Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
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bethsawin.bsky.social
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
@bethsawin.bsky.social
28K followers 1.4K following 3.2K posts
Director Multisolving Institute. She/her. Systems thinking, climate justice, and multisolving, with a sprinkle of gardens and the odd puns. @bethsawin on X
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bethsawin.bsky.social
We are hosting a hands on training with FLOWER - the tool for helping cross sectoral groups build shared understanding and take action together in complexity. The training will get you on your way to use FLOWER in your own organizations and communities. Nov 19 12-1:30 PM ET bit.ly/MultisolvingF...
he Power of Possibilities The Multisolving institute invites you to our hands on training for our tool developed for Facilitating LOng-term, Whole-system, Equity-based Reflection. In this webinar, our goal is to teach you about the software’s features and answer your questions about how FLOWER can support your goals. Are you ready to unlock the power of possibilities? Register using the link below to join us. 19 November 12-1:30 PM
November 7, 2025 at 7:46 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
With the solstice racing nearer, dog walks are becoming sunrise walks.
Sun rising through bare trees An apple tree in a frosty field as the morning sun hits the hillside. A big black dog is walking away from the camera
October 28, 2025 at 1:27 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
More seriously, I am noticing my own temptation in fear, confusion & overwhelm to get stuck in what I just named the "rumination loop." Same steps in the same order except it bypasses the "take a step" part. When there's new information everyday & new worries & new stories it's really easy to do.
The learning loop, except that the arrows skip the "take a step" box
October 24, 2025 at 2:17 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
I have a secret strategic plan for the rest of my life. It's newly updated for the levels of collapse, emergence, uncertainty, and destabilization we are experiencing and will likely to continue to experience for the rest of our lives. Feel free to borrow it. It's one size fits all. 🤣
A Learning Loop diagram. Take a step, reflect, update understanding, plan, take a step, etc
October 24, 2025 at 2:17 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
In honor of today's outage which apparently disrupted automatic cat feeders, medicare sign-ups and everything in between, an excerpt from by book Multisolving. Diversity, redundancy, having more than one way to do the same thing can be a super-power in unstable times.
Diversity, while not always efficient in a narrow sense, can be protective in times of disruption or rapid change. These examples all highlight a trade-off. Efficiency can help systems thrive during periods of stability. But it can make them vulnerable during periods of disruption, hindering their ability to shift in response to new opportunities. You are already making progress in this shift by multisolving. By designing for multiple goals, you are creating a system that is less highly optimized for singular goals and therefore likely to be less brittle. Multisolving often happens in partnerships and collaboratives and thus can help build redundancy and flexibility. You can have more than one organization maintaining the key records or holding knowledge on key processes. Since you are already experimental and iterative in your design, you can try several ways to meet the same goals. Not only will you learn, you'll also have backup plans and approaches should you need them.
October 20, 2025 at 5:52 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
A "giveaway clue" (maybe....)
The bed of a white pickup truck is filled with a large blue contraption. There are hoses and cranks and doors and all manner of things. There is also a purple box and you can just make out the words: not your average toilet.
October 12, 2025 at 2:38 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
We spent the day yesterday on the first step of a project to conserve water, protect a wetland, close a nutrient cycle loop, avoid a potential costly expense, and get back a sustainability feature we've been missing since we moved into our new house. Photos below . What are we doing?
A man stands in the bed of a pick up truck, with two planks coming off the side. A large blue object is supported at the bottom of the planks A garden cart with a large blue object with some tubes and fittings
October 12, 2025 at 2:18 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Such beauty and peace this Earth we are a always part of offers up day after day. The humans who have seized the levers of power may not be in touch with the operating instructions for the planet, but they are right there if you pay attention.
A misty view across a dirt road to a pasture. The colors of the asters on the land echo the colors of the sky above A small outbuilding of unpainted wood with a red door. There are flower parts in front of the building the clouds above and behind it are illuminated by the sun so that they glow. Close up of a very purple aster comuning with a very plump bumble bee.
October 1, 2025 at 1:45 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Systems change when the connections between their parts change, which means that community building is climate change response. Join us for a virtual #ClimateWeek conversation. What works and who do we need to be to build community in these times? September 25 at 1PM EST. us06web.zoom.us/meet...
Image of a flyer: Multisolving Moment: Building Community for Climate Justice
September 23, 2025 at 3:54 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Tomatoes are still real though. They just keep on ripening no matter what's going on.
a green container full of tomatoes of many colors and sizes
September 14, 2025 at 12:27 AM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Emerging from the woods after a week with no cell service is always a little weird, but this time it's very very weird. You look away for a moment and the fabric of consensus reality has gotten a fair bit weaker.
View of a forested landscape taken from a high vantage points. There are hits of fall foliage just beginning
September 14, 2025 at 12:27 AM
bethsawin.bsky.social
In honor of a webby morning walk, the poem from Chapter One of my book. The poem is called Web World, I wrote it to remind us that, whether we see them or not, we move always in webs upon webs.
a spider web stretched between meadow plants Web World Spiders worked all night so that when I walked through the pasture it was web filled, like the world. It was only the clinging dew drops that made the webs strung between meadow rushes and milkweed stems visible at all. This is how webs are: to see, look for sparkle. There is a web strung by a butterfly between this milkweed and Mexico. There is a water web that connects a dew drop to an upwelling ocean. And of course, there is a web that connects you to me. Moving through a web world could be a joy. Or, it could hurt; it could desecrate. Or— you know this, you can trust this— it could heal. It’s not the web that tilts the balance. It’s how you move within it.
September 8, 2025 at 1:15 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Please join us at our second "Multisolving Moment" a pop up virtual space to together explore the challenges and opportunities of complex systems change in tumultuous times. This time the theme is community building. Sept 25 at 1PM ET www.climateweeknyc.o...
An event flyer title Multisolving Moment. Sept 25 1PM ET
September 5, 2025 at 1:55 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
I celebrated this nice recognition for my book Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World by eating a fresh sun warmed peach. You can find the book in bookstores or online. You'll have to find your own peach though! bookshop.org/p/books...
Business Impact Award 2025 Longlist with an image of the cover of the book Multisolving Elizabeth Sawin: Multisolving Island Press, 2024 Complex problems abound, but multisolving – “using one investment of time, money, or energy to address multiple problems” – may hold the clue to penetrating them. With this strategy, complexity fosters solutions instead of thwarting them. Elizabeth Sawin, founder of the Multisolving Institute, offers systems thinking strategies for addressing multiple problems at once. If you’ve wondered how to use systems thinking to solve problems, this helpful explanation provides both an overview and accessible methods — such as applying feedback to weigh a decision’s benefits and risks. Rich, well-chosen examples make the approach especially convincing.
September 3, 2025 at 3:46 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Wearing our wool hats and jackets for breakfast this morning. 48.° Heard the school bus turn around up the road. Officially autumn on the porch even if we are shy of the equinox. #porchnote
A view through the screen of a porch. The sky is blue with wisps of clouds. The march as some mist on it. There's a table in the foreground and houseplants, a watering can, and orange candles.
September 2, 2025 at 1:53 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
We harvested peach tree number one. Small crop after last year’s bumper crop. But delicious. Some for eating out of hand, some for the freezer… and peach ice cream has been mentioned.
Two trays of peaches in a single layer on a porch table.
September 1, 2025 at 7:13 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Our sweet potatoes from last fall are keeping amazingly well in the root cellar. Who knows what goes on down there in the dark?
A person wearing a plaid shirt is holding a large sweet potato. There's a split in the potato that looks like a mouth and two black eyes that may have been drawn by hand. 🤣
August 31, 2025 at 12:29 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Sometimes a little order is therapeutic. 4 months after we moved the pantry is getting organized
Pantry shelves of dried beans, grains and fruit
August 30, 2025 at 2:10 AM
bethsawin.bsky.social
I think now is a time we could learn from goldenrod. If it's not a plant you know here are a few things about it: It finds its way into marginal spaces at the edges of a mowed area, the un-mulched spot in the flower garden, the gravely side of the road.
A meadow dominated by the tall bright yellow flowers of goldenrod
August 26, 2025 at 12:13 AM
bethsawin.bsky.social
‘Twas a success — pictured is Queenie Buzzbutt demonstrating step in the assembly.
Kids watching a man assembling pieces of wood. They are standing in a workshop A long wooden octagon stuffed with cardboard tubes
August 22, 2025 at 9:56 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Can building community change the world? Can it support us as shocks shake the systems we depend on? Does multisolving building community? Or does community building enable multisolving? If questions like these interest you please join us in reflection and conversation. bit.ly/ClimateWeek25...
A banner for an event reading: Multisolving Moment: Building Community in a time of Destabilization
August 20, 2025 at 8:38 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
The people we talked to were doing different things from decarbonizing cities in Canada to improving rural health in Georgia to protecting wetlands in Mexico. So different, yet so many resonances. We wanted to capture that, but not another long wordy document hat would go unread. Here's a sample.
A page from the report, heading "Motivation" Text as follows: Things are going wrong. In too many places. Injustice. Emissions. Disasters. Housing too expensive to make home. Illness. And no health care anywhere nearby. Informal settlements destroying wetlands. Fragmentation. Stolen power. We don’t have time – or energy – to do it all alone. So we wanted to go upstream. Look for the root causes. Help people live into the full potential of their lives. Go on a healing journey. Repair. Focus on prevention. Find our shared purpose. Shared commitment. Follow our passion to build community and put equity at the beginning. In the middle. And in the end.
August 19, 2025 at 8:19 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
Found myself writing to colleagues today about this "report" of ours from 2023. An experiment in looking for coherence across diverse experiences. It took the form of a "found poem" made up of lines from the transcripts of interviews.
The cover of a report, an image of light house against a dark sky. The title is Looking for Signal: Multisolvers in Their Own Words.
August 19, 2025 at 8:19 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
It's easy to feel small right now.
When I do, I picture my favorite fractal (OK I don't have a favorite, I love them all, but you get the point).
I picture a fern, a tree, a capillary bed, a river delta, neurons branching.

A black and white photo of a large, leafless tree. Image credit: pixabay
August 19, 2025 at 3:57 PM
bethsawin.bsky.social
It's easy to feel small right now.
When I do, I picture my favorite fractal (OK I don't have a favorite, I love them all, but you get the point).
I picture a fern, a tree, a capillary bed, a river delta, neurons branching.

A black and white photo of a large, leafless tree. Image credit: pixabay
August 19, 2025 at 3:55 PM