A Practical Framework

Our escalating global polycrisis¹Marginnote polycrisis1A crisis that consists of multiple, causally entangled, mutually reinforcing (economic, political, social, ecological) crises “that must be understood and addressed as a whole.” ↩ is caused by an extractive and exploitative system founded on the idea of separation: the false belief that we are separate from our bodies, emotions, other living beings, communities, and the Earth as a whole. The reality is that we aren’t – that the world is interconnected. The problem is that our actions don’t reflect this reality.

Complex systems perpetuate and endure due to the constraints they impose on their elements – conditions that influence and shape their behaviour. The belief in and the experience of separation are some of the primary constraints that maintain the dominant anti-life system: They are what makes strategies of separation successful, spreading them across the globe.

This assessment is shared by activists, scientists, spiritual leaders, and traditional knowledge holders alike. For all of us, the question is: what can we do about it?

How to Change Our System

Any complex system is shifted from one stable state to another by changing the constraints it operates under. To bring about the change we seek, we will need to impose constraints underpinned by the idea of interconnection. This will foster a belief in and experiences of interconnectedness, enabling strategies that embrace the reality of it to be more successful than those based on the idea of separation.²Marginnote theory-12For a deeper explanation of of all this, see the page on our theoretical foundations. ↩

One place we can implement such constraints is the way we organise for social change. Our current organising methods – hierarchical, democratic, consensus- or consent-based – are all framed in an ontology of separation: as solving the problem of coordination between individuals who are separated by their goals and preferences. This inadvertently reproduces and reinforces the very dynamics we are trying to change. As a result, the change we seek is often undermined.

Organisational methods that emerge from an assumption of interconnectedness create space for new ways of working and relating that reflect the interconnected nature of reality and the life-affirming systems we hope to strengthen. They empower us to develop purposeful strategies while building bonds of trust and providing care and support in the face of trauma, harnessing a creative force that can generate collective power.

This is a key advantage when facing forces of oppression that are atomised and therefore limited by ideas of separation. Moreover, if these ways of organising are more successful than those based on separation, they will spread across the system as an enabling constraint, creating the cascading feedback loops of interconnection needed to shift our civilisation toward a more just and sustainable way of living.

Three Pillars

To help organisers discover and practice new ways of working that can create transformative ontological shifts, we have developed a framework based on three enabling constraints:

1. Central commitment: We make a commitment that whenever there is a decision to make about how we work, we choose the option that cultivates both our awareness and embodied experience of interconnectedness.
2. Reflection: We work in defined review cycles so we can discern whether the choices we make actually support us to fulfil this commitment and what we might need to learn to do so.
3. Radical listening and learning: We make space in each cycle for learning to listen without judgement and to acquire skills and relational capacities that enable us to fulfil this commitment.

A Commitment to Cultivating Awareness and Experience of Interconnectedness

The more consciously aware we are of the interconnectedness of everything, the more we can avoid replicating and reinforcing destructive, separation-based dynamics. For example, we could grow food using fertilisers for larger crops this year, but this would reduce nutrition, rely on fossil fuel extraction, and denude soil over time.

We could build movements through centralised organisation, but this would disempower grassroots initiatives who understand their contexts and have acquired a wealth of experience, likely encouraging competition and rivalry. We could use hierarchy for quick decision-making, but this would entrench power, encourage political maneuvering, and undermine our ability to create meaningful change.³Marginnote examples3There are numerous other examples of these dynamics – we discuss some of them in our podcast. ↩

However, it’s not enough to be aware of interconnectedness with our thinking mind — the role of the body is fundamental. As any musician, athlete, scientist, or writer will confirm, we are often most effective when we are in a flow state or trance: our thinking mind becomes quiet, actions and ideas seem to arrive as if from elsewhere.

Many of us have learned to value somatic information such as that “knot in your stomach” – a felt sense that something isn’t quite right, even when our “rational,” left-hemisphere thinking mind doesn’t understand why. Our commitment is to nurture and amplify this competence.

Somatic information includes non-linear, non-cognitive information communicated through sensations, movement impulses, intuitions, images, visions and dreams. Modern science provides a clear articulation of the vast amount of information available to us when we shift our conscious attention to this somatic information.⁴Marginnote theory-24Again, see our theoretical foundations for more on this. ↩

It is for this reason that when we choose how to do our work, we commit to finding a way to both remain aware of the interconnected nature of the circumstances we are in, and to pay attention to somatic information, considering what it is bringing, what we are missing, and what needs tending. This lets the wider intelligence of life support our work, allowing us to experience, not simply understand, the interconnected nature of things.

Reflecting in Regular Review Cycles

Organisations which work in regular review cycles are able to adapt, while those that don’t often struggle and stagnate.⁵Marginnote orgdev5This insight has been captured in many approaches to organisational development, e.g. learning organisations, lean management, or agile development. While they have often been a vehicle for consultancies riding hype cycles, the insight itself has remained extraordinarily stable and useful. ↩ Review cycles create the feedback loop that supports change within complex systems and is central to our approach. It is not about measuring or neat lines that go up or down. It’s about the act of noticing the patterns that are emerging from our work.

Our suggested model for these cycles is developed in partnership with those who will be applying it and builds upon good organisational practice. It encourages individuals, teams, organisations, and networks to build a heartbeat of regular reflection into the ways they work.

As individuals, we are encouraged to regularly capture our work experience in a simple way. This enables patterns to become visible over time, which we can then assess as a team. This lightweight method avoids adding bureaucracy that gets in the way of our actual work, while allowing us to identify enablers (practices and approaches that help us meet our purpose and our central commitment) and disablers (such as colonial patterns and trauma that keep us from doing so).

It intersects with approaches already used for working in learning cycles and can be expanded to capture a wide range of information so that patterns become visible across diverse areas, supporting organisations to move wisely towards their intended purpose.

Radical Listening & Learning

In the Global North, we don’t actually know how to operate from an assumption and experience of interconnectedness. If we are to meet our central commitment, we need to move beyond the mental constraints and unhealthy practices imposed on us by the dominant system.⁶Marginnote inspiration6For this part of our work, we are drawing a lot of inspiration from the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. ↩

This means making space to slow down, tune in, and notice what’s present beneath the surface – the emotions, beliefs, tensions, somatic signals, and patterns in the group. And it means learning to let go of acting from ego, urgency, or the need to be right, and instead moving from openness, humility, and curiosity. This allows us to access a wider field of intelligence – one that includes the intelligences of our bodies, the collective, and the systems we’re embedded in.

There is a wealth of experience and processes that will help organisations move towards practices that can support this, for example methods for decolonising, building trust and capacity, or training our attention to somatic information and capacity for entering flow states. However, we can’t prescribe which approaches and practices are appropriate to the wide variety of contexts in which organisations operate.

Radical listening and learning is understood as a regular practice within the context of our work. As patterns of enablers and disablers emerge, we are asked to consider: In the next cycle, what do we need to learn to better meet our central commitment? And how can we undertake this learning so that it supports our collective purpose?

In this way, it becomes the soil which nurtures what we do, helping us shift away from organising based on control and separation, and towards a way of working that centres relationships and responsiveness. We make time each cycle for learning so we can discover how to make these changes given our unique contexts.

Our framework recognises both that these changes will require deep and transformative efforts, and that it is vital they enhance our ability to navigate towards the purpose for which we have come together. Its implementation will inevitably surface how we unconsciously reproduce patriarchal and colonised patterns in our working relationships, as well as bring clarity about alignment and divergence of purpose. How we approach these revelations — mindful of power, privilege, and purpose — will be an ongoing experiment requiring care and discernment.

We need a nuanced approach that balances the need to undertake challenging development work while not interfering with our ability to get on with our day-to-day work. This balance is achieved by understanding that the aim is to take small steps, becoming a little more aware of, and experiencing a slightly stronger, expanded sense of interconnectedness each cycle.

Next Steps