Annotated Table of Contents Multisolving Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World By Elizabeth Sawin
The Introduction explains how multisolving uses on investment of time, money, or political capital to solve multiple problems. In a time of converging crises, it is an exciting possibility. Could we solve problems in ways that solve other problems at the same time. The introduction also describes the teachers and experiences that moved the author from a monosolver to a multisolver. They include a Buddhist scholar, a computer modeler, a climate fueled hurricane, a leader of the movement for racial justice in the American South, and more.
Chapter One (Multisolving: Promises and Obstacles) opens, as do all the subsequent chapters, with a poem, written to express the overall message of the chapter, and to prepare the ground for the chapter to come. The first poem, “Web World”, invites the reader to imagine some of the invisible webs that tie us to together with each other and the rest of life.
The chapter then shows the variety of multisolving, drawing on examples documented in the author’s work. The chapter establishes how multisolving is found at all scales and across sectors and names eight payoffs from multisolving. It invites the reader to imagine a world with more multisolving.
The chapter pivots to face an important fact: multisolving may be everywhere but it’s the exception not the rule. If multisolving shows such promise, why is it so rare? Chapter One shares eight obstacles to multisolving, including institutional silos, disciplinary boundaries, and a lack of tools for working with complex systems. It argues that we’ve broken our world into