Beyond problem-solving and systems thinking

Have you heard of Paul Chefurka? We stumbled across him some years ago, along with a deceptively simple framework he called the Ladder of Awareness. It’s not a long essay, not an academic treatise, just a short, quietly powerful text. It begins like this: “When it comes to our understanding of the unfolding global crisis, each of us seems to fit somewhere along a continuum of awareness that can be roughly divided into five stages.”

That short passage, and the five stages that follow, may be the most useful and insightful text we’ve read in the past decade. Chefurka isn’t widely known. He’s not a sustainability star; he’s not on the speakers’ circuit or quoted in strategy documents and policy reports. But those who know, know. Over the years, sometimes we heard someone mention his work, and each time, it sparks the same smile and glance: Ah, you too. Nice.

His simple model, his five-step ladder, has come to shape many of our reflections, and many conversations with friends walking similar paths. It offers language for something hard to talk about: the emotional and existential terrain of living in a time of planetary crisis. Let’s walk through the steps:

He begins at the first stage, which he calls Dead Asleep. Here, “there seem to be no fundamental problems.” People are busy living their lives, trusting that innovation, technology, markets, or politics will fix whatever small temporary glitch in progress arises.  It’s not denial in a malicious sense, but a kind of inherited confidence that the system, somehow, works.

Then comes the second stage, where a single big systemic crisis bursts through the surface. A person begins to see one problem. It might be climate change, inequality, injustice, or ecological collapse. Many environmental movements emerged from this place; fierce, focused, passionate. We remember the climate protests of 2019. At this stage, one becomes an activist, devoted to one cause, and often blind to others. There’s power here, and urgency. But there’s also a trap: the belief that the problems of the world stem from this one problem and fixing this one thing will set the world right again.

The third stage arrives when the walls of that single issue begin to crack. A person begins to see interconnections; that environmental degradation is tied to economic systems, that social justice can’t be separated from energy, that migration, biodiversity, and finance form one vast tangle. Greta Thunberg now links climate and Gaza. Complexity grows, and so does frustration. The conversation shifts to which crisis is “the real one.” Many international NGOs find themselves here, wide in scope, but stretched thin, navigating the overwhelm of trying to hold it all at once.

Then comes the fourth stage, systemic awareness. This is where one starts to see not only many problems, but their deep interdependence. Solutions in one domain ripple through others, sometimes making things worse. The world is not a collection of solvable problems, but a living, entangled system where everyone faces a shared predicament. It’s the beginning of a shift from problem-solving to sense-making, but it’s also an uncomfortable threshold. Chefurka writes that people here often withdraw into small circles of others who get it. It’s not a popular place to stand.

Between the fourth and fifth stages lies a fragile passage. When the full scale of the predicament becomes visible, the line between insight and despair grows perilously thin. People falter here. The sense of agency can dissolve; what once felt like clarity can turn heavy. Some retreat into cynicism, others into exhaustion or depression. It can feel like a dark night of awareness. In such times, it matters to stay tender, to notice when despair tightens its grip, in oneself or in others, and to offer gentleness and companionship rather than answers. For some, this care, this simple willingness to stay, becomes the light that keeps the passage open. And sometimes, on the far side of that darkness, something else flickers: a quieter seeing that no longer depends on hope. What if despair is not the end, but a crossing? A necessary unmaking that clears the ground for a deeper kind of attention, not driven by fixing, but by presence.

Then comes the fifth and final stage: an awareness that the predicament permeates everything: our economies, our stories, even our sense of self. Here, “no amount of human cleverness appears able to solve it.” Many who arrive here tend to follow one of two paths. Either they turn outwards, toward smaller, slower forms of life with community building, biodynamic farming, and local initiatives. Or they turn inwards, seek to shift consciousness, and engage in spiritual practice and inner work. And then there are those who simply rest in not-knowing. 

These, then, are the five steps on the ladder, from blissful denial to existential clarity. Not a psychology of collapse, not a moral ranking, but an unfolding of perception. And not risk-free. As Chefurka writes, “It's worth mentioning that there is also the possibility of a serious personal difficulty at this point. Please keep a watchful eye on your own progress, and if you encounter someone else who may be in this state, please offer them a supportive ear.” As Gramsci put it: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

And then comes the question: What lies beyond Stage 5? Chefurka hints at something he calls transcendence. Not an escape, but a deepening, where fear and grief soften into presence. Few describe it well, and perhaps they shouldn’t, because it’s not a doctrine. Also, let’s bear in mind that Chefurka wrote his text in 2012. Much has happened and many have spoken since then. We have in our conversations talked about a possible stage after the fifth. If there is a sixth step, it may lie in the integration of inner and outer work, where reflection and regeneration meet action and repair. Those who reach this place no longer separate consciousness from practice, or thinking from doing. They build, teach, plant, and organize not to save the world, not in pursuit of calculated impact, but to embody a different way of being in it.

Before dreaming of what lies beyond, though, it’s worth remembering that the ladder can become a trap, a hierarchy. “She’s at level two.” “He’s still on the first rung.” Awareness turns into status; the path becomes a scoreboard where a kind of spiritual meritocracy sneaks in. Whether the ladder points up or down, it risks confusing depth with virtue, surrender with failure. That’s where the metaphor begins to bend.

Some fear it’s not a ladder or a spiral, but a labyrinth. We don’t agree, we don’t feel lost. We keep walking, sometimes slowly, sometimes in circles, but we walk, together with a growing group of companions. And in that sense, Chefurka’s model becomes a mirror, a way to notice where we’ve been, what resistance we faced, what we are called toward, and who is with us. And the question of whether the ladder goes up or down becomes irrelevant. 

What we find most remarkable, looking back, is not the stages themselves, but that Chefurka dared to map them, all the way to step five. By doing this, he opened a portal that wasn’t there before: a shared language for what comes after the known, after hope and despair alike. More than a decade later, his ladder invites dialogue about what lies “beyond” the fear of collapse and the despair at the state of things. What happens if you keep pushing? Maybe you reach that strange, luminous terrain where old words begin to fail, but new conversation can be born. In a time when silence often surrounds the unspeakable, Chefurka made it mentionable. And that, perhaps, is his greatest gift: not certainty, but permission.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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