Sustainability has been intensively planned for at least four decades. In this time the world has become dramatically less sustainable. This progress-in-reverse undermines life on Earth. It should shock people into larger imaginative spaces where more ambitious solutions become possible. What happens instead is ‘shrinking thinking’, where the complex global challenge is answered by withdrawing from it. We must unshrink our thinking to become a civilisation with a positive future. Within a planet-sized imaginative space we can find ‘planet levers’ designed to shift global complexity as a whole so the same systems that now cause all the big problems can instead solve them.

James Greyson is Head of BlindSpot Think Tank. He works internationally on system change to reverse critical interconnected problems. James’ ‘planet levers’, including ways to design waste out of economics and to reverse the arms race, were published as global security advanced research by NATO. He’s a Fellow of the Earth System Governance Project and works on collective intelligence crowdsourcing with MIT’s Climate CoLab.

You can find James on Twitter as @blindspotting and on LinkedIn as jamesgreyson.