A practical, inspirational, revolutionary guide to cultural innovation

Many of us possess a deep desire to make the world all around us a better place. But often our good motives are undermined by the fear that we are so insignificant in the best scheme of things that nothing we are able to do will in actuality help give food to the world’s starving, fix the harm of a Hurricane Katrina and even get a healthy lunch program up and running in the neighborhood school. We tend to think that great public change is the province about Getting to Maybe: The way the World Is Transformed of heroes – an intimidating view of fact that keeps normal people over the sofa. But extraordinary leaders such as Gandhi and even unlikely interpersonal activists such as Bob Geldof most often observe themselves as harnessing the forces around them, rather than singlehandedly establishing those causes in motion. The trick in virtually any great cultural project – in the global fight against AIDS to attempting to eradicate poverty within a single Canadian city – is to avoid looking at the discrete elements and start attempting to comprehend the complex interactions between them. By studying fascinating real-life examples of social change through this systems-and-relationships zoom lens, the authors of Getting to Maybe tease out the rules of engagement between volunteers, market leaders, organizations and circumstance – between people and what Shakespeare known as “the tide in the affairs of men.”

Getting to Probably applies the insights of complexity theory and harvests the encounters of a wide range of people and agencies – like the ministers behind the Boston Magic (and its own aftermath); the Grameen Standard bank, in which one man’s dream of micro-credit sparked a economic trend for the world’s poor; the attempts of the Canadian clothing designer to help change the lives of Indigenous women and children; and so many more – to construct a brand new method of thinking about making modification in communities, running a business, and in the world.