“THE GREATEST THREAT to our planet is the idea that some one else will save it.”

This is what I saw an hour ago as I walked up to a picnic table alongside the Mississippi river in Moline, Illinois. It’s quite a thought-provoking comment. But it’s one thing to understand the truth of that statement in the current context, and it’s quite another to think about that idea in the context of an improved art and science of communications.

In his book, The Public and Its Problems, published twice, in 1927 and 1954, John Dewey pointed out that it is a mistake to think we have freedom of thought and action when the concepts we have access to severely restrict our options. From my point of view, today’s world lacks the ideas, methods, and tools we need to take effective action as individuals. We lack the language we need to communicate, magnify, and amplify our individual efforts from within our unique local situations to the global scale.

We must have new languages organizing innovative new combinations of ideas, words, and things if we are to act effectively on the idea that each of us has the power to save the planet, and ourselves. Although we do not currently possess the power we need for our unique efforts to do the job, we could. In the world as we live in it today, even if we all acted as decisively and as effectively as possible on the idea that it is up to us to live sustainably, we must inevitably fail. The whole is not the sum of the parts. Our individual actions do not add up to the level needed to effect real change.

Because our social whole is greater than what we add up to as individuals, we possess capacities for changing our systems only at the level of the patterns in our collective behaviors. We must learn to recognize and leverage those patterns if we are to succeed in transforming our institutions from being inherently disempowering and inequitable to being systematically empowering and equitable.

That transformative power and those capacities are available only as products of our collectively coherent patterns of thought and behavior. We need to bring those patterns into language so we can think on them together and act on them in ways that are coordinated and aligned. That process of bringing things into language is analogous to tuning the instruments of the human, social, and environmental sciences to common scales. And in the same way that standardized tuning systems do not force the round pegs of unique individuality into the square holes of enforced conformity, so, too, it is not necessary for the new languages we need to impose a false uniformity. Harmonizing our relationships does not mean composing and performing only the vapid and hollow Muzak of sterile and bland interactions, but must open up onto a rich diversity of musical ensembles and styles, allowing for jazzy, blue bent notes, alternative tunings, and creative improvisations.

Today’s institutions do not recognize, affirm, celebrate, or act on individuality in the ways that they should, and that they could. There is a tension between standardization and personalization, of course, but they are not mutually exclusive categories. These ideas are explored at length in my published work, especially in the forthcoming book I co-edited with Stefan Cano on person-centered outcome metrology, appearing in the Springer Series on Measurement Science and Technology.