# Declaring Worldviews in SSM for Sustainability & Community Learning

## TL;DR

This paper explores how Soft Systems Methodology can be enhanced to help communities address sustainability challenges through shared learning and values.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a double-loop learning cycle within SSM to explore and align community worldviews with sustainability ideals.

## Key findings

- A double-loop learning cycle can help uncover and align community worldviews with sustainability goals.
- The value-action gap phenomenon explains the disconnect between intentions and actions in sustainability efforts.
- Incorporating models like Doughnut Economics and UN SDGs can foster common ground for sustainable action.

## Abstract

For over fifty years, Soft Systems ideas and the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) have played a pivotal role in understanding various problem situations and initiating action. Often tackling the grandest challenges of our time, SSM will retain continued relevance in helping decision-makers address sustainability challenges within organisations and their communities. In this paper, we are concerned with the meaningful co-creation of sustainable value through community-based learning using SSM. More specifically, recognising that a sustainability paradigm, characterised by the need to create a just and safe space for humanity to thrive within the means of a living planet (as called for by Raworth, 2017), is often marginalised or overlooked. This paradigm presents us with an ethical imperative, complex and messy challenges/issues, and a set of ideals (articulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) that are significantly off track. This paper employs a variation of the Delphi method, drawing on the authors’ collective interest and experience in applying SSM in communities, to propose a double-loop learning cycle to explore the underlying assumptions of our worldviews and mental models within communities. We suggest that an SSM learning cycle can be enhanced by initiating conversations on relevant models for sustainability (such as Doughnut Economics, UN SDGs, and the principles for a Circular Economy), to find common ground for triggering new learning. This idea is contextualised and proposed as the value(s)-action gap phenomenon, which can help explain the difference between an individual, an organisation, and/or a community's intention(s) and their actual action(s).In doing so, find common ground, shift to higher levels of systems consciousness from an ego-centric to an ecosystem level of awareness, engage communities, and take an intergenerational perspective. We suggest that incorporating a double-loop learning cycle into SSM can support organisations and their communities in putting shared values into meaningful action.