Coronavirus, Control & Collaborative Inquiry: Changing how we live in uncertain times

By Daniel Ford

Overview: The uncertainty we face from COVID-19 is an invitation to look differently at how we’re living and working in a complex world. My hypothesis is that at the heart of sustainable living is a sense of agency in creating a different world together. The process of collaborative inquiry used in the Boundless Roots Community is an example of how we can work with uncertainty and complexity to build agency in the creation of new patterns of living.

COVID-19 — what’s happening?

The past few months have seen fundamental shifts in our ways of living. Embedded patterns and habits have been disrupted and assumptions about how we can and should live have been challenged, showing us that previously unimaginably rapid change is possible.

Where I’m writing from, in London, our Prime Minister imposed a lockdown on our lives on the 23rd March 2020. No more going to work. No more meeting up with friends. We’re only allowed outside for exercise once a day and for essential shopping.

Through this experience we’ve been challenged with a new sense of perspective that comes with a global crisis — what’s really important? How do you choose to spend your time? Does your work really matter? What about the people that aren’t lucky enough to isolate in safety? A high level of uncertainty and anxiety accompanies these questions because they fundamentally challenge what we’ve taken for granted in our lives for so long.

Control & agency

If you’d have told me a government would take such drastic control of our lives a few months ago, I’d have laughed at you for insinuating Boris to be a totalitarian ruler. The willingness with which we allow this type of leadership in times of crisis and uncertainty, implies that there’s a temptation to look for easy answers, quick-fix solutions and strong rulers to tell us how to act, because we’ve drifted into chaos and we don’t like the feel of it. But at what cost do we hand over control of our lives? Our own agency in change seems to be one of the prices we risk paying. Why would we believe we can influence change if we’re not participating in making it happen?

The increasing apathy I sense in myself and in the world towards traditional forms of party politics is a sign of this loss of agency. It’s what Adam Curtis calls Hypernormalisation: the apathetic reaction we have in response to abuses of power. (“Of course our government’s selling arms to Saudi…”). These shadowy power games try to teach us that we don’t have any agency to create change and, over time, these systems of dominance traumatise us into numbness and submission. How can we change a system that rewards abuses of power with more power [defined here simply as the ability and influence to achieve your purpose]? It can be hard to find agency when apathy is the flavour of the day, but the best way to overcome ingrained patterns of submission is to restore a capacity to engage — and we’re seeing that at the moment, too.

Despite the apparent control over our lives, we are also seeing incredible momentum for change. People are witnessing that rapid change is possible, and we’ve had a chance to re-evaluate our relationships with friends, family, our local community, what work is valuable and the food we eat. We’re also seeing phenomenal solidarity, in Britain over 500,000 people have volunteered to support the NHS during the crisis, and each person self-isolating is sacrificing their own freedom to protect the lives of the vulnerable. This crisis-response is inspirational and shows how people are connecting the dots between their own behaviour and the health of the system as a whole. But how can we organise in ways that can continuously sense and respond to what’s needed when we’re out of crisis-mode but remain in the uncertainty that follows?

The process of collaborative inquiry

In the Boundless Roots Community we are experimenting with a way of organising that is rooted in complexity — the view that we are all open living systems, tied in knots of relationship with each other and nested within other open systems: families, communities, organisations, industries, economies, cultures and ecologies, all of which interact with and respond to their environments at and between different levels. There’s a high level of uncertainty in complexity, but asserting control over that uncertainty tends to lead to unhealthy relationships and increasing levels of resistance over time.

The Boundless Roots Community is building a community of sustainable behaviour change practitioners looking to increase the ambition of projects shifting our patterns of living in the face of climate collapse. This is happening through a process of collaborative inquiry — or what we call systemic action inquiry — a way of organising with complexity principles at its heart:

• It starts from a position of uncertainty: no single person knows the answer to how we radically change how we live in the face of a climate crisis. We might have ideas about what might need to change (eating less meat, buying less stuff, valuing nature more), but nobody has an overarching view of how to actually do this. We need to try to figure it out together as we go.
• It questions underlying assumptions: through giving space to ask deeper questions about the structures and mindsets that underpin our current behaviour, it allows us to contextualise our patterns of behaviour and become more conscious about what’s fit for purpose in serving the health of the whole system. For example in Boundless Roots we’re questioning the role power and trauma in behaviour change, and how to work with moments of cultural resonance to create more rapid changes in behaviour.
• It values multiple perspectives: we work from the hypothesis that we all hold partial views of the system that are valuable in building a picture of the whole. There are people with very different ideas about how change happens in the community, from community-led transition movements to global social media campaigns, but the magic lies in the creative tension between these perspectives.
• It sees ourselves as part of the inquiry: how we relate to each other is all part of it! We try to embody the way of relating we want to see in the world and we try to bring the tensions from trying to live sustainably in our own lives into the inquiry.
• It values constant learning and adaptation: when you act in complexity, you realise whatever you do is attached to everything else, so we aim to learn from the feedback from the system, and adapt our approach accordingly.

In the Boundless Roots Community, we couldn’t have predicted a sudden global crisis that fundamentally shifts the way we live, and the unintended consequence of a reduction in carbon emissions as a by-product of these shifts. This radically changes the context within which our community is operating. So how will we respond?

We had a community call recently to discuss how this changing context affects our work. The group was incredibly aware of the need to sit with the discomfort and pain of this crisis. What happens if, before we look for opportunity, we sit with the discomfort of seeing the world-as-we-know-it shake under the strain of a virus that will take the lives of so many? Sharing this lived experience with others and understanding the difference and conflicts that come from sharing this experience together holds the potential to create the quality of relationships we need for the change ahead.

But there was also an awareness of the need to think about what comes next. The need to organise and spot potential for new patterns of living to form out of this collapse, for example: what is the long term narrative emerging from this experience to support what comes next? This tension, between the need to sit with the discomfort and the need to organise and explore potential, is a gift. It is in the negotiation of polarities like this that change happens, so for the community, the inquiry becomes ‘how do we work skilfully across polarities?’, recognising the need to balance being with doing, the individual with the collective experience and immediate needs with strategic planning.

This process of collaborative inquiry allows the community to sense what’s happening in the world and adapt its approach as a result. This is not a command and control approach that strips people of agency, but one that reflects the uncertainty and complexity of living systems. It builds agency for change through acknowledging that we are all ingredients in the system and that everything we put into the system shapes it. There are powerful structural barriers to change, but COVID-19 has shown us these structures can rapidly change if the collective will is there.

Futurist Bill Sharpe says that the only evidence we have of the future is our commitment to it in the present. It is the commitment and intention that we bring into the present that shapes the future. The most hopeful way I see through the uncertainty we face in the wake of COVID-19 is renewed commitment to the future in the present, commitment rooted in an understanding of the complexity of living systems and made real through an ongoing process of collaborative inquiry.

The Boundless Roots Community is a KR Foundation funded project. It is an online community that meets once a month and is free to join. If you work in the world of sustainable living and like the sound of this approach, and you are passionate about how we radically transform the way we live to remain within planetary boundaries, the Boundless Roots Community is now open to new members, so get in touch to find out more about how to join.

About the author: Daniel is a Senior Strategist at Forum for the Future and a co-facilitator of the Boundless Roots Community. He’s worked in the world of futures and sustainability for 5 years, on a mixture of collaborative projects and strategy work. He works with a range of system change approaches and is currently building his practice in Lewis Deep Democracy, looking at how to use difference and conflict to grow stronger group relationships, make wiser decisions and build more effective collective action. He writes from his own perspective.