Navigating Through Deep SHfT
Recognizing the subtle (and not-so-subtle) power that language holds, we need to shift the thinking from win-lose battle metaphors.
Language is a bellwether; sometimes the words and expressions we choose keep us stuck in old familiar grooves. Sometimes the old familiar grooves box us into limiting ways of communicating and behaving…
Patterns that reinforce the mechanistic Industrial Age, unhealthy competition, winners and losers, strong dominating heroic leadership archetypes, scarcity mindsets, false dichotomies — maintain an old story that artificially separates us from one another and nature, treating our complex wicked challenges like battles with lines drawn and problems to be conquered.
This leads us to the question…
What does it mean to really be the change we want to see in the world?
Our words, our actions, where we put our energies, what we stop doing, start doing — all these things individually and in combination, have impact — whether small ripples or sweeping ramifications.
Everywhere we look, our institutions and systems are broken and dysfunctional — not fit-for-meaningful-purpose. Society is way out of balance. The driving economic model, a leftover from the Industrial Age, is all about money, growth, consumerism and extraction.
The pervasive patterns:
🔮 People and all living beings are commodified…treated like a means to an end
🔮 Business has overarching influence — driving growth purely for the sake of economic profit — whereby the original root purpose and meaning of company has been distorted
🔮 Governments are typically rigid, slow, bureaucratic, controlling and/or often pandering to big corporate enterprise
🔮 Civil society has lacked the true coherent agency to play meaningful, sustainable roles
🔮 Polarization keeps people divided across ever-widening societal chasms
With a cascade of domino effects, all this sets the context for human behaviour at every scale and across all domains. And so we observe lots of bad stuff and vicious cycles.
Othering — pointing fingers of blame — out there…at others — for all the wrongs, does little to change the trajectory. It just keeps us stuck.
We can be overwhelmed, fatalistic, apathetic…
We can conclude that it’s all too much…“There’s not much that I can do…”
We can be angry and complaining, pointing to all the barriers that appear insurmountable.
Right. We are in deep sh*t. Mired and stuck in the old…yet immersed in the messy middle of a deep shift.…a shift that is underway in a world still caught in-between — that extended liminal space where we cannot precisely know or predict how things will unfold…
There really is no going back to what was…
While difficult, turbulent and destabilizing — that in-between space presents a window of opportunity…
And many burning questions…
How are we choosing to think about all this? What are we choosing to do or not do? What kinds of activation makes sense in the midst of turbulent uncertainty? And how can we navigate — wisely and well — mindful that lots of ‘doing’ in the usual siloed ways, with the best of intentions…falls seriously short…and worse, often produces negative, escalating downstream consequences.
Talking about the problems, while necessary, isn’t enough, especially when talking is limited to echo chambers or like-minded comfort zones and preaching to the choir. Talking about…easily slides into a repetitive circular pattern of paralysis.
Action for the sake-of-action, being and looking busy doing stuff — won’t do it. Too often it’s not the right stuff and/or it’s not guided by the right underlying and overlapping reasons or root causes. Too often it’s not including people with all the information and perspectives required — those who must be directly involved and actively engaged with personal and collective agency to shape a life-affirming trajectory for their own lives, families and communities.
Today’s solutions often become tomorrow’s problems. Haven’t we learned that yet? Indeed, our world has been driven by myriad instant and myopic solutions that often exacerbate problems, imbalances and conflicts among people. We deplete our resources and drain our spirit — human, environmental and economic…
So yes…we need to take mindful action, with cycles or spirals of observation, reflection and adaptation.
Not quick fix bandaids. Not dogmatic, rigid interventions…
While evolutionary change is natural and good...waiting for evolution…or incremental tinkering is potentially too little…too late…
Business and government are facing rising pressure to demonstrate that they are adequately equipped to understand and address environmental, social, economic and governance issues — from climate change to human rights to social unrest and more…
Mounting monumental evidence demonstrates that they are NOT equipped…and that is of overarching concern.
Where is civil society in all this — the ordinary citizens on planet earth? Irregardless of our particular roles or the sectors where our work focus happens to be planted — we are all citizens, perhaps better described as denizens on this planet we call home.
“Civil society needs teeth, and business and government need to gain wisdom, so that we can all have hope.” ~ Unstitution
Unstitution, a collaborative commons, is working at the intersections between the sectors: civil society, business and government, and across any and all divides.
We need new adaptive living system models and structures that cultivate healthy balance, freeing us from the inherent fragility, flaws, and gaps of current (colonizing) economic, governance and operating systems.
There are more of us working from the space between. Drawing from a wide reservoir — this work, building from decades and sometimes described as the 4th sector, is gradually gaining awareness and taking form.
Decades of work and examples (mostly at the fringes) point to a compelling need to reconstitute commonsing into the living fabric of working societies that naturally foster and deepen collaboration.
We are doing what we can to co-catalyze and nurture commonsing efforts that are manifesting in many places and spaces in a variety of ways.
Many people, in increasing numbers also seeing the need for a fundamental shift, sometimes described as (r)evolution, are more ready to help shift(s) happen, recognizing that to do so and to navigate well through these uncharted waters — we need to work together…in some different ways.
We are interdependent. As living beings we are nature…inextricably interconnected and embedded within one another and the web of life.
Given the complexity of world problems, no one has all-encompassing answers.
“If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.” ~ Hazel Henderson
We all need to make peace with the three little words “I don’t know”…because we really don’t…There’s always more.
We can see parts of wholes. And while some folks are a bit better at seeing and holding more parts and their nestedness, we really must work together across the divides — those artificially human constructed divides — to widen our collective lens, sense making capacity and co-intelligence.
Some of the issues have partial solutions…that need to be shared and accessed more broadly. Many of the issues are thorny entangled dilemmas that need to be weighed and balanced, and for which no clear, perfect solutions exist.
Navigating between worlds is difficult. When people find themselves stuck or isolated by damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-don’t double binds, we gotta find ways to get unstuck. Recognizing and naming those dilemmas is a start.
Finding the common[s] ground, experimenting a bit and adapting — we can potentially break through…We must forge those figureoutable and unimpossible pathways
So we ask…
”How can we proactively support needed shift(s)?”
How can we reasonably move things along…in a good way? Not forcing or controlling. Not slipping into illusory masters-of-the-universe Industrial Age patterns that got us humans into this existential soup…
We’ve been calling it deep SHfT… as a catchall term…reflecting the sh*t-load of wide and deep macro, micro and meso layered shifts at any and all scales and domains — underway and needed.
The greatest potential for deep SHfTing progress becomes increasingly real when (many more) of us work together collaboratively, in co-creative ways.
One of our overarching observations is that people — all of us — need to learn (through experience and experimentation) how to deeply collaborate and co-create — for real. By building upon one another’s knowledge, perspectives, and ideas, we can shape new possibilities and pathways that no one of us (individuals or groups) can do in isolation or from compartmentalized silos — no matter how brilliant, insightful or well-conceived.
We can mobilize, activate, reflect, (un)learn, combine and join together in some new ways — co-discovering and recovering healthy patterns that embrace our interdependence — our interbecoming.
We can live the questions together…
This is an ongoing paradoxical dance of emergence and strategy. This kind of SHfT is an inside-out and an outside-in process. Zooming in and zooming out…we can advance our individual and collective human (consciousness) development.
We are all works-in-progress, not perfect and that’s (gotta be) perfectly okay. Somehow, we gotta learn how to accept and embrace our inherent messy humanness. Part of this lifelong journey is being able to be who we are and to learn and develop throughout our lives — thereby becoming fuller, richer versions of ourselves — as we work together.
We are also dancing with monsters…a simple metaphor we use having studied the recurrent and recognizable, dysfunctional patterns or barriers that keep us stuck. These systemic patterns often appear or manifest entangled in clusters.
The kind of SHfT we are pursuing interweaves many overlapping and synergistic elements.
Personal awareness AND interpersonal relationships AND collective sense making AND applying strategic systems thinking AND adaptive living systems lenses AND…
Lots of and-and…
Unstitution’s mission is a big collective one – to reboot society’s operating system. Bigger than all of us, we fully recognize we won’t see a full reboot in our own lifetime.
We — an expansive adaptive collaborative commons — are seeking, inviting and supporting alternatives that are heart-centred and drawing from a wide reservoir of collective capacities.
Networking, sharing resources, story making, storytelling and story dwelling — sometimes described as narrative landscaping are all part of the effort. Inclusiveness — across sectors, cultures, generations, regions and strata of society — widens and deepens our learning capacity. Bringing our integrative lenses together to understand the range of overlapping systemic social issues, from different perspectives and lived experience — is catalytic and fundamental.
As more of us birth collaborative creative commons, with alternative governance structures, enabling conditions and building blocks, we can help to catalyze, convene and support many collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions. Together, in small and big ways — locally…globally…(g)locally — we can potentially right scale and amplify our collective impact.
In deep SHfT, working from the space between, we are not part of any institution or sector as they’re conventionally configured or delineated. We are largely subject and methodology agnostic or omni-partial.
In essence…Unstitution functions as a creative holding space, an integrative collaborating agent and co-catalyzer…A living lab spawning and supporting lots of living labs…Fluid, dynamic, semi-permeable…A working playground…
Together we are learning how to unstitutionalize what no longer serves…what never served…people and planet.
All of us involved are cross-pollinators to some degree — a great term borrowed from our natural environment — connecting people, groups organizations and synergies…building bridges.
We can potentially make more tangible progress when some of our networking is a little less loose and…more purposeful…
As we build bridges and relationships, we discover what ignites people’s passion and sense of meaning. We can galvanize co-creative initiatives that enable and support movement and flow in the roughly right direction
With a wide constellation of collaborators, which we playfully describe as a WorkNet, — there’s growing readiness potential to shape alternative work systems, an adaptive model for getting needed work underway and flowing, from the space between established institutions/sectors and informal networks. This work gets underway through mission critical common purpose.
Regenerative efforts advance through emergent learning. Stories take shape as documented work-in-progress…learning-in-action..action research.
Together, we are doing what we can. Present-centred and forward-facing, we are meeting…not matching complex challenges, as Nora Bateson often discusses. Recognizing that no one has all-encompassing definitive solutions — and with deep humility — neither do we.
We are working to transcend pervasive dysfunctional polarization — to help (over time) bring society into healthy functional balance. We support a wide variety of ways to gain and leverage personal and collective agency toward needed change — on the ground, in and across communities and ecosystems.
As we reframe and cultivate a deeper sense of community and belonging, we embrace our rich diversity rather than clinging to narrow likemindedness, vested interests and/or tribal homogeneity.
We are discovering what being unstitutional means — many different ways to potentially make a positive difference, connecting a variety of efforts that can amplify learning and meaningful shifts.
We can all activate a variety of roles, aligned with principles of collaboration and abundance — fluidly being the change we want to see, as we live into an unknowable future.
Taking Coalitiō to heart — the Latin derivative of coalition…to grow together — can cut across any conventional boundaries of civil society, business and government, enabling meaningful progress toward regenerative systemic change.
Deep SHfT is enabled through:
🔮 Collaborative co-creation
🔮 New, adaptable resilient forms of governance and work systems with clear, transparent rights, protections and obligations (stewardship)
🔮 Building bridges across divides
🔮 Making space for gifts differing
🔮 Including those who are often left out — the unusual suspects
🔮 Reframed, adaptable leadership roles and accountabilities
🔮 Reaching common ground toward mission critical progress
🔮 (Trans)contextualizing and active learning…research and ongoing evaluation based on relevant quantitative and qualitative criteria, (warm) data and feedback loops
🔮 The power and empowerment of narrative, the stories that enrich and connect us — our uniqueness and our diversity
🔮 Technology as a force-for-good that amplifies access and cross learning
One of the most intractable, interconnected issues that manifests as a big hairy monster impeding life-affirming shifts concerns money.
Our flawed driving monocapital neoclassical economic model is broken and the cascading effects are many:
🔮 Funds are not flowing to where they are most needed
🔮 Huge waste, loss and missed opportunities — fallout that has negative impact and/or efforts that don’t have sustainable positive impact
🔮 Non-financial capitals or capacities that should be valued with healthy protections, exchanges and flows are under-valued, exploited or altogether dismissed
🔮 Greed, corruption, fear, conflicts of interest, injustice, competition and disproportionate distribution of wealth, are consequences of a society that is not designed for or aligned with conditions for flourishing
One of our overarching themes, Shifting Economics for Societal Value, potentially touches on everything – very deep SHfT. We collaborate on a variety of efforts aimed at opening new pathways.
As we navigate through deep SHfT, we’re observing ongoing inherent tensions and increasing recognition in ever-widening circles, that:
🔮 Our institutions are not fit-for-purpose — now…nor are they equipped to navigate wisely and well toward an unknowable non-ergodic future
🔮 Casualties of impending and cascading collapse will (likely) intensify without progress towards life-affirming shifts
🔮 Problems cannot be fixed with bandaids and in the same old compartmentalized ways, from within sectors or institutions as they are configured today
🔮 Destabilization, fragility and lack of funding flows impede navigation progress.
There are parallel needs to:
🔮 Ground longstanding prosocial commons, human systems science and Indigenous wisdom etc. into adaptive living system design and practice
🔮 Reimagine and coalesce around promising possibilities — creative conceptual societal-wide and deep systemic redesign
🔮 Support forward-facing learning and living lab activation whereby people can engage, exercise personal and collective agency and advance their layered inside-out and outside-in journeys.
We aren’t waiting for macro or global societal contexts and conditions to magically transform. We need it all!. We humbly advance through uncertainty:
🔮 Taking on needed work at all nested layers…with gifts differing
🔮 Supporting and funding efforts with the greatest leverage and amplification potential
🔮 Reimagining and shaping those wider-scale possibilities
🔮 Stepping up many deeper scale living/learning lab pilots
🔮 Prioritizing grounded regenerative bioregional (rural and urban) initiatives that can potentially grow deeper resilient roots toward the flourishing of circular wellbeing economies.
As we envision, test and leverage next-itution potential for deep SHfT, we:
🔮 Co-discover and collaborate on the most promising first principles, enabling conditions and building blocks
🔮 Apply and adapt what is learned and ways of knowing in real contexts and places
In every direction, we’re all observing and experiencing destabilization, fragility and a lack of needed funding flows to support the navigation work required to shift from Horizon 1/2 ↗ regenerative Horizon 3.
As we navigate through deep SHfT we can develop our futures literacy…creating and cultivating the required enabling conditions whereby people are more empowered to make and contribute to positive shifts in their everyday lives and more broadly in society.
Organization design lenses also inform us about unfolding possibilities. Some degree of form still follows some degree of function. Minimum critical enabling conditions and contexts, funding flows and building blocks can help us all gain traction.
Alternative legal governance can be paired with fluid operating frameworks — with just enough binding structure to support regenerative mission critical resilience…allowing enough permeability…healthy ebb and flow of emergent co-creative adaptation and mutual learning.
Reasonable freedoms…individual and collective agency within reasonable boundaries/limits for the common[s] good of humanity and the living planet we call home — wherever we live, work and play.
And so…we are especially interested in ways to re-pattern…step up collaborative efforts at the interdependent ecosystem layers that can gain more resilience, becoming living demonstrations of what’s possible, learnable and doable, benefiting all stake/care/holders — people, a living planet, investors and future generations….What indigenous cultures have always understood.
Mindful navigation from the degenerative Industrial Age driven Horizon 1/2 world as it is today toward regenerative Horizon 3 nested ecosystems can also undergird the very deep SHfT required to advance true democracy in society. As more of us work together, we can move beyond the aspirational — living and learning our way forward — while honouring and restoring our lost Indigeneity.
Deep SHfT is underway. A messy, nonlinear journey with many twists and turns — all of us ordinary humans are welcome on this voyage!
“Navigating between worlds, we ‘live into’ an unknowable future. We experience the sting of moral injury and injustices without overly attaching ourselves to the narratives that can become reinforcing downward spirals. We’re guided by a moral compass — relinquishing illusory control, when holding on is likely to yield more (existential) loss than (meaningful) gain…Zooming in…zooming out, bringing our whole beingness to the intertwined tasks of living and working…observer and participant…ever curious and learning as we go…open to what life is presenting, what it might offer, what we might offer as heart-centred gifts. Indeed, system change isn’t compelled or propelled from within.
Working from ‘the space between,’ an unstitutional dance of emergence AND strategy…we’re reminded that there’s no carefully measured balance…no recipe. Creative sparks flare and dissipate. We muster intentionality and purposeful activation.
Navigating between worlds…and words…many ‘living lab’ trials-by-fire…Tender shoots rising up through the cracks and brokenness. We are pioneers navigating through deep SHfT, leaving domination-oppression patterns in rear-view, as we live into partnering pluriversal possibilities. ~ Unstitution
*This article was updated again May 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen and adapt — a humbling learning journey for us all.
The links embedded throughout are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth
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