Clara Moreno
I love cheese. So do the four characters of the tale ‘Who moved my cheese?’ by Spencer Johnson. Despite this story is a best-seller motivational fable on how to deal with change in a business environment, I think that it shares something with sustainable development too: fear to change.
The four characters of the story –two mice and two lilliputians- represent four different attitudes towards change: quickly detecting the necessity of a change, taking immediate action, denial and resistance to change fearing bad consequences and slowly learning to change when being convinced that it can lead to something better. For the mice the cheese is simply their daily food. For the lilliputians the Cheese is a metaphor of what they base their lives on and makes them feel fulfilled.
After struggling for some time, the four of them find a deposit with four types of cheese. They all enjoy the cheese, but the mice do not lower their guard that the cheese can be gone at any time. On the contrary, the lilliputians start creating a comfort zone around their cheese and see themselves as eternal owners of it. One morning, the deposit is empty: there is no more cheese left. As a reaction to this change, the mice take action, abandon the deposit and search for new cheese while the lilliputians stay in the deposit analyzing the situation and denying the need to search for new cheese. They do not want to abandon their known comfort zone, because they fear the unknown. (Warning: spoiler! One of these two finally abandons it)
This short story presents many reflections: about simple, intuitive and decisive actions rather than complex ones; about comfort zones where no need of change is felt; about anticipating rather than only adapting to change and about willingness to change only when there is not much to lose, since something new represents risk. The story also reflects about the feeling of (un-)security, about being a prisoner of fears that paralyze and about change in a group only being possible when many people want the same change.
How does this all relate to sustainability? To me sustainable development is about changing or adapting current practices – to take more advantage of what we have, to do more with less and to envision more than solely economic growth. Many times we have talked about ‘steering or triggering change’ and about ‘drivers and barriers’ for changing current practices. I think fear of the unknown is one of the main barriers. And this is what entrepreneurship means to me: anticipating to change and pushing the current boundaries rather than ‘only’ adapting to new ones; turning the risk and fear to lose security into an opportunity to win something better…designing for an uncertain future. What I am not sure about yet is how ‘simple and intuitive’ actions as the ones described in the story can lead to sustainable development. Because being a sustainable entrepreneur does not look simple!
To finish with, I think we also need to be somewhat critical about creating change and adapting to change. We need the vision of a new state and the ability to recognize what needs change and what does not, what motivates change and where this change leads us… to avoid an addiction to permanent change and simply differentiating from the mainstream.