Booked on Planning

Multisolving

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 6

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Join us as we discuss the world of systems thinking with Beth Sawin author of "Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World." Far from being an abstract academic concept, multisolving offers a practical framework that reveals how seemingly separate challenges—from climate change to public health to economic development—can be addressed simultaneously with thoughtfully designed interventions.

Beth takes complex systems theories and makes them accessible through everyday examples. She explains how filling a bathtub helps us understand housing shortages, and how our body's response to thirst demonstrates the power of balancing feedback loops. These relatable analogies unlock a powerful way of seeing the world that planners, community leaders, and change-makers can immediately apply to their work.

Whether you're a seasoned systems thinker or completely new to these concepts, this episode will transform how you approach complex problems and help you discover multisolving opportunities hiding in plain sight. 

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Stephanie Rouse:

This episode is brought to you by Marvin Planning Consultants. Marvin Planning Consultants, established in 2009, is committed to their clients and professional organizations. Their team of planners has served on chapter division and national committees, including as the Nebraska Chapter President. In addition, they are committed to supporting their chapter in various APA divisions. You're listening to the Booked on Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode, we talk with Beth Sawin about her book Multisolving Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World. One big takeaway for listeners is that we are all working with systems and they impact our daily lives. Most of us just probably haven't stopped to think about them or how we could be influencing them.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I can certainly say that I hadn't heard of systems thinking and never gave it a thought, that the majority of my day was filled up with multi-solving. But now that I'm more aware, I've been seeing systems thinking and their balancing mechanisms everywhere.

Stephanie Rouse:

The book is written in a new way from most systems thinking approaches, which tend to be diagram heavy. Here Beth is trying to open the language up to a new audience by using examples of systems from our everyday lives like filling or draining a bathtub, or how we drink water to rehydrate after we work hard and get thirsty.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I really appreciated Beth noting that the entire body is made up of a bunch of systems which of course we learn about in middle school, but I really haven't thought about since middle school. But it really helped conceptualize what she was talking about. So let's get into our conversation with author Beth Sawin about her book Multisolving Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World.

Stephanie Rouse:

Beth, welcome to the Booked On Planning podcast. We're happy to have you on to talk about your book Multisolving creating systems change in a fractured world. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So, to kick things off, can you give us an overview of the concept of stocks and how understanding them supports a multisolving approach to work?

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, and maybe we should even give at least a one sentence nod to what multi-solving is, because that will help stocks make more sense. So multi-solving is the idea of any kind of project or investment or policy that creates multiple benefits or meets multiple needs for that one investment. And I opened the book by talking about stocks because they you're right, they are a part of multi-solving. So stocks is a term that comes from systems thinking and it describes all the places in the world where things accumulate for a short time or a long time. So water in a lake is a stock, kids in a school is a stock, bushels of corn in a grain elevator is a stock. So when you look in a grain elevator is a stock.

Beth Sawin:

So when you look around the world and you see these places of accumulation, you're looking at stocks, and stocks matter because they're often the most visible parts of systems. Although not all stocks are concrete like those examples. You can also have stocks of trust, stocks of knowledge, stocks of well-being, so they can be kind of qualitative things as well as real, measurable, countable things. And all the dynamics in systems influence stocks, make them go up or make them go down, and when critical stocks change their levels. That can create change in systems and sometimes make them work better. If the stock is food available for the school lunch program and that increases, that could be a good thing. If the stock is number of people with a new virus circulating in a community, then that stock is a dangerous thing. So stocks aren't good or bad, but noticing them sometimes gives us opportunities to intervene in systems, including finding these ways to create multiple benefits from the interventions that we do.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Long live stocks can create stagnation if they're not encouraged to turn over. Folks in Nebraska, where we are, would be familiar with corn and elevators catching on fire if they sit in there for too long. So what are some of the ways that we can create that turnover and how would that help our system work better?

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, well and again. Sometimes, of course, you might want a stock to be long lived. If the stock is carbon that we've sequestered to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the hope is, or greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, the hope is that that stock would be long lived. But other times stocks can, as you say, create stagnation if they become sort of too steady, and so I'm thinking of an example of that might be the stock of people in power in a government, and if that stock is the same decision makers for decades, then the system might be robbed of creativity and new ideas. And so turnover in a stock of elected officials. In a democracy, that turnover would be the result of elections, and that's why in some cases, you know, voting rights and civil rights are so important because that's a regulation, regulatory point in a system to change some of those stocks if they're not serving all the people in the system.

Beth Sawin:

Other stocks that we might wish would turn over could be stocks of polluting capital, like automobiles with low fuel efficiency. If we're trying to improve the fuel efficiency of the entire fleet but there's inefficient gas guzzlers that are just hanging on for years or decades, then that makes the stock as a whole less efficient than the goals of the people in the system might be. So there governments can institute policies. One that's pretty famous is cash for clunkers. Right, it's a way to take an investment and get those vehicles off the road and allow the stock to get replenished with new or more efficient vehicles.

Stephanie Rouse:

So another important concept that goes along with stocks is flows processes that move, that are measured in units of stuff per unit of time. Can you explain what the three laws of flows are and where you developed those or where you came up with those concepts?

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, stocks don't make very much sense without flows. So flows are, as you said, the movement of material between stocks. And so, if we stick with the automobile fleet, there's a stock of newly manufactured vehicles and those would move into a stock called vehicles on the road when they're purchased and put into use, and then they would leave the vehicles on the road program at the end of their lifetime or with accelerated retirement, like with cash for clunkers. So an inflow is anything that fills a stock. So in that example, the inflow would be purchasing cars and the outflow is anything that drains a stock, so in that case the outflow would be retiring vehicles at the end of their life.

Beth Sawin:

One of the easiest ways to think about stocks and flows is to think about a really familiar one that we all have a lot of experience with, and so lots of people who teach systems thinking use the example of a bathtub. So a bathtub is a stock of water. The inflow is the faucet that you open to fill the tub and the outflow is the drain that empties water from the tub. And the three laws of stocks that you mentioned. If you ever need to remember them, all you have to do is think about a bathtub. So the first rule of stocks is that if the inflow is higher or faster than the outflow, then eventually the stock will overflow or the stock will rise, right? So if you're adding a gallon a minute and you're only removing half a gallon per minute, the water in the tub will rise and rise. If, on the other hand, the inflow is smaller than the outflow, then over time the stock will drain. So if you're dribbling in water but draining it out really fast, then the level in the bathtub will go down.

Beth Sawin:

And that points to the third rule of flows, which is there's only one way to keep the level constant, and that's to have the inflow and the outflow be equal. And for all of these, it's important to say that some stocks have more than one inflow or more than one outflow, and so to apply this rule of stocks and flows, you need to take the sum of all the inflows and make that equal to the sum of all the outflows if you want the level to stay the same. And all this matters because the only way to change the level of a stock is to change flows. So if there's a stock that's problematic for a system, either too low, you know, not enough native pollinators or too high, too much of a certain pollutant. You have to think about the inflows and the outflows to change the level of a stock.

Stephanie Rouse:

And then, when thinking about changes in systems, there's two types of feedback loops that you discuss in the book balancing and reinforcing and different types of systems have one or the other, or you want to influence one or the other. What's the difference between them, and can a system have both a balancing and reinforcing feedback loop?

Beth Sawin:

So part of what makes systems so interesting and so complex and honestly so able to serve us is that there is more going on than just stocks and flows, and that's this idea of feedbacks. So feedback loops are whenever the level in a stock feeds back in some way to change its own level. And a great example of that that we're all familiar with is to think about if you have a savings account. So the level of the stock at any time is your savings, but your bank is probably going to pay you interest every month, and the interest is an inflow that will increase the stock, you know, maybe by a few pennies, maybe by a lot, depending on how big your savings balance is. And here's why it's a feedback loop the larger your savings, the more interest you get, and so a change in your savings and interest payment means next month, if all else stays equal, you're going to get an even bigger interest payment. So that's an example of a reinforcing feedback loop where change in one direction making your savings bigger leads to even more change in that same direction. And there's lots of things in the world that move that way. If you have a population of organisms in an ecosystem and they don't have predators. You know, picture the more rabbits you have, the more baby rabbits you have, the more rabbits you have. All of these reinforcing feedback loops give a behavior on a graph that is called exponential growth. So it looks like small change that feeds upon itself. So that's one type of feedback and what it tends to do is drive systems into sort of new terrain either explosive growth or sometimes explosive decline or rapid decline. And of course, if that were the only force in systems then we would be always in these extremes, because reinforcing feedback drives toward extremes. So, luckily, systems always tend to have a second kind of feedback loop that moderates change, that balances it. So that's called the balancing feedback loop.

Beth Sawin:

Our bodies, if we think about homeostasis, all of those processes are balancing feedback loops. So, for instance, I go jogging and I sweat a lot, then the hydration level of my body goes down and I detect that as the sense of thirst and I go and have a nice glass of cold water. My hydration level will go up. So that's a case where change in one direction getting dehydrated leads to change in the opposite direction getting rehydrated and we hold our blood sugar constant, we keep our temperature constant by all those kinds of processes and, in communities, similar things. We have goals for, maybe how our community looks like a certain amount of trash on the streets and beyond that, people feel like this isn't right and they organize. I tell them they call it green up day on the first day of May. So that's a balancing feedback loop that sees a change in one direction more and more trash and organizes a response for a change in the opposite direction cleaning it up.

Jennifer Hiatt:

So this was actually the first time probably, unfortunately, but that I'd really thought about multi solving and so, if any of our listeners are really kind of nervous about getting into a larger systems thinking, your book has so many examples like this and you break it down so well and I really appreciated that aspect and I loved the poems at the start of each of your chapters because it really got you to start thinking about that system, even though you weren't even realizing that you were thinking about systems. So really appreciate that, thank you.

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, yeah, thanks for saying that it was a little bit of an experiment and the book is an experiment in one other way to lots of books that are emphasizing systems thinking, are pretty heavy on diagrams and charts, which I happen to love.

Beth Sawin:

My brain works that way. But for teaching systems thinking for many years, one thing I noticed was about one third of people kind of light up at those graphs and charts and it really makes sense to them, and two thirds not so much. It just doesn't communicate. So my book is a bit of an experiment to talk about systems by telling stories about them like we've been doing right, Like cars on the road or what happens when you're thirsty, like we've been doing right, Like cars on the road or what happens when you're thirsty, because we all know a lot more about systems than we think. We may not know that the formal language for it, but we are systems made of systems, participating in systems. So we have a lot of intuition about systems and I really encourage people to tap that and be their own authority, if that makes sense.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah, and another thing I appreciated about the book. So there were all these great examples, and especially when you applied it to like the human body, I think is a great example of a system and how it really works. But then you challenge the reader at the end of every chapter with the reflections to try and apply what you've just learned into your own daily life and your own daily work. Because that next step, I think can be a little challenging and it was for me a little bit, going through all the reflections of trying to take what you had talked about in that chapter and then take something in my daily work and apply the systems, thinking the multi solving approach, and think of how can I better influence the work that I'm doing or the systems that I deal with day in and day out, which is housing and issues with homelessness, and how can I make an impact using this approach. So I thought that was helpful.

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, no, I'm glad. I'm glad. The world is obviously really, really complicated and can get really overwhelming. And one thing about systems that I think is helpful is that once you start to see them, you see certain patterns and you can often extrapolate from a system you're familiar with and realize, oh, that's the same behavior, right. And so we talked about the bathtub. If you're working on homelessness and housing, like there's a bathtub of housing stock in your system, in your city, If you're going to think about the bathtub, well, the only way to really change that is either to increase the rate at which housing is built or slow down the rate at which housing is decommissioned, you know, maybe by retrofitting and repairing. And so then you can talk with your team and your stakeholders and investors like, yeah, these are our two strategies. Do we want both? Which one's most important in our case? But you know all about that because you know about bathtubs.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Great way to think about it, and you mentioned when it comes to reinforcing feedback loops. The wait and see method is almost always the wrong thing to do, so can you explain why that is?

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, so remember the reinforcing feedback loop. That's the one where change feeds upon itself. I live in in Vermont, so we always are thinking about snow and snowballs here, right? So if you've ever done this and you're at the top of a hill and you make a little tiny snowball and you just give it a push, each time it rolls down the hill it gathers more and more snow to itself, right? That's the kind of change we're talking about. Or a forest fire, where there's a tiny spark and then it grows out of control as more and more material gets brought into the fire.

Beth Sawin:

Or you have a small infection and you put off going to the doctor. That's a virus doing reinforcing feedback, right, more and more of your cells are infected. So in the everyday examples we're pretty familiar with the idea that it's important to interrupt these processes quickly. You know like your parent takes you to the doctor when you start to be sick, and that's going to be likely a better outcome. Where it's harder, I think, for people to apply that same logic is on some of our more complicated systems that are bigger than our personal lives, and all of us can look back with pretty direct experience.

Beth Sawin:

Now to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was really struck early March so March 2020, by a public health official who was saying you know, it looks like our response is extreme right now, like we're this is early days and like we're really building awareness. We're investing so much money and that's because there was, at that time, the potential to block or reinforcing feedback loop before it got full steam. We now know, you know, the virus got out of that any kind of containment. It did affect the whole world, but that feeling of like, why are they responding so strongly? It's just a few people who are sick. That's the idea of getting out ahead of a reinforcing feedback loop.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Actually, on my Facebook it just popped up five years ago, yesterday. Yeah, I shared a little post that was, like you know, two weeks to crush the curve, or whatever. The saying was Wow.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Five years ago Exactly, and so, as I was reading about the balancing of feedback loops, I kept thinking about goals and conflict. So many what I would say are progressive goals seem to be in direct conflict with the status quo. So how do we go about combating systems that are, in fact, actually keeping you from being able to reduce that gap in your goal?

Beth Sawin:

Yeah. So the goals of systems are really important and they are often sources of conflict or contention. So we were talking about the example of litter on a street in a community. So there's a goal. It may not be explicit, no one has probably written. You know, two beer cans are okay and 15 is too many, but the sense of the community as a whole probably has some level. That's kind of acceptable and in that case systems operate pretty well, the goal isn't really being argued about and the feedback loops can keep things steady around the goal.

Beth Sawin:

But in other cases there really are different visions for what the goal should be. One, honestly, is the amount of carbon pollution in the atmosphere right? Climate advocates are like it shouldn't be higher than 350 parts per million, but you know, of course, we're already well above 400. On the other hand, the proponents of the fossil fuel industry are like, oh, that goal is way too stringent, like that would be terrible for the economy, and they may not name a number, but they're saying you know there's a different goal and all the policies flow out of, to some extent, what that goal is. And so in the case of climate change, we have mass movements, we have education, we have people building coalitions. All of those things are ways to try to build the power, to set a goal of a system where people think it should be.

Beth Sawin:

Where multi-solving comes in is that often we find ourselves really wanting a goal that we can't seem to accomplish because of power somewhere else in a system, in this case, Bill McKibben says the fossil fuel industry is the wealthiest industry in the history of humanity.

Beth Sawin:

So you know those of us worrying about our children's climate future we're up against real power. The thing about multisolving is that there may be other interests in addition to climate that would also benefit from some of the same policies, and one really important one is health, because if the world were burning less fossil fuels, there'd be less air pollution, and with less air pollution there'd be less illnesses like asthma, respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease. So people who manage health systems, you know, actually would be rooting for a similar goal of low CO2 emissions. Parents of kids who are prone to asthma would be in line for those same goals. But often we find ourselves kind of separated from one another, maybe not understanding that there's a certain policy or an opportunity that would meet multiple needs, and so it's often that careful tending of both helping people see how issues are connected and helping them come to know each other as people and as collaborators that can actually help shift where the goal of a system ends up being.

Stephanie Rouse:

And we've talked a little bit already about the range and size of systems. There can be some smaller ones that impact our daily lives, or some larger ones that are a little more challenging to kind of wrap our minds around or to interject solutions and make change. Can you give a few examples and talk about how understanding the system helps with a multi-solving approach?

Beth Sawin:

So one important idea that my teachers of systems thinking really emphasize is the idea of boundaries in systems. So the reality is, of course, everything is connected to everything else. You know it's one planet. At the end of the day we're one human species. But none of us could do anything in our day actually if we had to consider every linkage between me and you, and me in the atmosphere, and me in a river, and it would be paralyzing.

Beth Sawin:

So what we do is create boundaries and we say, within this boundary I'll pay attention, it will influence my decisions, and beyond that boundary I'm going to not consider that very much. But it's really consequential where we set those boundaries and sometimes I believe they're too narrow, which leads to some of the challenges we face. So it can be narrow in space, like I'm going to really care about my immediate family, but I'm not going to really take too much responsibility for other people in my city, and that can work for a while. But systems with too much inequity or too poor of a social safety net you know those feedback loops exist even though we don't pay attention to them, right? So maybe I'm going to send my child to a school but the tax base is so low because people are not caring about other people's children. Right, that would be an example of a feedback loop and probably a system boundary that I'd argue is too narrow.

Beth Sawin:

The other thing that happens is just to make our organizations work, we draw these boundaries and we say there's a public health department and it's separate from the public works department, which is separate from the transportation agency, and maybe those departments all exist in different buildings. People don't particularly know each other. They probably studied slightly different professional paths and use slightly different language. Each of their budgets is calculated separately, and what happens when you've drawn boundaries either too rigidly or too narrowly is you miss a lot of the opportunities for multi-solving, for instance, active transportation.

Beth Sawin:

So people being able to get around walking and cycling is a great climate solution. It reduces emissions from transportation, but more than that, it's an amazing public health intervention. It reduces chronic illness because people get more safe physical activity, and it's an economic intervention. People who move through their neighborhoods on foot or on bike are more likely to wander into a small local business and make a purchase. So when it comes time to say, can we invest in more active transportation, ideally you'd have health advocates and economic development advocates at the table and not treat that just as a transportation policy. But to do that you have to loosen some of those boundaries or stretch across them in some way. So a lot of multi-solving is about challenging the boundaries that have been drawn and asking if it might serve to expand them or think of them differently.

Jennifer Hiatt:

How would you encourage people who are just getting into systems thinking, that are overwhelmed by the complexity and challenges of a multi-solving approach?

Beth Sawin:

One beautiful thing about multi-solving is that it provides this opportunity for everyone to do something, but no one to do everything, and so I really encourage people to choose the issue that matters the most to them or where they have expertise, but then engage with and actively look for the people that that issue touches. So we often talk in multi solving about bundling problems, about asking how can the solution to this problem that keeps me awake at night be a solution to a problem that keeps you awake at night, and so that's, you know, the connection between the Children's Asthma Coalition and the river advocates and the climate advocates. Things like greening a city with more green roofs and more vegetation would actually lift all of those goals. And you don't have to have, you know, a primary goal and secondary goals. You can say all of these can advance together, but you can, within that, continue your advocacy for kids asthma. You know if that's, if that's your passion. Really, the only change is that you're listening and connecting with people sort of adjacent who touched that same issue.

Stephanie Rouse:

You know, what I found interesting is like reading through this book. It was new to me. Jennifer said at the beginning of the episode multiselfing was new to her is new to me. I think it's a concept that planners should be paying a lot more attention to, because we kind of do it by default. We tend to be generalists, we know a little bit about everything. We try and make the connections. We're looking at comprehensive plans that have all these elements and are tying them together, but it's not a concept that's really part of curriculum or in our daily work. We're like working in systems without realizing it and I think there's so much more potential for more cognizant of the systems and how they're operating and things like the feedback loops and balancing and trying to more intentionally influence some of this.

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, it's pretty common for me to meet someone who will say I've been multi solving my whole career but I didn't know it was a thing or I didn't know other people were doing this. We figured it out here by trial and error. So we never at my organization, multi-solving Institute, feel as though it's something we invented. I much more think we hold up a mirror and show people what they are accomplishing and offer people kind of a sense of being part of a community who's learning more every day about how to operate in this way. And of course it's very ancient If you think of indigenous societies or wisdom traditions.

Beth Sawin:

The whole system perspective is very prominent there. And the other place we really see multisolving and I think this isn't that surprising are in marginalized communities, places where people don't have much resources and maybe haven't for a long time and have to be really creative about how to make things happen. And sometimes we also say the multi-slammed are the multisolvers. So marginalized communities often are feeling the impact of multiple parts of a system, like they have air pollution and also disinvestment and also flooding, and so it's not as mysterious that all these things fit together because it's part of daily experience.

Stephanie Rouse:

World views is another topic that you touch on in the book, and there's two main world views web of relationships and collection of objects. I feel like we were trending towards the former, but recently have regressed towards the latter, in the last month very quickly. What are ways that we can continue to push back and get to a more equitable and sustainable worldview in the current climate that we're now facing?

Beth Sawin:

So those two sets of words are phrases that I ended up using in the book to describe two things that I felt like have been two forces really in opposition for centuries. One of them, the web of relationships, starts with this idea that we're all interconnected and interdependent, that my well-being is tied up with your well-being, that no one's free until everyone's free. And the other worldview I call the collection of objects worldview which I actually borrowed that phrase from Thomas Berry that eco-theologian, and that's more the idea that we're more like billiard balls who kind of bounce off of each other, that one of us can be safe at the expense of another and that might also mean that an economy can be thriving while the ecosystem isn't. That's sort of another feature of the collection of objects worldview. And I do agree with you that for most of my life it felt like there was more and more decisions being made from that worldview of a web of relationships, if you think about increasing civil rights, increasing the rights of women or moving toward racial justice. At the same time, I think we know that that other worldview didn't really go away. Worldviews don't go away quite as easily as that and there's ebbs and flows, of sort of where society is aligned and it does feel like for a time, that balance has shifted, and I think that's one reason why multisolving is so important. Right now.

Beth Sawin:

Multisolving is actually only possible within the web of relationship worldview because it depends on as we've been talking about this reaching across boundaries and silos to care about the issues that impact someone else. That's a web of relationship way of seeing the world. And even if it feels small, you know it's a community scale project. Maybe it only affects one park, but the people there are listening to each other, they're caring about each other's well being. I see that as building a kind of muscle memory from which this worldview of web of relationship can find new seeds and, you know, keep going into the future.

Beth Sawin:

The other thing that people who study worldviews say is that they rise into prominence when they solve problems, when they're useful, and so that's the other, like the very practical side of multisolving. If it's feeding people, if it's keeping them sheltered, if it's protecting waterways and air quality, that attracts more energy and more support, and that's another. We've been talking about reinforcing feedback. Where change builds upon itself, that's another reinforcing feedback loop. Our small successes bring other like-minded people to our causes and we get to do more experiments and hopefully with more successes. And so I really caution people, especially now when it's easy to be discouraged, to focus more on how well you're embodying that web of relationships worldview, if that's the one that sounds right to you, how high is your fidelity to it, rather than how big is your project or how large is your budget. So it's a different way of thinking of things, but a lot of how systems change supports that, because of the way that small changes can ripple and expand.

Jennifer Hiatt:

There is really no denying that we are living in some tumultuous times where change is kind of occurring. So, to that end, what advice would you give people who are trying to be multi-solvers when it feels like there is no stability in the system at this point, different than being overwhelmed by all. Of you could do with multisolving, but just there's no stability, it's hard to keep going.

Beth Sawin:

Well, over the years, and really now for almost 15 years, we've had a few projects where we've been asked to scan for examples of multisolving around the world, and one thing we realized was how many of those examples were actually a response to our crisis. I'll just maybe tell you a couple. We looked at a project in New Zealand called Warm Up New Zealand, and it was a response to the 2008 financial crisis. There was a downturn in construction, people in that sector were out of work, no-transcript impacts of people living in those buildings, and they found that there was reduced medication expenses and fewer visits to the emergency department because the housing had improved. And, in fact, on a dollar per dollar basis, some of those health savings were larger than the energy savings. So a project that started in response to a crisis in the economy without much connection to health broadened to where public health became involved in the second round of the project and doctors could refer patients for an energy upgrade.

Beth Sawin:

So not that we should celebrate crisis. Of course, no one wants to do that. We know innocent people are suffering right now, but we should also remember in crisis, innovation often happens and we can be part of that. So that's one thing I would say about tumultuous times. The other thing that I talk about in the book is about the no regrets actions, things that we can do even if we don't know what's going to happen next.

Beth Sawin:

Bets actions, things that we can do even if we don't know what's going to happen next that are probably pretty good bets, and the way I explain that is to say, if I told you that tomorrow was going to be a really difficult day for you, but I didn't tell you why like maybe you're going to have to take a really hard math test, or maybe your car is going to break down and you're going to be late to get your kid from school you don't know which it's going to be there's still things you could do today that could help the outcome of that.

Beth Sawin:

Like, what might you do? You might decide to get a really good night's sleep, you might try to eat a healthy breakfast, you might spend time doing something you love, with people you love, so that your batteries are charged up, and so those are things that I think we should pay even more attention to because of the uncertainty, and it applies beyond just our individual systems. We can make our watersheds healthier, and that's gonna help whether drought comes or flooding comes right. Both would pay off. So when you start thinking that way, you'll find all kinds of things that are worth doing, even if you don't know exactly what's gonna happen next.

Jennifer Hiatt:

On that hopeful note, this is booked on planning. So always our last question is what books would you recommend to our readers that they should check out?

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked because I have two that I'm one I read a while ago and one I'm reading right now. So the older one is called From what Is to what If, and it's by Rob Hopkins, who's based in the UK, and the subtitle is unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want, and it really looks at what our communities might be if we really allowed ourselves to imagine what we really want to see, and it's full of hopeful examples. The one I'm just partway through is called the equitably resilient city. It's by Zachary Lamb and Lawrence Vale and I think the title does a great job. It showcases examples from around the world of people prioritizing two goals. So this is really multi-solving right Of improving equity while also making our cities more resilient to the different shocks and forces that we know are here now or coming soon in the future.

Stephanie Rouse:

Both great books We'll have to add to our recommended reading list. Beth, thank you so much for joining us on the show to talk about your book Multisolving Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World.

Beth Sawin:

Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Beth Selwyn about her book Multisolving Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Island Press, or click the link in the show notes below to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked, on Planning you.

People on this episode

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Jennifer Hiatt

Co-host
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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

Co-host