00371 A Hierarchy of Goods, Betters, and Bests
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Incremental steps that lead to better outcomes than we presently experience are always good. The cumulative effect of small incremental steps over time can be powerful.
If you cannot make the best decision, make a better decision.
If you cannot make a better decision, make a good decision.
If you cannot make a good decision, avoid making a bad decision.
If you cannot do the best, do better.
If you cannot do better, do good.
If you cannot do good, don’t do bad.
Often, making good decisions develops the ability to make better decisions. Making better decisions enables you to make the best decisions. This is succession at work in your life.
Use Succession to Solve Problems
Sometimes we need a quick fix to a festering problem. If people are hungry, a fix might involve buying groceries from a supermarket and distributing it to those in need. This isn’t necessarily the best permaculture practice. As an emergency response it works. It is “good.”
Having met the immediate need, we could move on to a second level of response, e.g., teaching people how to cook meals from basic ingredients and maybe moving on to developing capacities like community gardens, tool cooperatives, and processing kitchens at local stores and schools. This is “better.”
The final step would be implementing the best approaches — that is, introducing them to and helping them work through all of the steps of local and community food security. This is “best.”
However, in this particular design problem . . . we are unlikely to do much with the “best” choice until we have worked through “good” and “better.”
Procrastination is the thief of time.
Some of us live in an imaginary future, where we think we will be able to live more permaculturally because, you know, it’s safely in the future and we don’t have to actually worry about doing something in the now.
The kindest thing I can think of to say about that attitude is that it is an unhealthy psychological trap which serves the purposes of the Excess Consumption System.
Getting out of the problem and into the solution requires that you break out of that land of the future lotus eaters, and ground your experience firmly in the here and now!
Decisions regarding change
This material comes from a presentation by Professor Stuart Hill University of Western Sydney, to the Blue Mountains Permaculture community in June 2011, on permaculture and the 'inner landscape'. http://youtu.be/mzY1eZLwOdk. It is worth the time to watch the whole presentation.
Appropriate next steps are always deeply personal and highly context specific.
This is why formulaic, centrally directed, and imposed change always fails to achieve its stated aims and invariably causes more problems than it solves. As you think about the next steps in your life, consider these questions:
- What do you stop doing?
- What do you do differently?
- What do you increase/expand?
- What new things to start doing?
- What will it take to do this?
- What are the barriers and what will remove and weaken them?
- What resources are needed and available (particularly local) and how do we get them?
- Prioritize activities and apportion resources.
- Brainstorm and set long, mid, and short-term goals.
- Break goals into meaningful doable actions (no Olympic-size decisions here!)
- Do, reflect, celebrate — do, reflect, celebrate (praxis!).
- Evaluate and redesign as indicated by outcomes and feedback