The Local Transformation Toolkit provides a local community a way to reorganize itself towards sustainability and wellbeing, responding to the great challenges of this historical period, adopting systemic thinking and a specific set of methodologies, tools and principles.
To create deep cultural and practical changes towards sustainability and wellbeing through the real life implementation of the set of Principles emerged mainly in the context of the Transition Towns Movement.
Explore the PrinciplesLTT is designed to perform a set of functions that we consider extremely important for every community trying to evolve and change.
A way for the community to easily evaluate its initiatives in a cheap, approximate way, but still sensible enough for the present purpose, and to set a reference Baseline from where its path toward the sustainability and wellbeing is starting. This will also let the same community to keep track of the progresses and changes over time. Meanwhile the LTT helps to spot energy, resources and weak points of the community, providing a diagnosis tool to inform the support and design of other actions, policies, etc.
A better way to connect different actors and help them co-design plans and actions. The way the LTT works tends to break walls and compartments, making the power of connections, cooperation and sharing more visible and valuable. This is achieved mainly by the use of a very specific and unusual governance model of the process
Designing and planning is nice, but in the end we want to see facts. In a world facing various levels of scarcity, the need of doing a lot with less can be a key ability to pursue. By taking actions together, we are more likely to be able to support shifts in culture and behaviour and to achieve impacts which are more proportionate to the ecological and social crises we face. Adding the energy of different actors we produce subsidiarity and we use complementarity to the best.
We have now so many different technologies, methodologies, proposals, possibilities that is quite easy to get lost or be paralyzed by the general noise or by the impact of the choice paradox. The LTT aims to make readily available in its Pattern Language Database a variety of tools and concepts that are particularly suitable for the kind of process we are trying to foster. It will also suggest how to connect and use them in the most effective way, highlighting strengths, risks and weaknesses for each one of them.
Using the LTT will help people gravitate towards systemic thinking and key patterns towards sustainability. This will happen for those aware and in direct contact with the LTT but also for those that will use the tools or that are part of processes designed within the LTT logic. In fact the basic Principles will be replicated in a fractal way all over the system elements. The final effect will hopefully be a slow but steady change of the agenda and cultural background of the community.
The LTT introduces an innovative and disruptive governance model within the start-up and implementation teams managing the system and beyond. This function is transversal to all the others and is there to create a decision making space that is completely different from the one we normally experiment in our institutional and democratic routines. In particular we use the Sociocracy 3.0 methodology in combination with a number of other simple tools of support greatly improve sensemaking ability and reduce polarization (enabling inclusion and the dialogue between diversity).
