Chapter 1: The Global Problematique

This chapter presents the prospectus of the Club of Rome on the predicament of Mankind, by the identification of forty-nine Continuous Critical Problems (CCPs), such as population growth, ecosystem deterioration, obsolescence of the value-base and the educational systems, climate change crisis, and the like. This set of CCPs are strongly coupled in our era to form a new high complexity entity, called the Global Problematique. The complexity of the Problematique cannot be identified and resolved by means of conventional problem-solving methods, such as the simulation modeling of MIT that produced the “The Limits to Growth” report in 1972. It is, therefore, an imperative to develop methods for engaging stakeholders in deliberative dialogue for the construction of consensual narratives and the collective ownership of Problematiques. Such a systemic design methodology is equivalent to a paradigm shift, which Christakis and Kakoulaki have called Demosofia (wisdom of the people). They argue that this paradigm, will be gradually validated by objectifying intersubjectivity through stakeholder inclusion in co-laboratories of democracy, “The Thread” systemic design co-laboratories, represent the Third Phase Science equivalent to the telescope of Galileo, which when combined with the theory of gravitation of Newton, was instrumental in accomplishing the paradigm shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric explanation of planetary motion in the 18th century.