Catalytic Thinking: A Theory of Change for Realising Abundance
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Before we begin, we would like to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have been the original change makers and stewards of Australia for over 60,000 years.
Their profound wisdom, resilience and deep connection to country have fostered countless stories of survival, adaptation and transformation.
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The knowledge held by these communities is an invaluable resource for understanding how to create positive change and build a more just and sustainable world.
Welcome back to Change Maker Q&A everyone.
If you are new here, this is the podcast by the Humanitarian Change Makers Network where we answer all of your questions about anything social change related.
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I’m Tiana Jay.
I am the founder of the Humanitarian Change Makers Network, and I’m the host of Change Maker Q&A.
And we’re going to be diving into a topic that I love learning about and thinking about and talking about.
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And it’s this idea of an abundance mindset and the importance of having an abundance mindset in social change.
And I talk about this a little bit in our first social change handbook, The Change Maker in You.
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I talk about this idea of having an abundance mindset and the importance of an abundance mindset when we are engaging in the work of change.
1:52
And an abundance mindset can be contrasted with a scarcity mindset.
A scarcity mindset is one that is really rooted in this idea of lack or not having enough, whereas an abundance mindset is kind of about recognizing that we have enough, whether that’s enough resources, enough support, enough, whatever it might be, and we don’t need to, I guess, accumulate and keep things to ourselves.
2:20
We actually have enough to share with everyone, and we have enough to actually achieve the things that we want to achieve.
And I posted a video on my YouTube channel a while back now talking about how sometimes it can be really hard to kind of think with an abundance mindset because so much of the systems within our society are kind of rooted in scarcity.
2:46
We do kind of live in an environment and and a capitalist economy that is really kind of grounded in this idea of competition and scarcity and this idea that, you know, if you don’t work hard enough and if you don’t look after yourself or your family, you won’t have enough or you’ll fall behind.
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That is very much rooted in a scarcity mindset.
So when we grow up in that environment, it can be really hard to kind of shift into an abundance mindset.
And I talked about our concept called collective enoughness in this one particular YouTube video.
And collective enoughness is essentially A mindset shift that’s kind of like not quite an abundance mindset, but on the way to an abundance mindset.
3:28
And it’s this idea that, look, we might not experience abundance in our own lives, but when we come together collectively, we have enough.
And I received a question on that video about how we actually kind of implement or utilise this idea of collective enoughness as more than just a mindset shift.
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But, you know, how can we actually practice this?
And so I wanted to address this question in today’s episode.
I wanted to kind of refer to the theory of change known as catalytic thinking that was first proposed by Hildee Gottlieb in her work.
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And this is really, I guess, a theory of change that is grounded in abundance, and it kind of looks at different interrelated concepts.
And that’s what we’re going to unpack in today’s episode.
So if you have any questions about absolutely anything you would like me to answer in an upcoming episode, definitely head to our website humanitarianchangemakers.net/podcast.
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Now catalytic thinking is essentially a theory of change like I mentioned before, first proposed by a woman named Hildee Gottlieb.
4:56
And it’s essentially a theory of change that is rooted in the logic or the mindset or the philosophy of abundance.
And it kind of has these three interrelated observations or premises about the cause and effect of positive social change.
5:15
So we’ll go through these three kind of interrelated observations or I would call them the premises of this argument.
So the first is that our power to create really powerful results lies in our power to create favourable cause and effect conditions towards our vision for the future.
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So that’s the first one.
So this is really important because I’ve mentioned this so many times, but so much of the work that we are doing is focusing on being kind of reactive or addressing a lot of the symptoms of big problems that we see in society.
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But when we can understand the cause and effect relationships and really understand those kind of like root causes that are affecting what we’re seeing happen in reality, then we can be much more effective at actually addressing those root causes and changing things.
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So when we have this vision for the future and we really understand what the cause and effect conditions are for that vision for the future as well as what’s currently manifesting in reality, then our power to create those results that we want lies in our ability to create those.
6:33
Essentially the correct what I would call the causal conditions or those kind of favourable cause and effect patterns.
The 2nd is that the most favourable conditions being sorry, begin and end with bringing out the best in people rather than focusing on stuff whether that’s money, food, education, other resources.
6:58
And this is really important.
This is what a lot of the work that we do at HCN is kind of grounded in.
It’s this idea that the most important asset that we have when it comes to creating social change is people, because that’s what we’re ultimately seeking to change when we say the word social change.
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The social in social change is things to do with people.
It’s people themselves and the things that people create.
Nothing changes without people changing it.
Laws don’t change themselves.
We have people that change those laws, right?
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The way in which we engage with each other doesn’t just magically change itself.
We have to change as people to change the way we engage with other people in the same way that, you know, the resources that we have available to us don’t just change unless we actually change the way that we are generating or sharing and distributing resources.
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Change happens through people, whether that’s like physically through our actions, whether that’s through our mindset, whether it’s through like the outcomes of the things we do, Whatever it is, people are the vehicle for social change.
So we need to bring out the best in people and we need to support people more than we focus on all of these other things.
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That’s something that I believe in very wholeheartedly, and it’s why we focus so much on the work that we do at the humanitarian Change makers network with building people’s capacity.
We focus on giving people the skills and the knowledge that they need so that whether they’re working on their own or in a larger organization, whether they’re working on an environmental issue or a humanitarian issue or a human rights issue or an issue of injustice or inequality, whatever it might be, people have got those skills that they can take with them.
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Finally, we have the observation or the premise that together we have everything we need.
It is only on our own that we experience scarcity.
And this is where the reality of collective enoughness kind of comes into this idea of catalytic thinking and the work of Hilde Gottlieb.
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So I will dive into that Third Point more in this episode.
Those are essentially kind of the three premises that underlie catalytic thinking as a theory for change.
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Now catalytic thinking is essentially called catalytic thinking because it’s really about shifting the focus to our thoughts and the assumptions behind our thoughts.
It essentially argues that the results that we see in any of our change efforts actually begin with the thoughts that kind of pre exist any of our actions or that shape and create our actions.
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And when we ask questions that are kind of rooted in scarcity then that’s why we get the reality of scarcity.
And if we develop the ability to ask the right questions and ask questions that are rooted in abundance then we’ll get more effective answers.
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We’ll understand those cause and effect patterns and relationships better and we’ll be able to move past this mindset of scarcity into one of abundance and we’ll actually be able to realise that through our actions.
So just for some examples to kind of illustrate this, I’ve got three questions that we might typically ask in the work that we’re doing as change makers and then a reframing them through the lens of catalytical catalytic thinking.
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So we might ask a question like what is the problem that we want to address and how how might we solve it?
That’s a pretty standard typical question.
We might find ourselves asking if we want to reframe this through the lens of catalytic thinking though we might ask what is the future that we want to create and what will it take to create that reality.
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So you can see that we’re kind of shifting it from this focus on the immediacy of the problems that we’re maybe witnessing or experiencing and things that might be the symptoms of larger problems.
And instead we’re shifting the focus to what is the future we want to create.
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So what is that big picture vision for the future that we have and what will it actually take to get there?
So what are the causal conditions?
What are the things that are going to ’cause that and how can we begin to create those conditions?
Another example of a question that we might ask in our work is, can we really trust them?
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What if they steal my idea or our stuff?
Now this is a common question that we ask we might find ourselves asking.
It is very much rooted in scarcity, this idea that you need to protect your resources and protect your ideas.
12:43
And this is definitely something that I have experienced in my own life, in my work, in my research.
It’s, you know, it’s something that because of the nature of the way our social system is designed, we feel like we have to, I guess, protect our things.
13:02
And you know, we’re living in a society that promotes this idea of individualism to the point where I think it is rather unhealthy.
And it’s this idea that you have to look after yourself 1st and you have to protect, you know, yourself or your family or whatever, rather than this idea of sharing and looking after your community as a whole.
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And if you look after the community, the community is also going to look after you.
So a way we can reframe these questions in the lens of catalytic thinking is to say, who else cares about this thing that I care about?
What can we accomplish if we work together that none of us could accomplish on our own.
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So it’s this idea of saying, OK, this is what I have and what I can contribute.
How can I join forces with others in my circle, in my community, in my wider society?
And how can we actually achieve something way greater than what we could achieve on our own?
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It’s this idea that, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Another question is how will we pay for that?
Where will the money come from?
If you’ve ever worked in a not-for-profit organization or for a charity, I’m sure this is a question that you have found yourself asking or the people around you have often asked.
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And a way we can shift this through the lens of catalytic thinking is to ask the question, what resources do we have together that none of us have all on our own.
So there’s two important things here.
First of all, it’s this idea of coming together.
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It’s this idea of how can we actually collaborate.
But it’s also this shift from asking questions about the money that we want to the resources that we need.
So money being the means that we think we need to acquire these ends and instead shifting the focus on the actual ends, the things that we want.
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Because chances are there are probably ways that we can actually bypass the need for money and just directly acquire those things.
Not always, but often.
So in order to begin to ask the questions that we might ask when we are catalytic thinking, there are kind of three questions at the heart of this framework.
15:25
So you might have picked up on this from those previous questions, but these three questions are what do we really want?
Who else cares about this and what do we have together?
So that first question, what do we really want?
That is a question of kind of getting to the why, the heart of why we want something, why we think we need something.
15:51
We can ask questions like what will that make possible and for whom?
To kind of delve a little bit deeper.
If you’re familiar with the book by Simon Sinek, start with why.
I think that’s a great example of this idea of kind of getting to the heart of the why.
16:10
I also talked about this in I think it was episode 4 where I addressed doing a PhD and looked at different career options in research.
But I looked at this framework by Simon Sinek called Start with Y and it’s about starting with the Y.
16:29
So in this context it would be why do you need something?
How is that going to help?
And then what?
The what is the thing that you think you need?
But the why is what it’s going to achieve.
So you ask this question, you know, what will that make possible?
Because sometimes we think we need like these tangible resources, but we could actually achieve the thing that we want to achieve through alternative means.
16:54
So it’s about saying, OK, what do we really want?
You want to get to the heart of what it is you really want.
You want to keep asking this question until you can’t answer anymore and that’s going to get you to, I guess, the essence of what you truly want.
So a lot of the time, the resources that we think we want or that we need are actually the means of getting us to the thing that we really want.
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And the smaller you get, the more you can kind of drill down into this, the more likely you are going to be to find a way to get it.
An example of this, just from my own personal life would be the example of travel.
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It was really hard for me during the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 when we couldn’t travel.
Travel has always been such a big part of my life and it’s, you know, one of my passions.
I’ve always loved travelling and as somebody who had travelled, you know, for multiple months every year, it was really hard for me to suddenly have these travel plans taken away from me and to have to stay home.
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And in the beginning I kept thinking that the thing that I really wanted was to travel.
I that’s what I thought the thing that I wanted was.
But if I really kind of asked myself those questions and drilled down to the core of what it was about travel that I liked, I realized that travel was actually the means of me getting other things.
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So I wanted to be able to connect with people and share stories with people from diverse backgrounds.
I wanted to be able to explore new places, to learn new things.
I love learning.
I love place based learning, but I just love learning in general.
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And so asking those questions and realizing the thing that I really wanted, I was able to find alternative ways to kind of get those experiences even while I was stuck in lockdown in my house.
So the next question who else cares about this when we get clear on why we’re doing what we’re doing and the thing that we really need, not those surface level things we think we need, but you know the why of what we need.
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We can find the people who also care about the thing that we care about.
And if we find the people, then we might be able to find other ways of getting what we want.
We can find people who have those things.
We can find people who help us.
This is all about strength in numbers.
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And this idea that, you know, we only experience scarcity on our own when we come together.
This is where the idea of collective enoughness comes in.
When we actually come together, we’ll find that we can probably have everything we need together.
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The final question is what do we have together?
So when we share, we have everything we need.
It’s only on our own that we experience scarcity.
So in the context of social change, this looks like rather than calculating how much funding you think you might need and you know, going out and looking for grants or fundraising opportunities to access those resources, actually breakdown those resources that you need and seek out opportunities to directly acquire those resources.
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Focus on the functions rather than the resources.
So you want to focus on the thing that the resources are allowing you to do, not the resource themselves.
Partnerships and collaboration I think are always going to add that extra layer of community and ownership for a project.
20:30
So don’t go to people with an ask saying you know this is what I want from you.
Have a genuine conversation with people and potential partners.
Ask them.
You know, this is what I want to accomplish.
What do you want to accomplish?
How can we accomplish this together?
And you know, how can we benefit each other?
20:48
Make it a mutually beneficial relationship.
Don’t make it a one way relationship.
So the quote that I love from Hildy and her framework for catalytic thinking is when we change the way we see things, things change.
21:08
Now, collective enoughness is a manifestation of abundance.
It is a way that we can kind of overcome one of these challenges that I think is so prominent in the work that we’re doing, in this idea that, you know, if only we had more money, more time, more resources, which is grounded in scarcity.
21:31
The reality is that it’s only on our own that we don’t have enough, and together we do have enough.
So how can we begin to, I guess, take action to actually realise that abundance or that collective enoughness?
And something that I love about Hildy’s work that really challenged me, I think in the beginning was this idea that resources are everywhere.
21:57
Money is scarce, but resources are abundance, Sorry are abundant.
Money is scarce and tightly controlled.
Now, money isn’t a resource in this framework.
It isn’t inherently valuable to us.
22:13
It’s the things that money buys that have value and have lost resources.
That was a really challenging mindset shift that I had to make in order to understand that.
But once I got it, I got it.
And This is why it’s so important to develop this ability to ask the right questions.
22:34
Because when we can distinguish between things like cash, which is a means for securing what we need, versus the actual real resources, which are the things that the cash might buy us, that is essentially how we can live out this idea of abundance and collective enoughness.
22:54
Now there are so many systems for sharing that exist.
We have things like libraries, food banks, tool libraries, couch surfing.
These are all kind of like systems that exist that allow us to, I guess do this and bypass the need to have cash as a means for securing resources.
23:15
And all of these kind of systems for sharing are grounded in I guess, the framework or the approach known as mutual aid.
I strongly believe that experiencing the world is one of the most important things we can do as change makers.
23:31
And one of the best ways to experience the world affordably and meet like minded travellers is to stay in hostels.
I’ve almost exclusively stayed in hostels when I travel.
It’s how I was able to afford to travel to almost 50 countries while studying full time.
And Hostel World is the platform I use to search, compare and book hostel accommodation whenever I travel.
23:53
If you’re ready to experience the world, click the link in the episode description below to explore over 36,000 properties in 178 countries.
You may have seen that we are in the process of launching our very own mutual aid network through the Humanitarian Change Makers Network, which I will discuss very shortly.
24:15
But just for those of you who aren’t familiar with what mutual aid is, it is, I guess, a framework or an approach to giving that was first put forward by Peter Kropotkin.
He was a Russian anarchist, geographer and biologist, and he essentially argued against this idea of social Darwinism.
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And if you’re not familiar with social Darwinism, it’s based on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and this idea that it’s about the survival of the fittest and only the strongest can survive and work constantly and like species are constantly in competition with each other.
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And Social Darwinism is the application of that logic to people in a society.
What Mutual Aid essentially argues is this idea that actually mutual Aid, this idea of collaboration.
25:09
It was actually a very natural factor of evolution and it was first published in 1902 and he essentially challenged this view that cooperation and mutual aid amongst individuals within a species actually played a crucial role in the development and the survival of the species.
25:30
So while different species may have been in competition with one another within the same species, there was actually a lot of collaboration.
So there were a few key points in his argument, which I will go over.
25:49
So it was based on his observations in nature.
He pointed to various examples of cooperation and mutual aid amongst animals.
He looked at birds that nest in colonies, animals that hunt in packs, the way that bees work together in a hive.
26:05
And these observations kind of contradicted this popular notion within social Darwinism, that there is kind of like a war of all against all.
There’s this idea of the survival advantage.
So, oh.
Kropotkin argued that mutual aid provided a survival advantage rather than a disadvantage.
26:26
So in many situations, this idea of cooperation and working together increased the chances of survival for individuals and the species as a whole.
He believed that the species that engaged in mutual aid were better equipped to face environmental challenges, to find food, and to protect themselves from predators.
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Then this.
There’s this idea of social instinct in humans.
He extended his argument to human society, suggesting that the principle of mutual aid is kind of ingrained within human nature.
And he contended that human communities are not solely built on competition and conflict, but they’re equally shaped by cooperation and solidarity and mutual support.
27:09
Then there’s this idea of sociability as an evolutionary force.
So Kropotkin proposed that the evolutionary success of social species like humans was closely tied to their ability to live and work together in groups.
He argued that the social instinct was a powerful force in our evolution, and it fostered the development of social bonds, the ability to communicate and develop tools and activities together.
27:36
Finally, he rejects Malthusian ideas, so he criticized Thomas Malthus’s idea about population growth and the scarcity of resources.
Contemporary academics and scholars have all kind of rejected this idea anyway.
27:56
But considering he wrote this back in 1902, he was kind of one of the biggest, I guess, scholars or people writing at the time that argued against this idea of Malthusian population growth and the idea that populations will grow and then they need to kind of balance themselves out.
28:17
And I won’t go into it now, but essentially, he argued that mutual aid is actually a really positive way that we can kind of counteract or mitigate the impact that resource scarcity has in population growth.
28:34
So we don’t actually need to rely on something negative happening like conflict, war, disease, whatever it might be, in order for a population to kind of balance itself out when resources are getting scarce.
We can actually use something like mutual aid as a positive way to counteract the resource scarcity that might come with population growth in an unpredictable environment.
29:01
So that is essentially Hopkins argument for mutual aid.
Since then, mutual aid as a concept or as like a broad kind of movement has grown a lot.
It’s something that we are really embracing here at the Humanitarian Change Makers Network as a way to kind of, I guess, manifest this notion of collective enoughness or abundance within our community and the wider community.
29:28
So I am in the process of building a website for our mutual aid organization called Mutual Aid Australia.
It is a not-for-profit cooperative.
So essentially the idea is that we are creating a platform where change makers can come and share any resources or things that they might have to bypass the need to pay for these things.
29:53
If it’s appropriate, money can be exchanged through the platform, but essentially the idea is that we’re taking the things that we have more than enough of, all the things that we can offer our community, and we are offering it to them for the betterment of our whole community.
30:10
An example of this is I grow a lot of my own food.
As many of you might know, I am really into permaculture and I’ve also been really into just like propagating certain plants, things like bromeliads, succulents, things that I have a lot of that I don’t really have a lot of use for.
30:27
I’ve been propagating them and trying to kind of build like a little mini nursery in my backyard of all of these plants and I give them away to members of my community.
So I let people donate on a pay what you want basis, just to cover the costs of the potting mix that I have to create the little pots that I put them in, things like that.
30:49
But the idea is that I am growing more than enough of these.
I don’t need any more in my own garden, so I’m just growing them to give them away.
It doesn’t require that much effort on my behalf because I already spend so much time in my garden.
It’s not that hard for me to kind of grow a little bit extra so that I can give it away.
31:07
So that’s just like a really simple example of Mutual Aid and how I will be sharing my own resources through the Mutual Aid Australia platform.
I’m sure I will get asked questions about this and I’m sure I will answer them in upcoming podcast episodes, but definitely feel free to ask any questions that you might have about Mutual Aid About Mutual Aid Australia, If you aren’t already signed up to our newsletter, definitely do that.
31:36
Grab a copy of The Change Maker Renew and you’ll also keep get updated on how we are going with Growing Mutual Aid Australia.
It’s currently a solo project that I’m working on.
If anybody listening to this is interested in helping us build the website, we do need to raise a little bit of money in order to actually get the website posted online.
31:59
So if anyone wants to help with that kind of stuff, if anyone has any ideas or anything, I would love people to volunteer with me.
I am, you know, trying to do it on my own.
I obviously know that I can’t do it on my own, and that’s the whole point of collective enoughness and having people come together.
32:16
So if that interests you, definitely check out the resources in the episode Show Notes to get involved.
Otherwise, feel free to ask all of your questions about anything social change related at humanitarianchangemakers.net/podcast.
32:32
Check out the post that accompanies this episode if you want to see just some resources and things about catalytic thinking.
I think it is a great theory of change that has definitely helped me in my own life and my own work, and hopefully it will help you a little bit.
32:47
Otherwise, I will see you in the next episode.
