Can you be Regenerating the World, Serving a Community and Developing Yourself, simultaneously? — Part I — What and Who ?

Navigating the experienced synergies of Possibility Management and Regenerative Development practices

13 min readMar 24, 2022

Have you already found yourself trying to choose between different parts or scales of your life? Wanting to choose between promoting social, ecological or environmental activism; trying to get your team, organisation or community together in order for you all to be more aligned in the organisation direction and goals and better work together; working on your personal development so you are a better person, partner, father or colleague?

In general, and simplistically, our current society considers that we obtain knowledge from experts and knowledgeable ones, that the world is a mechanical system with causes and effects connected through linear processes, and that we human beings are born with some capabilities and that development and evolution is uncommon or difficult.

We, Gil and Marco, consider that another ‘thoughtware’ (define later) is available, where knowledge is created when we are centred, conscientious and walking in groundlessness together. That the cosmos is multidimensional and operates simultaneously at all dimensions in order to become more vital, viable and more able to evolve. And that we humans are an intrinsic part of Nature, also multidimensional and are born with an unique essence, great potential and undeveloped capabilities and capacities.

In this article we will share with you some of our insights, learnings and ongoing experiments, and hope these will shine some light to your own path. This article describes how we are perceiving each practice considering our journey until now and their synergies, complementarities and where they are significantly different.

We want to bring clarity that what we present here is a current understanding we have of both practices. We have been practising Possibility Management (PM) and Regenerative Development (RD) for less than 5 years, and know that each of them have more than 30 years of experience. Nevertheless, this reflection based on lived experience will be important for us to get our “X on our map” (feedback) as well as receive invitations to go deeper in each of the practices.

We do that dividing this article in 3 parts:

Part I — What and Who ?
Part II — What is common and what seems different ?
Part III — Our research agenda

Part I — What and Who ?

1. About Possibility Management (PM)

On the PM website we can read: “Possibility Management is upgraded thoughtware for catalysing change in the physical, intellectual, emotional or energetic obstacles blocking you and your team from using non-obvious possibilities. It works by converting inner barriers into fertiliser, doorways, rocket ships, or avoidable mud puddles along your path of evolution.”

In the Distinctionary “Possibility Management is the open code copyleft Gameworld created by applying the Distinctions, Thoughtware, and Processes that emerge from the context of Radical Responsibility. Its power comes from serving the Bright Principle of Possibility which brings with it the option of creating the possibility of Possibility.

The Gameworld of Possibility Management was initiated in 1975 by Clinton Callahan and has been continuously developed, documented and delivered in various training environments since then. In 1995 Western civilization broke the evolution barrier and continues to exceed the naturally allowed speed of evolution. Present Organisations predominantly use last millennium hierarchical designs and are no longer fluid enough to function effectively in 21st Century conditions. Possibility Management proposes New Organisational forms and New Meeting Technologies. The job of Possibility Manager is already appearing on company Org Charts as a change agent with Radical Responsibility for liberating and applying a greater proportion of an Organization’s human intellectual capital. “

Another way of saying it is that Possibility Management is a gameworld that makes distinctions and maps available to themes that every human being deals with on a day-to-day basis, whether in their relationship with, e.g., themselves, their parents, children, companions, friends, peers and topics such as communication, listening, speaking, feedback, coaching, emotions, relationships, teams, intimacy, gameworlds and many other topics.

Possibility Management uses this language of ‘distinction’, ‘thoughtmap’ and ‘gameworld’ that we will use here for both practices.

Distinction
In the Distinctionary “A Distinction is an Energetic Declaration that if you have the Matrix to hold it, it changes who you are and therefore gives you a new Possibility for Action. When you get a Distinction it lands in your Matrix and reorders your Energetic Body in such a way that you can experientially differentiate something which you could not differentiate before. Your experiential discernment is refined to a measurable degree (the measurement being the new Results you can create).”

Thoughtmap
In the Distinctionary “A Thoughtmap is an energetic diagram showing the relationship and the flow of power between factors. You can understand the importance of Thoughtmaps when you consider that very real possibilities were created when people changed their Map representing the Earth from a disk to a ball. You acquired new possibilities not because the Earth itself changed, but only because your Mental Map of the Earth changed. You do not relate to the world as it is. You relate through your Thoughtmaps of the world. Get a new Map and you get a new world.”

Gameworld
In the Distinctionary “A Gameworld is the field of commitment generated by three or more people applying distinctions, thoughtware, and internally-consistent rules-of-engagement that emerge from an agreed-upon context. Gameworlds can range from temporary and of minor consequence to longer-lasting and of major consequence. Examples of Gameworlds include: let’s go up the elevator, let’s have a party, let’s have a relationship, let’s have a family, let’s have a company, let’s have a town, let’s have a country, let’s have a war, and so on.

Gameworlds can be Responsible or Irresponsible, depending on their Purpose and their Results. Gameworlds become Defensive if their Stories are Believed to be true or are kept invisible to the participants, in which case the participants are said to be Identified with their Gameworld. Even if a Gameworld is considered to be the ‘one and only true reality’ by a majority of its players, it is still a Gameworld. Gameworlds founded in Beliefs and Shadow Principles build false communities and Survive through competing for limited resources through war.

Gameworlds founded in Bright Principles create Responsible Results and build authentic communities which thrive on creative collaboration to source the resources. Taking Responsibility at the level of being the Story maker for Gameworlds is the entry door to Possibility Management. Building new Gameworlds could create the space to activate your Archetypal Lineage. To paraphrase and adapt R. Buckminster Fuller, “You do not change things by fighting existing gameworlds. You change things by creating new gameworlds that make existing gameworlds irrelevant.”

A particular type of gameworlds is the Gaian Gameworlds (gaiangameworlds.mystrikingly.com/) — they are gameworlds in a regenerative culture, “they are organic in their design, they originate in Gaia, they serve the health of Gaia, they create value for Gaia, they serve the evolutionary Context of Gaia. They are designed in the image of Gaia.

2. About Regenerative Development (RD)

In the website of Regenesis Institute “Regenerative development is the process of harmonising human activities with the continuing evolution of life on our planet — a process that also develops our own potential as humans. As an approach in practice, it seeks to enable human communities to come back into life-giving alignment with the natural living systems that support them.”

As a starting place, regenerative development begins with the premise that human beings and human activities have the potential to nourish and support the myriad ecological systems that they touch — and that realising this potential is a pathway to restoring the health and abundance of human cultures and economies. In order to make this a reality, we must commit ourselves to a process of inquiring into and deeply honouring the unique socio-ecological identities of our places.

While regenerative development needs to happen all over the planet, the complex interface between human systems and natural systems must be studied, understood and navigated uniquely in each specific place. This means there can be no template or set of best practices for regenerative work. Instead, practitioners from a broad range of different disciplines and community sectors must come together to engage in deep and sustained co-learning, inquiring together into how to practice the art of regeneration through development in that particular place.”

Carol Sanford uses a framework entitled “Five Power Levels of Regeneration”. In this framework (we can say thoughtmap) Carol invites us to reflect of the importance to understand that we have power to transform any system at different levels. Starting form the less to the more powerful:

R1st Level: Power of Practices/Tools
At this level we can influence and transform a system by improving or changing the practices (behaviors) and tools (physical or virtual) that allow the system to be more effective (eg., consuming less, produce more compost), more participative (eg., knowledge sharing, interdisciplinary).

R2nd Level: Power of Ordering Systems
At this level we understand the benefits from grounding and allowing our practices to emerge from whole methodologies and their aligned principles and beliefs. We relate with the system itself in an holistic and interconnected way.

R3rd Level — Power of Ontology
At this level we move from operating holistically to understanding how Being comes into existence and evolves in connection with their family, species, other species and all their environment. Each Being is “energies at work and is unique and singular unto itself”. At this level we can see Being at the individual level, group/community, organisations, municipalities/regions, all rooted in living places. Working at this levels we increase capacity for each Being to express it self, not individually in a specific setting but simultaneously for millions of people. At this level we develop Essence Thinking and start working more nodally in the system, like acupuncture actions that transform the whole system.

R4th Level — Power of Cosmology Will Power
Here we start operating at the levels of our beliefs of how any system operates. By evolving our understanding of how a system operates, going deeper into the causal forces and dynamics of that system, we are much more able to create systemic changes and evolve the system with little effort. At this level we become aware and capable to see the paradigm or worldview we develop our ontology, whole methodologies and specific practices. We can start actively creating contexts and experiments that invite us to shift our paradigms and worldviews, and its influence can be global in a short moment of time, with a great multiplier effect.

R5th Level: Power of Epistemology (Consciousness of Powers)
At this level we actively develop the capacity to notice what is sourcing our thinking and have the agency to keep evolving the paradigm or worldview (Cosmology) and our becoming (Ontology). And a short and brilliant sharing from Carol: “We have true leverage over how change works for ourselves and all of life because we are dropping attachments, identifications, and our tendency to fabricate fully embroidered stories to support all of this, we now have the most powerful mind humans can access.” ”A regenerative epistemology has to be regenerated in our mind, experienced, and evoke in the field around us each time we want to think about it. It evaporates in our mind when we leave it for other distraction.”

Regenerative Development uses this language of ‘epistemology’, ‘cosmology’ and ‘ontology’ that we will use in these articles (Part I, II and III) to better comprehend both practices.

3. About Marco

I see myself as an edgeworker, an evolutionary gameworld builder, who stands on the edge of modern culture. I started my path, after leaving college, in one of the limits of culture, then, the beginning of the ‘internet’ and I was one of the co-creators of this universe for all of us. A few years later, I explored ‘information’ and how it ‘enacts’ the constructs of modern culture. My journey is one of social transformation.

In the last 10 years I have gone beyond the limits of our culture and started to explore the power of collaboration and participation and its challenges, whether technological, human and social. João Sem Medo was one of those vehicles. In 2016 a friend, Claudian, suggested I go do Expand-the-Box and I started my path in Possibility Management (PM). I realized how it helps me to understand who I am, what I want for the world and how to do it in relation to everyone else. How to find clarity and inner distinction, how to anchor in my authority and the way I act in the world. It gave me tools to navigate within myself, to navigate relationships, to navigate teams. It is a work that is done in a team, each one for himself, in a team and a team in PM is more than 3 people, to have at least the 3rd perspective. In the projects where I am currently involved, the people I work with have PM distinctions and we use them to navigate the day-to-day of the team, the projects.

Another friend, Gil, told me about Regenerative Development (RD). In 2021 I took the course. And another world opened up, as a project is not a project, isolated, but rather a continuum of a territory, the next evolutionary step in that territory, that ‘natural drift’ that Maturana spoke about in living systems — the territory as a living system, of which the project is an integral part.

For me it is evident that the two practices complement each other and bring a set of distinctions and maps that can allow teams to make sense of the development of bioregions for a regenerative future of our home, of Planet Earth.

After João Sem Medo (JSM), Innovations for the Future (I4F) emerged, an ecology of innovation, transversal to the whole of Portugal, an explosion of creativity on the way to the next culture, what Otto Schammer calls ‘society 4.0’, the Possibility Management ‘Archiarchy’ and Bret Weinstein call ‘game-b’.

My idea, my proposal is that PM+DR is one of the keys for the emergence and support of society 4.0, for Innovations for the Future, for all these people and teams that are co-creating the future.

My research take me to several human development practices like Integral Life Practices, Process Work, Internal Family System and the work of my friend Vasco Gaspar with deep-u. Possibility Management is the more integral and coherent gameworld that i experience and that help me to make sense of the World and their complexity. Regenerative Development is the other face. I think Gil has this same research with design practices, particular with regenerative design practices.

For more about me, you can check the post from Jan.2022 in my blog, and in my website.

4. About Gil

Since I was 12 years old I consider myself a planetarian guardian in the service of Life. When I was 17 I made a tough choice between economy and ecology. I ended up choosing the natural sciences path and became a biologist, a researcher of Life. I did my training in Florida, in the USA, cultivating crabs and shrimps that are usually caught in coral reefs with use of explosives or cianite. The purpose was to support local asian fishermen to make a living without destroying the natural environment. Then I decided to do a PhD on applied ecology and worked in East Africa understanding the impact of organic waste in natural mangrove forest as well as supporting the development of wastewater treatment facilities rooted in phytoremediation using mangrove ecosystems. Continued with a post-doc in ecological modelling in Denmark and then moved fully to work, at the Faculty of Science (ULisboa) on sustainability and regeneration at the local level, from villages to bio-regions (such as a small water basin). During this journey I understood that scientific fields were silos and that inter and transdisciplinarity was a challenging path to walk.

Parallel to this path I had an activist and spiritual one also. On the spiritual side I went inside frequently and connected with Gaia and natural elements, practised Reiki since I was 15, and navigated the worlds of family constellations and crystal therapy. On the activist path I initiated recycling in my street when I was 16, pushing for the municipality to integrate the recycling paradigm, was tutor in orphan houses, was a clown in paediatric hospitals, coordinated the Red Cross youth in my district, and started the volunteer group at the city zoological park.

All of these three paths have been merging in my life. When I met the transition towns and ecovillages, the research and activism path were united and I initiated the participatory action research journey.

Although I had navigated into the integral theory life practices and became an integral coach, only recently, the dive into Regenerative Development and Possibility Management are supporting the effective integration of the spiritual and all other dimensions (such as energetic and emotional) into a single journey (see more here). These two practices are supporting me to gain consciousness of the existing thoughwares and experience their pains and limitations to walk the path I know I was meant to walk, and that will allow me, and us, to experience extraordinary and regenerative destinations (stops) along the way. For this reason I am creating organic synergies with Marco and others to bring these practices more available to all supporting the development and regeneration of individuals, collectives and entire regions.

My research to build more matrix in me, to hold more consciousness, happened my navigating through the world of academia, activism and spirituality. In the academia I worked in the fields of applied ecology, climate change, sustainability and recently regeneration, from a local level (like a transition initiative or an ecovillage) to an European level. In the activism I experience being a clown, orphan’s tutor and animator, a protesters for social and environmental rights. During this period I fused these two aspects within the umbrella of participatory action-research and dived into dragon-dreaming, non-violent communication as well as permaculture, transition ecovillages libraries of knowledge and methods. My spiritual dimension allowed me to learn about Reiki, Systemic constellations, Biomimicry, and wanting to know more about integral theory (that I also managed to apply to the action-research path). Recently, I felt that something deeper was needed and I wanted to integrate all and stand for what I care about with a deep commitment. I participated in a THNK training and joined THNK community and found two schools of practice where my full Self recognized as “coming Home”. They are Regenerative Development and Possibility Management. Because of that, I walking this path with Marco de Abreu which also wants to investigate what both RD and PM can unfold together and be at service of Life evolution in Gaia.

You can know more about me here (Faculty of Science webpage) and these two related articles in my medium account:

Part II

In Part II of “Can you be Regenerating the World, Serving a Community and Developing Yourself, simultaneously?” we explore the epistemology, cosmology and ontology of each gameworld, what seems common and some differences. (click here)