. research for actualizing our future potential, and which have been applied in the design of our EARTHwise Constitution for a Planetary Civilization.
- Develop regenerative, inclusive, and distributive economies that are designed as evolutionary living systems. Promote the development of a planetary-conscious economic and political paradigm where success and progress are based on our common capacities to thrive, in ways that support us to evolve with our planet.
- Develop governance systems and institutional design that enable the transition to a thrivable civilization, by empowering people with the means and opportunities for deciding together on the necessary actions for our world and future. For example, the EARTHwise Constitution for a Planetary Civilization as well as the AGI Constitution framework.
- Work with the transformative potentials of social tipping points dynamics for the required societal transformations and grassroots engagement for a thrivable civilization. For example, the EARTHwise game, Elowyn: Quest of Time, which can be played via our website and serves to create a win-win movement for gamifying a thrivable world and future.
New Narratives for Systems Change
Within our global sustainability crisis is an invitation to become future creative, innovative, and unconventional. An invitation to explore how together we can co-create a thriving world, while hospicing the world that is dying and collapsing. This requires new narratives that go further than mere sustainability or warnings about collapse.
We need narratives that engage people in a change process that activates their future potential of the emerging new era, and unites us in our care and love for our Earth and the future generations.
These new narratives also require a life-based understanding of growth. For example by illustrating how the generative growth patterns of living systems include stages of death, dissolution, and decay to enable renewal, transformation, and evolution.
Growth itself is not the problem; the issue lies in the archetypes through which our desires for growth are expressed. Anti-growth or degrowth narratives often risk triggering resistance, rather than illuminating pathways for growth and evolution that align harmoniously with life on Earth.
Exploring Future Archetypes of the Emerging New Era
During my Ph.D. research, I raised the following question about the archetypal dynamics of the change of eras and the shift to new paradigm in human consciousness:
What are the archetypes of the emerging new era that harness the potential of our evolutionary next step as a species?
During my research into the emerging archetypal patterns in younger generations’ responses to major transformations, I discovered five key archetypal stages that activate during such shifts. I named these archetypes: The Wholeness Coder, Future Creative, Evolutionary Catalyst, Pattern Weaver, and New Paradigm Storyteller.
Curious to find out which of these archetypes resonate most with you? Take this fun quiz and discover your archetypal strengths and potential!
After completing my Ph.D. in December 2019, I decided to explore these future archetypes more deeply. I published my findings in The Quest of Rose, book 1 of the Future Humans Trilogy, which I co-authored with Jean Houston, Ph.D.
- The Wholeness Coder — Senses the deeper structural and archetypal layers of reality and knows how to work with complexity, codes, and symbols. Enables whole-system change by creating new choice points and coding for transformation. Catalyzes change at the causal level by altering the rules of the game.
- The Future Creative — Envisions and opens the vast possibilities for our futures. Comfortable in the imaginal realm, this archetype acts as the imaginal cells for new growth and development. Catalyzes change at the imaginal level by exploring and unlocking future potentials.
- The Evolutionary Catalyst — Facilitates transformation, evolutionary learning, and healing. Embodies the capacities of our future potentials and works with the tipping points of transitions — death, dissolution, integration, conception, and birth. Catalyzes change at the evolutionary level by developing our future capacities.
- The Pattern Weaver — Weaves together the connective and collaborative patterns of our future potentials, preparing the ground for new growth. Fosters partnerships for realizing future possibilities. Catalyzes change at the integral level by nurturing conditions for emergence and building communities.
- The New Paradigm Storyteller — Inspires our future becoming and communicates our emerging realities in rich, sensory, and evocative ways. Fertilizes the world with future patterns and focuses on creating abundance for all. Catalyzes change by embodying and sharing the new stories of our future evolution
These 5 Future Archetypes also form part of a thrivability pattern I mapped out based on 22 essential qualities I identified through my research on the cosmological foundations of how our universe grows and evolves.
These 22 qualities are fractal in nature and help us become conscious of the growth dynamics and evolutionary capacities of healthy living systems. This Thrivability Pattern can also serve as a diagnostic tool, allowing us to assess whether a system is generative by design. It can also identify missing or suppressed qualities and steps that may contribute to degenerative growth patterns.
To summarise, the growth archetypes of living systems are inclusive, regenerative, and thrivable by design.
Personal Message
I completed my Ph.D. dissertation with the following personal message.
Tomorrow began about 13.8 billion years ago. Tomorrow is already given to us now, as was yesterday, too. It is time to become the future creative humans that we can be. Thrivability begins within.
Our climate crisis cannot be resolved without the wisdom of the heart. There is so much that is happening right now that our minds cannot comprehend, yet our hearts can embrace.
They say the longest journey is the distance between the head and the heart, mainstream academia has increased that distance even further. It is time we reduce this distance now.
It is my hope and intention that this dissertation, beyond all the other reasons for which it was written, also shows that the knowledge of the head and the heart can be integrated as one coherent body of knowledge and wisdom.
This story is about you and me and our children, our world, and their future. We began this story long ago, when one became many.
We all desire to grow. Growth is wonderful and intrinsic to life. However, it’s essential that we develop growth models that, by design, operate as living systems for developing and evolving the human world in harmony with life.
Thank you for joining me, and millions of others, on this journey Into the Heart of Systems Change, for a thriving world and future.
Written by Anneloes Smitsman, PhD. Updated in January 2025.
If you appreciate this research, please support it further by sharing this article through your community and by giving a “clap of hands” in support.
You may also enjoy the following articles and resources that are related to these topics:
- Living Systems and the Call for Civilizational Transformation.
- Leadership for Tipping Point Times.
- The EARTHwise Constitution for a Planetary Civilization.
- The Inner Shifts for a New Paradigm in Politics.
- Confronting the Archetype of Domination.
- Changing how we Play the Game of Life on Planet Earth.
- What is the maximum goodness that we can create together.
- The Call for Educational Transformation.
References
Smitsman A. (2019). Into the Heart of Systems Change. Ph.D. Dissertation. International Centre for Integrated assessment and Sustainable development (ICIS), Maastricht University, the Netherlands. ISBN: 978–94–6380–610–7. https://bit.ly/3EtGV1P
Sahtouris, E. & Smitsman, A. (2019). Into the Heart of Systems Change with Dr Elisabet Sahtouris. EARTHwise Centre Youtube Channel. Retrieved 25 July 2019 from https://youtu.be/jhSPsJQZe8E
Smitsman, A., Laszlo, A. & Barnes, K. (2018). Attracting our Future into Being: The Syntony Quest. World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research. DOI: 10.1080/02604027.2018.1499850
Smitsman, A & Houston, H. (2021). The Quest of Rose: The Cosmic Keys of Our Future Becoming. Book 1 of the Future Humans Trilogy. Independently published via Oxygen Publishing. Winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award.
Smitsman, A & Alexander Laszlo, A. Eds. (2022). The New Paradigm in Politics. The New Paradigm Symposia Series — Book 1. New York: SelectBooks.
Smitsman, A. (2022, forthcoming). Applying the Cosmic Architecture of Consciousness for a New World Paradigm. In, The New Paradigm in Cosmology. The New Paradigm Symposia Series — Book 2. New York: SelectBooks.
Smitsman, A & Currivan, J. (2021). Healing our relationship with Gaia through a New Thrivability Paradigm. In Wright, J. (Ed.) Quantum Thinking for Agroecology: Theory and Practice for the Farming of Tomorrow. Taylor & Francis Group, FL, USA. https://bit.ly/3AvVG1K
Smitsman, A. (2021). Economy of Life -The architecture of wholeness for an economy that is life sustaining and regenerative In Eds. Klomp, K & Shinta Oosterwaal, S. Thrive: Fundamentals for a New Economy. Amsterdam: Business Contact.
Smitsman, A., Martens, P. & Laszlo, A. (2019). The Polarization Effect: Healing our Worldviews. Systema 2019, Vol 7 (1). http://www.systema-journal.org/article/view/414
Smitsman, A. & Currivan, J. (2019). Systemic Transformation — Into the Birth Canal. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol 36 (4), 604–613. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2573
Smitsman, A., Laszlo, A. & Luksha, P. (2020). Evolutionary Learning Ecosystems for Thrivable Futures — Crafting and Curating the Conditions for Future-fit Education. World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research. DOI: 10.1080/02604027.2020.1740075.
Smitsman A. & Smitsman A.W. (2020). The Future-Creative Human — Exploring Evolutionary Learning. World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/02604027.2020.1810536
Smitsman, A., Laszlo, A. & Barnes, K. (2018). Attracting our Future into Being: The Syntony Quest. World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research. DOI: 10.1080/02604027.2018.1499850
