Thinking about the Metacrisis with Kairotic Flow
Before reading, please watch the following 5 minute video clip of Daniel Schmachtenberger talking about the metacrisis.
At the end of the clip, Daniel says,
“So if anything, I want patterns of how to think about [the metacrisis]. And I want frameworks for how to think about it. And I don’t want people to attach to those frameworks because it’ll be useful but also limiting and to realise that cultural aspects do involve education. And media and parenting, and religion … and the structure of cities and… in the Political Economy aspects… lots of things. And so the getting past the zealotous and reductionist focus and being able to get ‘how do all these things come together?’ is key to understanding properly.”
Responding with the Cycle of Kairotic Flow
Since 2018, whenever I’ve listened to Daniel’s invitations for patterns of how to think about the metacrisis, like the one in the video above, I have considered responding with what I now call the Cycle of Kairotic Flow, shown in the diagram below.
While Kairotic Flow was first mapped visually with the cyclical sequence of six Archetypes in 2020 and then named in late 2022, I’ve been applying it for as long as I can remember.
As an intuitive, practical and predictive comprehension tool it’s proven to be remarkably effective, but prior to mapping out Kairotic Flow for others to see, I was only able to share the insights it produced, without really being able to explain how I got there.
The timing feels right to share now. Like a kairos moment, actually!
- Daniel’s public message has shifted. I first noticed a difference in the GITA conversation, which showed up even more strongly in two recent conversations in Sweden (Daniel Schmachtenberger l An introduction to the Metacrisis l Stockholm Impact/Week 2023 and What’s Important? Conversation at NAV).
- Over the past year Kairotic Flow has been taking on a life of its own, separate from me. In October, I made it public with a crowdfunding campaign to write a book — now ended. (If you would like an overview of Kairotic Flow, please start here.)
- The 5 minute clip you hopefully just watched showed up in my feed (again). While it is from an older conversation, it provides a perfect jumping off point.
So let’s jump! 😄
Kairotic Flow is, absolutely, a “pattern of how to think about” life, including the metacrisis. It avoids reductionism and zealotry, and applied properly, could go a long way towards helping us think and work together to navigate our way to a more beautiful world. Kairotic Flow invites us to remember what it means to be fully human.
However:
- Kairotic Flow is not actually a framework.
- Kairotic Flow doesn’t focus on problems or solutions.
- Kairotic Flow is not really a way to get “education and media and parenting and religion… and political economy [to]… come together”.
Each is explained more fully below.
1. Why isn’t Kairotic Flow a framework?
Whenever I hear the word “framework”, I immediately think of a building structure. Something solid. Something that is a human-created form, generally comprised of repurposed parts of non-human-created things. A framework is something to attach other things to, and/or to keep things in place during the process of construction.
I am reminded of the frames in the half-finished house we moved into when I was 10, before my father attached plasterboard to the interior walls.
I also think of the temporary frames that held the boats he was so often building, and the more permanent frames he would create inside the shell of a boat-to-be, that outlined the living spaces-to-be.
I smell wood and fibreglass resin, metal and glue and anti-fouling. And I hear construction noises.
These are good memories for me, but they certainly aren’t what come to mind when I consider Kairotic Flow as a “way to think about”.
All of these associations evoke only one side of the whole Kairotic Flow cycle — the orange side. By this I mean that the term “framework” evokes activities of the Pioneer, Settler, and Town Planner Archetypes on the right-hand side of the diagram, without suggesting the activities of the three Archetypes on the purple side (Steward, Curator, and Scout) at all. And as I hope to make very clear in this essay, that bias towards the orange-side Archetypes is precisely what Kairotic Flow seeks to amend!
What comes to mind for me when I think of Kairotic Flow as a whole, is sailing.
I smell wafts of salt and seaweed, and I feel the wind on my cheeks and the deck rolling under my body.
My earliest memories are of living on a boat. Before I started school, when I was about 3, my family moved onto the first sailing yacht my father built and cruised up the east coast of Australia. My brother was born during those years, and took his first steps on the boat. My first scar resulted from falling out of my bunk while I was sleeping… during a cyclone!
I strongly suspect that Kairotic Flow, my primary sense-maker — my grokker, if you like sci-fi — was largely formed in that early childhood context of life-on-the-water. Sailing is deep in my being, where my sense of life essence and wholeness and wholesomeness resides. And it’s a beautifully apt metaphor for how Kairotic Flow works.
Any yachtie can attest to life on a boat being very different from life on land. Especially while under sail, you’re continually perceiving changes in context: Where the land is relative to the boat, the depths and nature of the water around the boat, how the currents are flowing that might affect the boat, where the wind is coming from and how it’s blowing, and how all the people on the boat (including you) are responding to those conditions, and what is changing — or is likely to change — with the boat and the people as a result.
When you’re sailing, the boat is the locus of (relative!) stability and agency for all of the people on board. It is the relevant holon, the ‘whole’ that is being Stewarded. (To apply Kairotic Flow, you’ve first gotta grok which holon/s you’re grokking, so although the cycle itself is continuous, we always enter Kairotic Flow through Steward.)
You can only Steward the boat and the people on it by holding the boat at the centre of your perceptual scope, and continuously attending to what is present and relevant in the ever-changing context within and all around that continuously moving centre.
Even when the boat is anchored in a quiet harbour, it moves around the tether. The tiny waves rock you to sleep with an ever-changing music playing out against the hull, and when you wake, you’re often facing the opposite direction, many metres away from the position you were in when you climbed into your bunk. The holon of the boat has continuity, but its context changes noticeably while you sleep.
This sense of movement speeds up and slows down, but it never really stops.
And Kairotic Flow is the same. It helps you grok what’s going on with a holon, while it’s moving, and while its context is moving as well. That doesn’t feel like a framework to me… there’s nothing stable enough to attach to. Applying Kairotic Flow requires centering into a scope of concern, so it’s more like a compass or an adjustable lens.
2. Why doesn’t Kairotic Flow focus on problems or solutions?
Daniel’s overarching point in the video is expressed in the title as “all of the problems need all the solutions”. As a “way to think about” anything, Kairotic Flow diverges in an important way here, too. I’ll use the sailing metaphor again to show how.
On a boat, it often doesn’t make much sense to think in terms of problems or solutions. (I mean, you can if you really want to, but it’s a bit weird!)
A storm for example isn’t a problem with a solution. It’s a reality you respond to as best you can in the context you’re in. If you’re near an anchorage that will be sheltered from the storm, go there. If not, ride it out. Wet weather gear helps. So do sea legs, warm soup, and people looking out for each other. A sense of humour really helps. But they’re not solutions, any more than a storm is a problem.
Through the lens of Kairotic Flow, life is being in continuous change, responding to whatever reality is present as best we can, bringing whatever seems relevant — out of everything we know or intuit or imagine — to the moving situation at hand. What matters most is having a good-enough-to-work-with sense of where we are, seeing the possibilities in that context, and taking the ‘next right step’ to attend to whatever needs attending to.
As a result of using Kairotic Flow for many years (before mapping or naming it), I’m quite comfortable being in the largely-unknown, learning continuously, changing tack and adjusting my focus as new information comes in and the environment changes.
And please note that although I just spoke from my personal experience, this is a life perspective and capability, not a character trait. Using Kairotic Flow — like sailing — is a skill that can be learned by anyone.
Or more accurately, remembered and then applied across different situations, since Kairotic Flow simply draws attention to the responding-to-environment activities that any living holon (like a human being!) must always engage in, in order to continue living.
Kairotic Flow focuses not on problems or solutions, but on responding as wisely as possible to continually changing life conditions.
3. Why doesn’t Kairotic Flow ‘bring things together’?
Explaining this one requires a small detour.
Daniel also talks (not in this video, but elsewhere) about the underlying “generator functions” of the metacrisis as a whole, which he sometimes identifies as:
- Rivalrous (win-lose) games
- Extractive behaviour
- Exponential technology
I agree that these are all concerning, and can all be considered important generators of the metacrisis (or, if you prefer, the polycrisis or multi-crisis) we’re now experiencing.
But when I look at the metacrisis as a whole through the lens of Kairotic Flow, I see one dynamic driving the whole damn mess!
Culturally, and throughout our global civilisation’s systems and structures, we systemically and continuously overemphasise the innovating-constructing-standardising Archetypal activities on the orange side of the Kairotic Flow cycle, while devaluing and avoiding the nurturing-decomposing-reorienting activities of the Archetypes on the purple side of the cycle.
This might not sound like much, but the consequences are profound.
Rivalrous (win-lose) games, extractive behaviour, and (exponential) technology are all natural expressions of the orange-side Archetypes. If these expressions were properly balanced by the purple-side Archetypes’ focus on ensuring the well-being of the whole (and in the process, ceasing — or even preventing the start of! — activities which are, in reality, out of alignment with that) then we would not be in crisis.
By consistently avoiding and devaluing the activities of the purple-side Archetypes, we have effectively disconnected the brakes, and disconnected our civilisation from reality.
The orange-side bias in our civilisation is so intense and so pervasive that we frequently mistake the illusions it generates for reality itself, and fail to even see that the purple-side Archetypes are not only important, but necessary to reorient us to reality.
The result is, inevitably, a spiralling dissociation from reality.
At the very end of the video clip, Daniel says he wants people to “realise that cultural aspects do involve education. And media and parenting, and religion and… the structure of cities and… the Political Economy aspects … lots of things. And so… getting past the zealotous and reductionist focus and being able to get, ‘how do all these things come together?’ is key to understanding properly.”
Daniel clearly gets it. But notice here how the orange-side perspective also sneaks into the metacrisis conversation, through the very concepts and language we use to think about the situation, even when we’re saying “please, not that!”
Those concepts of education, media, parenting, political economy etc are all human constructs — classifications or categories we created to help us think about things in bite-sized chunks. They are the products and tools of analysis, reductions of reality. They’re all orange-side techniques and artefacts!
Unfortunately, whenever we attempt to orient thought, choice and action using these human-created concepts, we’re effectively navigating towards the centre or essence of the concept’s definition, and as an inevitable consequence are simultaneously orienting away from reality-as-it-is, as a whole. (The map is not the territory!)
So it’s not just difficult but actually flat-out impossible to bring concepts like these together to deal with the reality of the metacrisis!
What we really need to do is let them go.
Wait, what?!
I’m deadly serious. Bear with me!
We can’t solve the metacrisis, but in a way, we do have to dissolve it — by consistently navigating back towards reality, in every context. By going through the whole cycle and dissolving our illusions as and when they appear.
To restate another way, every single time we try to navigate real life (including the metacrisis) by focusing our attention on human-created constructs like economy and education, we automatically double down on dissociating from reality. As Daniel says, it is reductionistic to do this. That’s the nice way of putting it. Losing touch with reality is also the literal definition of psychotic.
Please understand me here: There is nothing wrong with the activities of the orange-side Archetypes or their tools, per se. Analysis, for example, is the “detailed examination of the elements or structure of something” — we analyse by separating a whole into its component parts, so we can examine those parts in detail and better understand how they work. We can then apply that understanding to great effect in designing and building technologies (of all kinds). That’s why we do it!
Analysis is also a crucial tool for understanding what has gone wrong when something has failed, and the purple-side Archetypes rely on it for that too.
But analysis and other orange-side tools are useless at best, and toxic/destructive at worst, when applied to the purple-side activities of orienting to and working with the whole. The very best analysis of education is about as useful for navigating the metacrisis as a map of the London underground is for navigating London’s streets.
And now back to the sailing metaphor to bring this point home, and show how it speaks to the same theme as the previous two points about frameworks and problems and solutions.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a world-leading expert on ropes and sails. You know how they’re made, what they’re all called, and what their tolerances and best uses are.
And now, imagine you’re on a yacht, sailing. What do you do with all that specialist, expert knowledge about the ropes and sails? Clearly, if you don’t want to run aground or get hurt or knocked overboard, you have to let go of most of what you know — let it recede into the background of your awareness — because it simply isn’t relevant to the situation at hand. What is relevant is what is present in the reality of your current context, as a whole.
So Kairotic Flow doesn’t analyse and it doesn’t bring together the results of analysis. Instead, it focuses on relevant scope as a whole, in context, allowing patterns to emerge into our awareness, without taking things apart in the first place.
What Kairotic Flow does
The key strength of Kairotic Flow is that it rapidly and easily directs our attention to what matters in the real-life situation at hand, even if that situation is abstract, and even when there are many people involved in it.
When we’re individually engaged in a real-life in-the-moment activity like sailing (or walking or surfing or driving or flying a plane), we don’t need to consider Kairotic Flow, because it’s obvious in the context. We typically go through the sequence of activities that need doing in rapid learning cycles, without having to think about it. Stimulus — response — stimulus — response, over and over, like Boyd’s OODA loops (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, Observe, Orient…).
Kairotic Flow comes into its own when we need to slow down and think about larger and longer-term questions, where we can easily get distracted or confused by irrelevant abstractions. Questions like the metacrisis. Like figuring out what to do when our institutions are failing us. Or like setting up or adjusting the governance for a project or an organisation or a new technology like AI.
It’s all the same!
To see what’s relevant in a situation that is much bigger than us, we have to be able to fluidly shift our focus from one contextual scope to another, and Kairotic Flow helps tremendously with that.
Most importantly, perhaps, Kairotic Flow offers a different approach to collaboration — to thinking and working together on larger issues, especially when old, embedded approaches to dealing with those issues have failed and we need to do something new (i.e. engage in purple-side activities).
Most of us have learned to cooperate using only orange-side techniques, coming from our position/s of expertise in a topic area, and seeking connections between those specialisms. For orange-side activities this is usually sufficient, but it’s impossible to perform purple-side activities that way. (As explained above, we simply cannot orient ourselves to reality by orienting to concepts.)
Collaborating effectively in the unknown, which is what the purple-side Archetypes ‘specialise’ in, requires us to let go of what we ‘know’ as experts, and instead bring our attention to considering the whole and what it needs, in the context at hand.
So while I understand some may feel a degree of shock or discomfort associated with me effectively saying — “Folks, we’re going about this metacrisis business all wrong”, I also invite you to consider the upside of possibility, which is tremendous: We can all do this!
Human beings are born with the ability to respond to complexity. We do it all the time! If rain starts while you’re outdoors, don’t you quickly choose a response, depending on your context? Maybe you head for shelter… a building, a car, a bus stop, a tree, a cliff overhang, under a bridge. Or maybe you open an umbrella, pull up a hood, rest your backpack on your head. Or maybe you shrug and figure ‘whatever’, turn up your face and enjoy the rain. You know the consequences — you’ll get wet. Smooth floors will be slippery. And if you come across a slippery floor, again, you’ll respond, perhaps just by stepping more carefully, perhaps by drying off your shoes on a mat.
Even if you’re in a group, the coordination of response to shared present conditions is near automatic. Watch what happens when a group of four people gets caught in the rain. One person may run towards shelter, while another two people share an umbrella as they walk to meet them, and a fourth who doesn’t care about getting wet or figures that you get wetter when you run, might casually walk alongside those two. Everyone will, to at least some extent, consider where they’re all headed, time constraints, others’ ability to move at speed, and so on. (Honestly, we’re so good at doing this kind of thing in real time — it’s so embedded in our norms of social behaviour — that we often don’t even realise we’re doing it!)
Kairotic Flow invites us to remember what it means to be fully human.
Looking to the purple side of Kairotic Flow — Steward, Curator, and Scout
Kairotic Flow brings the purple-side Archetypes forward into visibility, but they’re not new in any way. They’ve always been crucial.
People all around the world, with all manner of different belief systems and experiences and areas of interest, have been pointing to the importance of the activities and perspectives of the Archetypes on the purple side of Kairotic Flow one way or another for years (probably forever!) using all sorts of different language:
- Get out into nature, hug a tree
- Be in the present moment
- Holistic approaches
- A stitch in time saves nine
- Get your head out of the clouds
- Find your purpose
- Yin and yang (with yang being more orange side)
- Heed the wisdom of ancestors, seers or oracles
- Listen to your intuition/gut
- Child’s mind
- Go back to essentials
- Consider the possibilities
- Step back to jump further
- Proper preparation prevents poor performance (James Baker)
- Tidy your room
- Meditate
So we all have some sense of the importance of purple-side activities, even if the above advice tends to be directed at individuals, not collectives, and we might not feel at all clear about when to attend to what. Should I meditate for 30 minutes at 7am? Or maybe twice a day? Obviously it’s up to the individual, and what works for them.
Even when it comes to the metacrisis, I’m certainly not saying that we all always have to focus exclusively on the purple side of Kairotic Flow. That would be silly. Clearly, if we are building something we already know how to build and that we know works, then using the orange-side tools of frameworks, analysis and applying known solutions to known problems makes perfect sense!
However the activities on the purple side of Kairotic Flow are crucial wherever it appears that the way we’ve been doing things is in some way failing to meet needs.
So I’m proposing, very strongly, that we have to start attending to and valuing them, and truly, deeply understand that, as Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
And as an integral part of this, I’m also proposing that we need to allow all forms of power (including resources) to flow away from orange-side activities, techniques and conditions, and flow to and through purple-side activities, using purple-side techniques, to be worked on in the conditions the purple-side Archetypes require in order to be healthy and effective.
These purple-side conditions rarely — and barely — exist in the world we live in today. This has to change or we’re not gonna make it. No ifs or buts. Psychosis WILL kill us.
So what are these purple-side activities?
- Stewarding orients our attention towards whatever the relevant holon is that needs attending to, and nurtures that holon in its whole context
- Curation discerns what that holon’s underlying unmet needs are and how we will know if they’re met, carefully extracting the baby from the bathwater before disposing of the bathwater
- Scouting explores multiple dimensions of the unknown to discover, map and orient to new possibilities for meeting those needs, while keeping the wellbeing of the whole (including and beyond the holon) firmly in mind
It would be ideal if we all worked on these activities together, one ‘next right step’ at a time within our own living contexts. If we did manage to pull that off, I bet we would turn this Earthship around faster than any of us can imagine.
Of course that’s not likely to happen, given that the orange-side Archetypes hold tremendous power right now and letting it go ain’t on the agenda. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
But the fact remains that the more of us there are, taking more next right steps, more and more consistently, the better our chances.
And the good news is, we don’t need leaders to do this for us. As you may well have inferred by now, even the concept of leadership as we understand it nowadays has an orange-side bias!
Focusing the spotlight on the Scout Archetype (what comes next)
Throughout this response, I’ve primarily spoken from the perspective of the Kairotic Flow’s Scout Archetype, which orients to meeting the needs of whatever holon it’s centering on, and maps the multidimensional landscape of possibilities for (and risks associated with) meeting those needs, within the context of the whole.
Recursive though it is, it would probably be fair to say that the Cycle of Kairotic Flow is itself a Scout “meta-compass” of life, with needs of the whole (holon) held as a kind of magnetic core at the centre.
After saying that, it feels important to point out that overall, the Scout Archetype is no more or less important to life than any of the other five Archetypes. No better or worse. The activities and perspectives of all six of the Archetypes are necessary to continue life, and no subset of them is sufficient.
But “woo” though it might sound, I do think there’s a “reason” why Kairotic Flow found its way out of me and started taking on a life of its own in these past few years.
Right now, to navigate our way through the unprecedented, unknown transition our species needs to make — to respond to the context we are in now, and fulfil our responsibilities to our descendants and to the rest of this living planet into the future — Scout is the primary Archetype we most urgently need to start appreciating, developing skills in, resourcing, and generally powering up.
I believe Kairotic Flow is a response to that need.
In Kairotic Flow terms, our global civilisation as a whole is presently in the Curator phase of its lifecycle. So far we’re not doing a very good job of it, because Market and State operating conditions (including institutions, tools, assumptions, governance, and systems) really aren’t conducive to healthy, effective Curation. Daniel and others concerned about existential risks talk about this a lot, albeit using different language — “perverse incentives”, “reductionism”, “authoritarianism”, “war on sense-making” etc.
For my part, I feel compelled to note here the utter self-foot-shooting insanity of us allowing private ‘ownership’ of the living world and of social ‘substrate’ functions like banking, media, and IT/AI. Life itself, along with the collective learning substrates common to our species should all, by virtue of the most basic ethics and common sense, be stewarded in, by, and for the Commons. One need look no further to see our civilisational psychosis in action.
At any rate, in spite of these toxic conditions, some people like Daniel are still stepping up to perform the Curator Archetype’s role with incredible dignity and grace, and as they do, they are providing the food — the inputs — that the Scout Archetype needs to perform its role. Unfortunately, at present there is no adequately resourced or appropriately governed ‘place’ for those inputs to land or be worked on. Not even in our minds or culture, let alone in our economic or political infrastructures.
The Curator Archetype certainly suffers greatly from lack of appropriate conditions, but that’s still mild compared to the Scout Archetype’s total inability to function effectively in service to the wellbeing of the whole under present conditions. Culturally, we hardly even see that the Scout Archetype exists, let alone acknowledge its current importance. And those who are attempting to do the Scouting work that needs to be done (yes, like me) are really struggling… not only to do the work, but to not “sell out” in order to survive.
As a civilisation, we keep looking for “solutions” to what we’re thinking of as “problems”. Predicaments such as we’re faced with now don’t have solutions.
We keep looking to “leaders” to do Scouting work on our behalf… and that’s not only unlikely, but also dangerous if it happens. We don’t have a clue about where we’re going, and blindly following the perceptions of any one person is not a good idea (think cults and tyrants).
We keep looking to the Pioneer Archetype to “innovate” and come up with new ideas and visions, expecting these to magically appear with all their attendant risks properly considered. Without the Scout Archetype performing its preparatory orienting role, this is not going to happen. (Pioneer without Scout pre-work relies on ‘adjacent possible’ iterations of what already exists, or else takes blind stabs in the dark. Wisely considered orientation to reality depends on Scout performing its role, especially when the reorientation required is radical — i.e. goes down to the roots of our most foundational assumptions.)
Without the Scout Archetype, we will never know where the 3rd Attractor (Daniel Schmachtenberger’s language again!) exists in the possibility landscape of reality.
We desperately need the Scout Archetype to rise into visibility and be appropriately powered, in the right conditions, to perform its role.
Ideally in everyone, everywhere and all at once.
But here and now is a good place to start!
Discover more
If you would like to learn more about Kairotic Flow, please go to https://presenceofmine.com. All links are provided there, and if you wish, you can book a coaching or consulting session on Kairotic Flow.
The Cycle of Kairotic Flow © 2020 by Kylie Stedman Gomes is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
As Kairotic Flow’s ‘creator’ I am (for now) also its only licensed practitioner for commercial purposes. Certification programs are in development. In the meantime, understanding that insights may be needed ‘now’ (not after learning how to apply Kairotic Flow for yourself!) I am also offering a no-strings-attached high level Diagnostic service to businesses, organisations, and projects. The Diagnostic takes 3–5 business days, and aims to advise you on what you really need to know, rather than what you want to hear. If this is of interest to you, please contact me at kylie@presenceofmine.com.au.
And finally, I also want to give a shout-out to a couple of others I know who are using (different and ethical) Scouting approaches.
I also welcome in the comments your suggestions of others who are offering ethical approaches to Scouting. I won’t endorse them unless I personally know their work, but I will give a quick review and note whether each looks promising.
Thank you for the gift of your time and attention.
