In 2020, as part of a team working alongside Phoebe Tickell, who has written and presented extensively on the blurring of boundaries involved in complex systems and entangled, interdependent ecosystems of organizations and organisms, I delved into the mindset of creative reflection, inspiration, and exploration, offered through a series of gatherings in virtual space.
The gatherings were kicked off by an exercise in moral imagining during the early weeks of the COVID lockdowns, drawing together a network of storytellers, facilitators, and narrative practitioners, which has since expanded to include funders, policy-makers, and their professional advisors.
As a lawyer and legal engineer, I have been working for the last decade on technology-based mechanisms for upgrading our institutions and legal systems to take into account outcomes and measurements on how effective they are in solving increasingly complex and intractable social and organizational challenges. As laws and institutions fail to keep up with these challenges, we face a moment of fundamental crisis that threatens the legitimacy and stability of our values and institutions.
A major part of this crisis in legitimacy is the sense of not being able to see the rules, and how they are made and operate. We are not able to participate. Automation and technological change seem to be amplifying this effect. With increasingly complex and unpredictable webs of connections and interdependencies, opaque rules and interactions enable a system to be silently influenced; opaque institutions get gamed. Complex rules or rules detached from the actual interactions they govern have the same effect, the institutions get gamed.
With COVID-19, this crisis is reaching a climax. For policy-makers everywhere, the “normal” narrative for everyone has now come into question. Our governments and other current institutions and systems of sensemaking, coordination, and collective action are struggling to respond to the scale of the intersecting crises, from tackling COVID-19, to misinformation campaigns, to biodiversity destruction.
From the operation of markets, to how we operate at the workplace, from international climate or trade treaties, to local funding and planning decisions, we are plagued by corrupt or captured systems of resource and power allocation, needlessly-competitive dynamics, and a lack of vitality and inspiration. We have forgotten how to connect with ourselves, with each other, and to Nature.
More so than ever before, political leaders and their constituents know things need to be different, but we struggle to deliberate or coordinate. Lawyers have always been tasked with seeking ways to build trust, to develop non-zero sum games that support collaboration and the balancing of different values. And so lawyers and policymakers, I believe, have a critical role to play in developing their own mindsets and those of their clients and constituents, to enable sectors to work together and imagine together; to go beyond rivalrous dynamics towards a deep care and moral responsibility for each other and the world.
Communities of changemakers have been forming, but they aren’t yet united by common stories, patterns, and spaces around which to collaborate. Unlike teams within government civil services or larger corporations, entrepreneurs and civil society actors have traditionally not had access to the tools, resources or expertise to discover one another, and coordinate around longer-term, complex, systems-level transformations.
We asked:
What if we could concentrate and give access to the most rigorous tools and methods for strengthening our collective ability to perceive, discuss, and research complex issues?
What if for lawyers and policymakers who identify as changemakers, along with the communities and stakeholders who they serve and are supported by, we could offer the most rigorous approaches and practices around complexity science, collaboration, expanded perception and imagination?
What if we formed a warm community based on belonging and a long-term commitment to each other, founded on a culture of moral imagination where radical collaboration was the norm?
Through 2020 and into 2021, we have been launching various elements of an ecosystem capacity building lab, built from a concentration of expertise and tools to catalyze deep systems change. Over the past 10+ years we have been collecting and building the tools and approaches to up-skill people in systems thinking and ecosystemic approaches towards deep systems change.
Our long-term mission is to catalyze a future where decisions are made by humans with Nature and future generations in the room, and where radical collaboration is the norm.
The core communities we serve are the changemakers, movement builders, and creators of ‘invention catalysts’, from entrepreneurs to civil society activists, who are working on projects that both need and offer systems-wide transformations.
Concurrently, we serve funders, regulators, policy-makers, and other institutional actors who are seeking to transform the way they work with these communities to drive deep systems change.
We have gathered a team and network of advisors, to work across disciplines using a directional patterning of societal change we have developed:
- Expand imagination and perception
- Tell new stories about humanity
- Shift practices and norms
- Innovate institutional structures
- Develop new legal structures
From shifting culture, to norms, and ultimately the technical and legal architecture of our organizations, economies, societies, and bioregions, we work to concentrate the necessary tools and methods for collective development and application of these organizing patterns for change at an ecosystemic level.
We are prototyping these organizing patterns through the following three interdependent approaches:
1) Expanding perception: Rigorous practices around expanding imagination and perception can first re-establish our connections to nature, other people, our work, and our selves. In this, we have been:
- Working with funders, entrepreneurs, leaders, policy-makers
- Working with the public on large-scale moral imagination exercises
2) Visionary narrative work: Being a beacon for Grand Narratives that shift culture and our understanding of what it means to be human; our identity, beliefs, and connection to ecology.
3) Upskilling radical collaboration: Developing capacity building networks, collective action infrastructure, new governance models, and practical skills for horizontal collaboration.
For further detail on our historic, ongoing, and upcoming work around these three approaches, please get in touch!