#OpenDialogue Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World
An interactive workshop session and dialogue with Beth Sawin, Multisolving Institute
With deep sympathies to Beth who has fractured her ankle and apologies to those who were looking forward to this session. We have to rescheduled until the New Year. Please instead join us on December 17th at 4pm UK for our last dialogue for 2024.
You can read more about December 17th here.
What is Multisolving?
In times of profound disruption and discontinuity, finding ways to work together across traditional boundaries becomes essential for building resilient futures and navigating current crises. Join us for an interactive dialogue and workshopping session with Dr. Beth Sawin whose groundbreaking book “Multisolving” invites us to address interconnected challenges through radical collaboration and systemic solutions.
Multisolving identifies and implements solutions that address multiple challenges at once – from climate change to health, equity, and biodiversity. This approach recognizes that our greatest challenges are interconnected and require breaking down silos both across and within organizations.
As we face interlinked crises from climate change to social inequity, the need for transformative solutions has never been greater. Multisolving offers a way to work together to address multiple challenges today while also building resilience for the future
Drawing on decades of research and real-world examples, Beth will reflect on how nurturing trusting relationships across silos can promote the emergence of solutions that serve multiple needs and constituencies at once. Beth will provide practical tools for multisolving and showcase the attitudes and approaches that help multisolving flourish and build adaptative capacity for navigating shocks, disruptions and unexpected opportunities.
For anyone working at the intersection of climate, health, equity, and social justice – or seeking hopeful pathways through our current crises – this session offers both inspiration and practical guidance for creating positive change.
Format
This will be a highly interactive session designed to share practical tools and approaches that you can apply in your own work. Featuring case discussions, small group work, and opportunities to connect with others working to bridge divides for greater impact, it will aim to explore and share, collectively, how multisolving appraoches are used in different regions and contexts to deal with the interconnected and intersecting challenges of our time.
This session is presented by Impact Trust in collaboration with the Multisolving Institute. A discount for purchasing Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World will be available.
Conversation guides
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin is the Director of Multisolving Institute. Beth is an expert on multisolving, actions that address equity, climate change health, well-being, and economic vitality as integrated issues. She developed the concept after studying bright spots around the world where people created systems change by building connections across silos. In 2021, Beth founded Multisolving Institute to share this research and to develop tools tailored for multisolving.
Beth has dedicated her career to the theory and practice of creating change in complex systems. She trained in system dynamics computer simulation with Donella Meadows at Sustainability Institute. At the Institute, she also supported sustainability leaders from around the world as they used system approaches to conserve land, enact climate policy, restore rivers, promote healthy communities, and more.
Prior to founding Multisolving Institute, Beth co-founded the think tank Climate Interactive to develop tools for grappling with the complexity of the climate system. She led Climate Interactive’s efforts to integrate measures of equity, health, and well-being into decision-support computer simulations.
Beth writes and speaks about multisolving and leadership in complex systems for both national and international audiences. Her writing has been published in Non-Profit Quarterly, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, U. S. News, The Daily Climate, and System Dynamics Review. Her work has been widely covered including in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Her book Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World will be published by Island Press in late 2024.
She has two adult daughters and lives in rural Vermont where she and her husband grow as much of their food as they can manage.
Tom Lent has 40 years of experience in six regions of the world in different roles, including leadership and management, facilitation, strategic planning, organizational learning and development and training. He has worked across themes, including human rights, child rights, advocacy, gender, disaster relief, systemic change, and education sector reform; and with diverse entities, including NGOs, CSOs, the UN, local and national governments, foundations, social movements, the World Bank, and the private sector. His intention is to build processes, institutions, organizations and systems that have greater collective impact in their contexts and in the world. He has worked for Business Community Synergies, Inc., UNICEF, the World Bank, USAID, the Bernard Van Leer Foundation, Save the Children (Norway, US and the Alliance), Plan International, the Palestinian Welfare Organization, Peace Corps, Global Rights, the European Foundation Centre, Watchlist for Children and Armed Conflict, and Global Action for Children
