What’s the context/problem?

In groups that are structured horizontally, power-plays that arise between members are often the result of unconscious processes. In coops, collectives, organizations where each member is meant to have an equal voice, it can seem paradoxical that we often observe — as the stakes grow high — an increase in power struggles and tension between self and togetherness, that is between Power and Love and between Authority and Freedom.

Sometimes people see organizations as a medium for their personal wholeness and wellbeing but then, what about the well-functioning of the organization and its wholeness?

When we engage in a collective, we start with an idea of what that engagement means and requires of us, and then when we are ‘in’, we may discover that it requires of us something completely different. Also, some members, in some contexts, have more agency, eloquence and natural authority that increase our capacity to be heard and influence what happens in a group, no matter what type of governance is at play. Others, in the same or other different contexts, have more difficulty and may react by reverting unconsciously to behaviors that sabotage the group’s project and overall development. Narcissist attitudes create imbalance and separation, derail connection and cooperative ways of being. [1]

In such cases members might not be able to make space within themselves to handle uncomfortable emotions, so they share them out with other bodies to expand the resources to deal with their personal tension. This results in a form of sabotage that may come in several forms. This article is based on my experience inside 3 collectives that have failed; I have spent 10 years of my life trying to ‘live the collective’. Today I want to make sense of the pitfalls that we need to overcome and share some results of my research in this area. I chose to write about the most pervasive of these pitfalls, and those I understand best, using 4 categories that these pitfalls belong to.

In a decade of participation in such groups, I’ve consistently observed (in all participating humans, including myself), these four categories of attitudes/behaviors can sabotage a collective project:

→ attracting attention to one’s own needs at the detriment of the group’s needs.

→ rejecting limits and structures in the name of a certain conception of ‘freedom’.

→ over relying on love and trust as the exclusive frame for the group’s collective action.

→ disrespecting the “source-person(s)” and getting into power struggles with the founders of the project.

What’s the concept?

Love & Power, Authority & Freedom, as tensions between self & togetherness (Friedman, 2007), are major forces that affect and shape our experience of horizontally structured groups and orgs. As we tend to ignore them or fail to identify these forces and engage with them… coops, collectives and organizations suffer relational stresses that can prevent them from accomplishing any meaningful action. There is little chance we can let these tensions live in our bodies (individual and social) without freaking out, and collectives can spend the entirety of their resources, time, and energy on handling narcissist attitudes, conflict and miscommunications.

“Whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.” (I. Wilkinson, 2023)

In this article I argue that “playing rubato” in the context of leadership and facilitation is an approach that can be helpful for getting unstuck from these emotional entanglements.

Rubato is stolen time; a musical technique in which the artist aims to increase sensitive expression using tempo and liberatory change. It is a way of playing with (rhythmic) structure by moving away from it slightly. The idea is to let go of our methods, to move from our scripts and machinelike doings that industrial times have imposed on humanity. With rubato one distinguishes our humanity: we’re human, we’re not machines, and we need to breathe to exist in ‘human time’. In the past, expressive and free playing was often associated with the terms “ad libitum”. In rubato, the structure remains but we can take liberties with it. It allows performers (musicians seen here as leaders/conveners/facilitators) to improvise or innovate their parts as they see fit (parts seen here as roles, perceived or real).

Rubato is breath, and breath is life. One must breathe within a pulse. Playing rubato is infusing life into the group. Pulse is as important to facilitation as our heartbeat is important to being alive.

Good musicians obsess over rubato. They put a lot of attention and intention into getting rubato right. When is the right time to play with and bend time? When is it not? To deal with the entanglements of Love & Power, Authority & Freedom in collectives, coops, organizations, families… in all groups, when crisis and conflict arise, we can decide to try sidestep strategies or respond to patterns, and — as good musicians — take liberties with the sheet music by using rubato. As Ethan Iverson said: “a musician’s relationship to 8 notes is between him and god” (The Tonic podcast).

A new awareness, and new meanings can emerge when playing rubato. This side-stepping from a previous standpoint (structure) allows us to change what matters in the present, and then to tweak the system.

Subtle rhythmic manipulations and nuance in our actions, stretching certain beats, measures, or phrases and compacting others, like a musician going rubato, strengthen our expressive and regulative capacity.

Why is getting collectives unstuck important today?

Before we started crashing into planetary limits, vertically structured organizations were perhaps relevant for being able to predict and control the environment. Work was done most often separately in a linear process; we used hard data as evidence to formulate right answers and deliver them through implementation. But such processes and reward systems may no longer be relevant in an environment, and in systems that have become unpredictable, highly complex, perhaps even chaotic as we are reaching tipping points that we render us unable to “feed the babies” (Nora Bateson, 2022) i.e. care for the next generations in the future.

If we want to be able to feed the babies tomorrow, we’re going to have to do things in smaller communities, and initiate action in collectives. In these smaller communities, we will need to undergo fierce engagement and intense learning of remarkable know-how, without the usual hierarchical constraints, so engaging in power-with relationships (Mompoint & Golden, 2023) instead of the power-over ones that prevail in business, education systems, politics, sports… all down to family.

These new/next self-organized horizontally structured groups, locally based networked communities holding distributed knowledge, are a pathway to: resilience in the face of unregulated capitalism, and resistance in the face of dying democracies and the rise of rogue oligarchies in many nation states.

We know that we need to collectively reduce our carbon emissions to face climate change and ensuing collapse. Reaching low levels of energy consumption means doing things that will have a deep impact on our lifestyles. How will climate change impact the way we travel, the food we eat, and the way we heat/cool our homes? The underlying evidence brought by the science of climate change may be value-neutral, what we CHOSE to do about it is on the other hand a highly value-laden issue! (Mompoint-Gaillard, 2023).

Changing our lifestyle triggers many resistances and fears. Our lifestyle represents what we wish to project socially. It is part of our personal and social identity, our social status as well. It’s hard to change it, and even harder to want to change it! Therefore, fierce negotiations are before us and self-organized groups will be needed to negotiate the changes that we ought to undergo, in a just and wise manner, instead of by war, hoarding resources and conflict.

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Getting unstuck: going rubato

All in all, what is happening is that we’re seeing the same patterns impeding many of the groups that gather to work on social change and transformation (including coops, climate activism, decolonization, social justice movements etc.). This is happening when we have no time left to wait in inaction, and at a time where we can no longer count on our old institution to fix things.

Therefore, we need more research on coops, collaboratives and other horizontally structured orgs, to better understand how what is impeding collective action.

In this article I focus on how the forces of Love & Power, Authority & Freedom interact- and to study some possible ways to move out of the gunk: here to play rubato to get our collectives unstuck from the entanglements of these forces and tensions.

As a leader, facilitator, hosts of “spaces of transformation” how can we step aside and go rubato within the 4 situations here described to regulate our groups’ emotional fields & deal with some pitfalls of collective action?

1. Navel gazing at the cusp of collapse: personal need and collective needs

Attracting attention to one’s own needs at the detriment of the group’s needs is a pattern that is prevailing in many collectives today. It goes something like this: ‘Oh your house is burning? Yeah… But wait, I have to visit my needs first (NVC lingua), I need to tend to my parts (IFS lingua), etc. we may identify this as the privilege of introspection.

A significant number of people are of the opinion that undertaking ‘inner work’ is a prerequisite to engaging in collectives. The myth goes like this:

“if we all super develop our inner self then we will all align and be fine in groups”.

This is a huge misconception because what happens in the group is not the sum of the experiences of its individuals, and group/org/system development is to be paid attention to with all contextual and relational aspects considered.

My point here is that this is a problematic narrative but at the same time we can’t ignore that — at present — our egos are hurting and there is a great amount of trauma to heal. Today, we encounter so much trauma and mental illness that this has become an unavoidable reality to contend with in groups. Inner work is worthy and important but there is an unspoken privilege when we think we have all the time for it, and when we expect those who are already feeling the brunt of crises — trying to survive — to engage solely in deep introspection.

This is a pressing issue, and the problem is compounded by the ubiquitous presence of people who think this way in present-day transition movements. One of the reasons for this is that the people who tend to gather in spaces of transition and social transformation are often the people who are sensitive to and grappling with inner trauma — or just basic unhappiness. For them participating in collectives is motivated by a desire to heal and they are often using collective spaces to find therapy space. There are several possible questions that arise: maybe we might need healing before we come to a collective? But is using a collective space for therapy effective? Do we find the competence in a collective to engage in group therapy or will we produce unqualified, flawed therapy spaces?

Such demands on the group can at times slow down the collective process and impede passage to action, preventing the collective from reaching its ‘common star’ (Rosart, 2019). Our egos get in the way of cooperation. If enough members of the collective are primarily focusing on their own needs, then the leaders need to perceive the inherent sabotage this can represent. It will require exercising nerve (Friedman, 2007) to refocus the group’s energy on its common star. This is frequent in coops and transformative communities. Friedman writes about this issue and proposes that the well individuated leader is in touch with the emotional field of the group. Following from this perspective, I add that:

A self-differentiated leader (or active participant) helps the group respect its resource in attention. Being care-full to not disperse this resource, so that the group stays nourished and not depleted by the sucking up of attention resulting from ego driven sabotage.

We who are versed in awareness and mindfulness-based practices, who have a systemic vision of context, group facilitation and leadership tend to harbor a culture of inclusion and empathy. The problem is that saboteurs know this and can weaponize it. They can hog all the attention for themselves. The group-intention and its attention are no longer on the common star but on the saboteur’s needs.

My hope is that a leader, facilitator, or active member, when experiencing these traps, will be capable of going rubato and opting for the “both/and” perspective: changing the rhythm, making space and pace for the group to reach for the star they identified together, while attending to individual members’ trauma[2].

Thus, going rubato gives us the opportunity to take a go-around to avoid the trap of empathy and misguided inclusion.

The matter is not a simple one. The complexity comes from the fact that trauma often originates from the oppressive systems we live in. Thus, working on the deconstruction of internalized systemic oppression is both social, political AND inner work.

So, we cannot just revert to saying to people who are focused on their trauma to drop it and let the group pursue its social action! At the same time, we need to develop the nerve to stop destructive patterns of members who give lots of attention to their personal wellbeing but not to the group’s wellbeing.

“We don’t change the world by asking everyone to do inner work — we change it by organizing collective action for systemic change, creating the conditions where healing becomes possible for all.” (Example of social media posting on the issue, here by Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov on LinkedIn)

Continuing with the metaphor, I want to dig deeper into what I mean by going rubato. Making space for dealing with inner trauma while keeping the social focus of the group, the common star, the collective action it wants to take to support social change, will require a sidestep, a change of pace and possibly facilitating two spaces, separate in time but feeding each other with deep understanding. This will be truly inclusive, not just let those with the privilege of focusing only on self to hog the space. Also not letting the neoliberal narrative — the one that tends to put the onus of unhappiness and place accountability on the individual only while ignoring the structural issues of inequality/inequity — to win over the space.

Maybe the question of whether evolutionary approaches to governance (spiral dynamics, teal, learning organizations, etc…), more spiritual and psychological in their content, are very different — or make more sense — or are better than — pragmatic approaches (holacracy, sociocracy, cooperative learning…) that start by changing the structures in which we function to create conditions to hopefully reach consciousness & spirituality, is a moot point? It is most always a question of doing both, and finding balance with respect to the different ways people learn, keeping in mind that the medium is the message (Mc Luhan).

We may engage in creating the structures that create the processes leading to the way we want to be, decide and act together as well as create a vision that contains values and spirituality that gives meaning to the whole. This is a double loop; one feeds into the other. Therefore, I will not engage in this article on deciding whether this or that approach is best, also because this is a competition-oriented, polarized way of viewing the issue. I don’t intend to make large generalizations or sweeping statements on governance, but quite the opposite: learning from my experiences of failed collectives, what I’m noticing is that

- both practices are complimentary.

- they’re to be adapted to specific situations.

- they cannot be generalized.

- they must be contextualized.

Perhaps some options are better in some context than others and are best adapted to certain people considering their learning strategies (so called multiple intelligences or learning styles in older literature, and more actual research on neurodiversity). I have learnt from years of experience in teacher education that flowing from theory to practice and back, is a fertile soil for professional learning. Thinking, doing and feeling always go together. No need to choose. When I hear people say “oh this is too mental, left-brain approach! I want an embodied, right-brain approach”, I stop listening. We never think outside, free from our feelings; cognition and emotion are embedded and make an inseparable system because we think with our mind, brain and body.

The times are asking for us to (re)learn joyful collective action. Schools do not teach us the skills to cooperate or to self-regulate to co-regulate, but instead what we have learnt in school is competition and egotism. In many posts on social media right now, we see authors blaming and revoking personal development as a hindrance to acting for social change.

I posit here that accepting the investment in time and energy in going rubato, staying well self-differentiated, making space for both personal and collective work, andis political work and we can do both synchronously.

2. Freedom and flow: your structure is ‘yucking my yum’!

Some members of collectives can start rejecting limits, structures and governance in the name of a certain conception of ‘freedom’ and “flow”. This might fall into the category of intergenerational challenges, where seniors are seen as being part of the ‘old world’ or ‘red world’ (Golden, 2021) and contributing to the problem while young people have the solution for new world approaches (blue world). For example, when we oppose structure and emergence, when we pit technology against embodiment- events I’ve witnessed in several collectives — we fall into the pitfalls of infertile polarities. Can going rubato help us find a purple perspective? Does no-order equate with freedom?

I argue that exploring the paradox — as musicians do when playing rubato[3] — is a much richer approach: the greater your discipline the greater freedom that you have; freedom can be best found within order.

When getting stuck in this polarity, any attempt to organize is seen as preventing flow and individual freedom, left-brain approaches etc. Flow and freedom are as well confused for each other. Such conceptions of freedom are often expressed as:

“There is no need for rules, let’s let things emerge!” or “Governance is boring!” (Mompoint-Gaillard, 2022), and

“We don’t need governance since we are good people who have common values and want the same thing” or

“We have no obligation to honor commitments — or have commitments in the first place since we are free”

are postures that are incompatible with cooperation in collectives. Cooperation and self-organizing in collectives requires governance, consent, shared decision making, agreed upon rules… commitment & accountability to at least a minimum extent.

My first point is that such freedom tenants manifest a position of privilege. Since being free on these terms is not given to all! When there are no rules of engagement, the door is wide open for the oppressive systems to come in through the back door, in full swing.

The default systems are reinstated: patriarchy (the men will speak more and louder than the women), caste (the minorities will have less voice than the dominant white default system), gender and sexuality orthodoxy (the cis gendered heterosexual members will be so at ease) etc.

Secondly, there is a disconnect that I find most easy to describe through the metaphor of a watershed or water cycle.

A participant with such conceptions of freedom is like a river that is disconnected from the hydrosphere (water that is on the surface of the planet, underground, and in the air). If each of the members are the rivers, then the group is the ensemble of rivers that together create lakes and other bodies of water. The lake represents the resource container of the group. It allows for providing resources and habitat for life (plants and animals including humans) just like groups need resources and space for their projects and collective action.

A river has a source, it flows, it’s emergent yes, but in the way that the water stream journeys, it’s self-organized, it’s alive. Riverbanks offer structure for the stream. Gravity drives the water downstream. Riverbanks, although not rigid and partly porous, are structured features that provide edifice that prevents inundation and havoc on the land and allows water to be a free-flowing body inside a frame that allows its existence, its forward motion with an orientation, and its contribution to the whole, the watershed.

Also, rivers are connected through hills harboring underground water streams that support each other. Water streams function on their own as individual entities but they are also connected to the needs of the whole and can come to nourish other bodies of water. When a lake is in trouble, for example with drought or other catastrophes, it can be helped by the individual streams and rivers that create it. The field is rich with membranes through which these waters connect in visible (overground) and invisible (underground) ways. All work together in a system, the water cycle; all is moving in one direction toward the ocean. And if one body leaves the system, goes rogue, the whole system is impoverished.

This system describes well the functioning of a structure (governance) that allows free flow. Without structure there is no flow, without a watershed there is no life. Groups are fields that are packed with membranes: the membranes of self, membranes between self and group, outer membrane of the group, and the — somewhat porous — elements are a strategic space for regulation of the whole. The structure shapes the way the flows and membranes interconnect to create watershed… or not, if we believe we need no structure, no governance.

A good enough governance accepts the laws of the hydrosphere in this metaphor. It is a question of balancing individuation (river) — the opportunity for each member to reach his or her own development goals and realization — and cooperation (watershed, lake) that I describe as a constant regulatory activity, that is overt (above ground, explicit) and covert (underground, tacit). And requires a stance in which the ego is low and the relational connection is high, in a societal context (hydrosphere).

In my experience a collective’s governance system (with its structures) is what permits freedom for all and not freedom for the privileged on their own terms.

A governance system that everyone agrees on and collectively upholds can create the conditions for the freedom of each member to self-realize and co-realize with the group, within high relational fields. Enabling equivalence between members, governance and structure, enlightened by a power-with and a power-within perspective, are needed along with caring and wellbeing -or whole-being. These cooperative structures are the banks that permit the water of the rivers to flow and feed the lake. Without these the collective endeavor is doomed, chaotic, dry and dead.

3. Loving our way to good decisions? Love vs. governance.

I’ve encountered many times members of collectives who seem to enjoy and operate within other infertile polarities as well. The polarity I write about in this section has similarities to the “inner-self vs collective” polarity described in section 1 of this article, but it is distinguished here because it invokes the issue of power and domination.

This section is about disapproving of governance and over relying on love (and trust) as the sole guiding force of the group’s relatedness and self-organization. It goes like this:

“Oh we don’t need all these ways of doing to make good decisions teogether… We love each other, so we will understand each other, and respect each other naturally and organically”.

Now I know, by experience of the collective, that the persons in a group who constantly talk about love and trust are usually exactly the ones who are going to enact and perpetuate the most violent behaviors, especially once high stakes come into play.

They will show a propension to be violent, probably more so than other members who do not speak of love as a leitmotiv but are more capable of it in their choice of attitudes and communication.

This seems counterintuitive to me, but I do know it to be true! When I’m in a group and one or more individuals regularly use the words “love” and “trust” as fix all buzzwords for issues of governance, conflict resolution, and other collective tension points, my system goes on high alert, and I start to think “Ah ok, I’ll have to keep my eyes open, because when the going gets rough, when difficulties and challenges arise within the collective, you may easily resort to violence to get yourself out of conflict, inner anger, trauma… you will lack accountability in that situation, and is not “love” you will choose to save yourself, but violence” This one form of sabotage.

It not only takes a lot of wisdom to have love as our only guiding compass but also that any guiding compass must recognize and deal with oppressive structures. But most of us are not wise enough for this, and we harbor internalized violence.

When tensions arise, we tend to revert to the unintentional but engrained, default oppressive structures we are used to (particularly when we have not co-constructed other, intentional, power-with structures).

When facing this, if we — yes I include myself in this category — leaders and active members of collectives who harbor a culture of inclusion and empathy fail to develop our nerve, we will fail to help the group co-regulate. Then people who prevent the group from having good self-organization, governance etc. by imposing love as the sole guiding frame for collective work, can pick up on our empathy-leaning values and identity and weaponize them. They then use this knowledge against us. This is a second form of sabotage.

Love cannot protect us from systemic oppression. When the group follows love without paying attention to power, oppression always comes running through the door. Without an understanding of domination and systemic oppression, groups cannot create the new non-oppressive spaces, no matter what shiny promising methodology they are using. We need to be able to do collective work that is sustainable and authentic. What is often lacking in our awareness-based operative and leadership is the question of power, readiness to engage and see invisible architectures of oppression and domination in all spaces and convenings[4], even those that might feel “safe… but only for some.

4. Problems with the source person or founder: stop bossing me around!

Finally, a last pervasive pattern within collectives that we need to overcome is the pitfall of disrespecting and getting into power struggles with the ‘source person(s)’ or founder of the project. By source-person, I’m referring to the person(s) who, by materializing their energy and ideas, is the first to give life to an organization, project, community, group, or team.

Although they are the source of the project’s realization, their role is often ignored and their influence neglected because, although they carry an intangible dimension of the project, that we could name its ‘soul’, its ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’, they are often perceived by some members of the groups — often individuals who have issues with authority — as exerting ‘power-over’ others.

By virtue of their unique role, the source or founder has a major impact on the project’s execution, the relationships between the people involved, and consequently the whole journey. Often a person becomes a source because of a deep motivation for change that is underpinned by an unease in the status quo. Therefore, a source person is inhabited by a very special energy, a drive and they project this drive into their vision of a better future. In ancient Greece the senate had authority, but the power belonged to the people[5]. Citizens may have respect for their leaders when they have been invested with legitimate and controlled power.

The issue with this pitfall is that members of the collective can reject legitimate authority. From there, things may unfold and evolve in two directions:

→ Authority may be rejected by members of the group in order to handle their personal difficulties with their own self-respect, self-confidence. When we suffer from such ills, we may find ourselves faced with the notion of authority and with those who embody it and we won’t be able to handle it. We won’t be able to understand legitimate authority and we’ll end up misguided by a sentiment that “anyone who shows authority is exerting power over us”.

→ A source-person can go beyond having authority to start exerting authoritarian force, often unknowingly. A source person can with time, become used to recognition, love the respect they are offered, enjoy the power the group endows upon them, up to entitlement. At some point, the source wants to keep this position of authority, but the legitimacy is gone. So then the source will often start exercising illegitimate authority, exerting power over the group.

The second you exercise power over someone, it’s the signal that you’re no longer in authority. When you are endowed with authority, there’s no power to exercise, but this nuance between someone who exercises authority and someone who exercises power-over has rarely been experienced by humans […] On arrival there is still this notion of authority which floats and… where are dad and mom? that’s the basic question.” (Isabelle Padovani, 2021]

I’ve seen source-persons come into trouble with members who succumb to the pitfall of mistaking legitimate authority for power-over, as well as source people moving from having authority to exerting power-over. And I’ve been surprised each time by the vigor deployed on both sides in such situations.

These entanglements, compared to others described in this article, many times even result in most hateful actions from people needing to deal with their personal issues with power. I’ve witnessed a shocking vehemence in the mutual attacks, within this pattern, that surprises by its intensity.

This is why, regarding this pattern, I’m not fully convinced that going rubato only can help and be enough to get the group unstuck. Recognizing the source and the principle of source should allow us to take concrete steps to ensure that everyone finds their rightful place in the project. When hateful power struggles commence, it is often too late to fix it without reverting to exclusion. In my own action research, I’ve witnessed that it is most often a winner-loser situation.

Therefore, I ask myself when is the moment to go rubato to prevent this pitfall, since it can rarely be fixed? Since the source person(s) is also often the leader, having nerve as a self-differentiated leader here would summon them to make space for sharing our onto-epistemologies at the onset of the creation of the collective: by this I mean sharing the personal stories that have built us to the point where we arrive here, at the start of a project, be it collective or individual.

In this case going rubato would be a sidestep into better knowing each other, learning together how to “co-perspective-as-a-verb”. It is well worth it for us to spend time understanding the source person’s onto-epistemology, and choose — when so informed — whether the project is for us to join or not.

Then it will take another rubato moment, when success of the project looms ahead, because that is a crucial point of the collective (hi)story where onto-epistemological issues can arise yet again.

Rather than hijacking the whole endeavor, when I know the source, and the ontological underpinning of the project, I can then envisage whether and why I would stay and participate, or leave to become a source of something other, elsewhere. Going rubato here will arguably be a preemptive, and preventive action.

Finishing thoughts

Of the entanglements that get groups and collectives stuck, in this article I described four, related to Love & Power, Authority & Freedom, because they were the most pervasive in my action research on 3 failed collective enterprises in the past 10 years as a founder, leader, facilitator and member.

I often hear people say ‘We need to learn to connect with others with empathy” … because “we have not necessarily developed relational capacities” etc.

But in summary, on arrival in a collective situation, we all find ourselves with all that was not settled within us, before the project. And then, we find ourselves with others and all that was not settled in them, with whom we will have to settle all that is not settled about our own capacity to be in relational mode. It’s a mess.

It doesn’t work to just pose at the beginning of the project as a prerequisite that to be part of the project, members must be ready to do work on themselves. To reach our common star, and hopefully social action & transformation, it is not enough to “consciously decide” to engage in inner-work (NVC, IFS, etc.) in a way that is as substantial as the work in the pragmatic, material & operational area. That is a naive position.

It’s a both/and situation: there is much to learn in the world of facilitation and leadership, in horizontal and self-proclaimed ‘awareness-based” environments, to deal in parallel with personal, individual growth and collective action for social transformation. Sometimes it’s time to sidestep inner work. Other times it’s right to have the nerve to keep saboteurs in check.

With careful play around a pulse, we can let go of our approaches, the methods we know as we know them to create more combinations. To be intentional in taking freedom from the pulse, and become more playful with ways to be human. I argue in this article that space, pace, breath and rhythm pictured as Playing Rubato, will have to be the work for dealing with all the entanglements.

The music is not all in the sheet. Interpretation is what turns a black and white sheet into music. There is much more intentionality when the decisions we take as leaders, facilitators and active members of collectives, contribute to the ongoing quest to determine what it means to be human; and, with rubato, what it means to be free.

Be ready to go rubato or don’t start playing!

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References

Bateson, N. (2022) Un-pick-apart-able. https://norabateson.medium.com/un-pick-apart-able-c68a4c079949

Duportail, J. (2023) Après la pluie. Self care ta mère.. Binge Audio Éditions. https://www.binge.audio/podcast/apreslapluie/self-care-ta-mere-peut-on-politiser-le-bien-etre

Friedman, E. A Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman (New York: Church Publishing, 2007)

Golden, L. (2021) Red world/Purple world. Healing our world. https://youtu.be/H5JvTdrDL4w?t=57

Kunkler, T. (2025). GRC: Regen & Governance — Nature flows n patterns. Patterns of regenerative governance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPF5rO4AzyI

McLuhan, M., (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf

Mompoint-Gaillard, P. (2022) Governance is boring — Not. https://medium.com/@pascalemompoint/governance-is-boring-not-9877513a4b0b

Mompoint & Golden , (2023). Transformative Social Systems (TSS) https://medium.com/transformative-social-systems-tss/introducing-transformative-social-systems-tss-7ee5bdc6f274

Padovani, I. (2021). Unmasking the mechanisms of violence: Non-Violent Communication (NVC) and founder dynamics. Université Vivante. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGGVxrz0PU.

Rosart, C. (2017) Étoile et opérationnel. https://individuation.team/etoile-et-operationnel/

Teste, C., (2023). Politiser le bien-être. Essay, Binge Audio Éditions.

The Tonic. (2021) The story of rubato, from Mozart to Matther Argerich, Podcast Series, Ep.3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Mz9dvlaWQgc

Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The origins of our discontents. Random House.

[1] One might add: and what about organizations that value their wholeness at the expense of the ecosystem wholeness? In the same way we wouldn’t want to be involved with a person harboring narcissist attitudes, we wouldn’t want to be involved with a org functioning within a narcissist stance.

[2] Here it’s about escaping the illusion of a separate self: “the self is nested in relationships and connections and what is important for governance at a systems level is self-regulation […] being able to name what I feel and need is part of self-regulation; being able to make choices to meet my needs within relationships and reciprocity and mutuality it’s about being relational without losing a consciousness of and connection to my own boundaries and it’s about embodiment […] this is a really important layer for governance right now, how we’re governing our own nervous systems.” (Tracy Kunkler, 2024)

[3] Inspired by musician Anne Marie McDermott speaking about rubato and articulating the sort of paradox that freedom can be found within order (The Tonic, podcast, see references).

[4] Follow for future reference on this topic of power within Transformative Social Systems (TSS) https://medium.com/transformative-social-systems-tss/introducing-transformative-social-systems-tss-7ee5bdc6f274

[5] To be fair, let’s be clear: ‘the people’ in ancient Greece were solely ‘free’ ‘men’ (not slaves, not women, not resident of foreign descent)

Playing Rubato and Getting “unstuck” from the entanglements of Love & Power, Authority & Freedom was originally published in Transformative Social Systems (TSS) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Authors: Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard, PhD, MA, pascalemompoint.com & Laureen Golden, MEd, LCSW, BCC, laureengolden.com

Author’s Note: This article has been years in the making yet continues to be a work in progress. We’re releasing an early version of this concept/white paper as a means to invite more people to gather in conversation around it, so we can learn aloud and together. For information about the authors, please check their websites indicated above.

Summary

When people gather to tackle today’s pressing challenges, create policies, organize and invent new ways forward, what’s often missing is the deep meeting of hearts and minds that can arise when we engage in dialogue and reflective listening to access deeper, collective sources of knowing. This white paper offers the term “Transformative Social Systems’’ (TSS) to name practices that help us access and be guided by this deeper source of wisdom so we can better address today’s challenges through open conversations and experiments in social contexts.

“Transformative Social Systems” (TSS) [1] include practices, methods, procedures, and techniques that propose a different way of being and working together ~ a return to honoring what is meaningful, connected, life-enriching and joyful. While this way of operating has always been beneficial, it is now essential to effectively work within the level of complexity and uncertainty facing communities globally. TSS help us improve towards a greater sense of wholeness, health, and life-affirming ways of being. These improvements only arise within “power-with” relationships and collective “sensitivity to emergence” (what is unfolding in a group, in a context) which enables us to develop the capacity to learn with peers, and under certain conditions, at an exponential rate.

Readers may have encountered TSS practices in their ancient wisdom form such as indigenous epistemologies and practices, martial arts, yoga, Confucianism, Taoism, Vedic traditions; or more modern forms such as “Agile”, “Lean”, “Spiral Dynamics”, “Teal”, “Sociocracy”, “Holacracy”, “Learning Organization” in the business world; or “Montessori”, “Reggio”, “Freire”, “Pestalozzi” in the field of education and pedagogy; or “Non-Violent Communication”, “Theory U”, “Constellations”, in the area of communication, etc. All of these, and many more, are all part of the TSS landscape.

TSS are important today due to the fact that the enormous changes we, as humans, have set in motion externally have currently outpaced our internal capacities to manage them (Golden, 2020). Therefore, there is an urgent need to shift the rate of learning for people of all ages and backgrounds, to ensure that our internal capacity is better matched to the external complexity we’re navigating.

TSS provide the essential means to enable this necessary shift. However, a siloed environment in the TSS movement prevents it from cohering across the fields of social action. Therefore, a fundamental challenge to meeting the need is to help the TSS landscape cohere. With this paper, the authors seek to draw support to help the parts of the system know each other, to more successfully collaborate, and serve the collective cause. Our hope is that by launching a reflection on TSS, we can launch a reflection on what it is that lies at the core of these social technologies while avoiding the traps of unnecessary competition. By doing this, we want to draw public awareness to the immense potential of TSS, link the practices, support the practitioners who use them, and help lots more people learn them by promoting their study.

Since people cannot learn all the parts of all the TSS, our goal is that they may learn their core and transversal elements. We suggest that such work is best accomplished within fertile, un-institutional spaces of peer learning. Creating such spaces is a challenging task that requires us to rethink how we learn as individuals and collectives (Mompoint-Gaillard, 2022).

Identifying as part of the TSS “Movements of Movements,” the authors of this White Paper are committed to:

• Facilitating self-discovery within the TSS ecosystem, as a means for this system to evolve from scattered fragments of small networks into a system of influence. [2]
• Helping galvanize the current field of TSS practitioners (the likely audience for this paper) to come together around the TSS concept and play a key role in explaining TSS to a wider audience of people who are not yet as aware or practiced. A desired outcome of such time and effort is that greater awareness and understanding of the benefits and relevance of TSS will create more sustainability within the world while also sustaining the livelihood of practitioners who steward TSS.

What are Transformative Social Systems (TSS)?

Transformative Social Systems (TSS) is a term to illuminate ancient and modern wisdom traditions which center an ethos of collaboration (Mompoint-Gaillard & Golden). These coherent sets of practices, procedures, methods, technologies, and approaches enhance the way we live and work together. The term has been carefully defined (Fig. 1).

The notion of “Transformative Social Systems” originated when a group of collaborators belonging to varied communities of practice (sociocracy, permaculture, NVC, Theory U, democratic and liberating education, and other fields of social action) began to notice how the variety of approaches we were all drawing from seemed to be based on similar principles. It was challenging for us to recognize each other as belonging to a larger whole, because each of these approaches developed its terminology in isolation from one another. Since then, cycles of conversations and experiments have been conducted, and the commonalities grew clearer. The concept was named and defined, that is, practically and theoretically grounded.

Transversal Elements of TSS…

Embodied: TSS consist of life-affirming practices that support the development of our own wholeness (integrating mind, body and soul). This matters as “practices are linked to values, ethics, care and commitments. We transform and evolve through practices.” [3] Working with and supporting our embodied mind is crucial to meaningfully address the level of threat that is upon us.

Holistic: TSS enable us to transform into more whole, integrated, and vibrant beings capable of managing the dynamics of duality and play the upsides of polarities. This includes our capacity for deeper intra-personal (within ourselves) and inter-personal (between ourselves and another) connection which are conditions for the true belonging that is necessary for the major collective paradigm shift that needs to happen in a short time for life and biodiversity to be sustained on this planet.

Engaging: TSS invite us to shift from a bystander mindset to that of an active participant in our life and the world around us. They enable groups to better harness the power of collective intelligence and create shared ownership of solutions by enabling diverse stakeholders to co-create and design in a context together.

Dialogic: TSS support real conversations around powerful questions which require us to fathom what is going on, in a way that is fully human, embodied, and present.

Aligned: TSS can bring greater coherence to a group by helping people align around clarity in purpose and values.

Intentional: TSS offer a menu of complexity-sensitive ways to learn “what works,” through intentional exploration, imagination, reflection, experimentation and iteration.

Emergent: TSS grow our capacity to think, learn, and work in wholes (ie, “systems thinking) as well as beyond our usual thought, emotion and actions, so we can experiment with new patterns that can produce different outcomes.

Peaceful: TSS enable us to better track and tend to our “neural state” which is crucial for working better together. When humans enter survival mode, it is challenging to be generous, creative, and benevolent.

Why TSS? Why Now? The “Learning Imperative”

“In the coming decades…the only thing that will matter is how willing we have been to learn.” ~ Nora Bateson, The Bateson Institute

Immense and deep learning is going to have to happen at a fast pace

TSS have always been valuable but in our current context, they’re now critical for our survival because the tipping points at which our systems collapse are around the corner and our institutions are ill-equipped to support the necessary level of learning and development that we need today. If we are to navigate the waters that are rising and the fires that are burning ~ both literally in our environment and metaphorically in our psychological, social, economic, political and workplace landscapes ~ we need to learn fast and fiercely. We refer to the need to support such immense learning for people of all ages and places as “The Learning Imperative.”

What we are confronting as a global society requires us to be different in ways that shift everything. It demands a different level of maturity and nothing short of whole system transformation. The type of learning we’re pointing towards incorporates the academic and intellectual, yet also transcends it to include the evolution of the whole person ~ our head (increasing our capacity to perceive more discerningly, think more complexly, and make wiser decisions), heart (our capacity to digest emotions such as anger, grief, and shame, so we can access our calm, clarity and compassion) and will (our capacity to stoke the inner fire of transformation and conjure the will necessary to heal our addiction to superficial comforts and act from a deeper sense of meaning, purpose and care for the whole).

Local communities around the globe will struggle to surf the seismic shifts ahead. To meaningfully address The Learning Imperative it is urgent that we take into account the (1) Scope of the problem (offering ways for people to meaningfully address today’s complexity and uncertainty), (2) Scope of time (be capable of realization in the next 3–5 years), and (3) Scope of the population (be capable of reaching 7.5 billion people). (See Fig. 2) The criteria of these 3 scopes illustrates why we cannot relegate The Learning Imperative to antiquated institutions of formal education. Aside from their prohibitive costs and gated access to knowledge, the pedagogies and structures they offer are not relevant in a world that demands us to be proficient in navigating complex and novel conditions.

New spaces of learning are needed for new pedagogies to flourish

To adequately support the developmental leap that is being called for from humans today, we need new spaces of learning that are suited for the 21st Century. Necessity requires us to remember that prior to formal learning in institutions, humanity had survived and thrived for millennia through the rapid transmission of knowledge that occurs in Communities of Conversations and Practice. Therefore, we are advocating for the rapid and widespread cultivation of less formal spaces of peer learning as these are more nimble, accessible, relevant, and capable of adapting to local context and need.

We are calling society’s attention to TSS as we also need a new pedagogy (and andragogy), new curricula, new content and methods. Not only do TSS offer some of the best “fundamentals” and core curriculum for navigating complexity and nurturing resilience in people and groups, but they also provide the learning spaces in which individuals and collectives may practice and grow proficient in these skills. TSS help shift our notion of learning-in-places to learning-in-communities-of-conversations-and-practices. They provide a context of popular education and a scalable pattern for supporting self-organized and facilitated development of our collective intelligence. TSS practices are a revalidation of epistemic diversity, and antidotes to having the-decision-of-a-few imposed on the many. In this way, they are all related to democracy and democratic cultures (Mompoint-Gaillard, 2015, 2018).

Current TSS Limits to Addressing the Learning Imperative

Unfortunately, there are several obstacles that currently limit the ability of TSS to meaningfully address The Learning Imperative.

First, the sheer volume of TSS and the lack of clarity in how they relate to one another currently makes it impossible for people to learn them all in their entirety. The question is, is it even necessary for people to do so? Such work could take a lifetime (it is certainly taking ours)! Another important question is whether and to what extent one must deeply know one (or two or more) TSS before being able to engage with the elements that lie at the core of the TSS constellation. We believe work needs to be done to distill the core teachings of TSS, as well as catalog their distinctions, so that people can ground themselves in the basic TSS competences. (See “The Need” and “The Dream” below).

Second, a siloed TSS landscape limits the coherence and flourishing of this field of knowledge. TSS wisdom is embedded in groups, organizations, and institutions in an environment that is not conducive to cooperation, collaboration, and collective impact [4]. Even with good intentions, movements for social change may in fact compete against each other as a mistaken goal [5], while at the same time having the dream to act collectively. As such, these communities and their practices can be considered as functioning in silos (See Figure 4): each group functioning on and for its own as a resource but groups don’t collectively grow each other’s capacity nor fully cohere. As a result, the parts of the system do not connect as a whole.

In their current context, TSS communities are functioning as ‘silos’ because the organizations that steward these approaches work mostly in terms of self-promotion and tend fall into the trap of becoming ‘accidental adversaries’[6] rather than partners or allies that carry the same goal and intention. The issue of funding, particularly among TSS organizations compounds this issue.

From Silos to Constellations

Another metaphor that can encourage the capacity of TSS to move beyond the current “siloes,” is that of “constellations.” Constellations are easily recognizable patterns of stars that help people orient (just as TSS wisdom can help orient people navigating the Sea of Change). In the vastness of the sky, individual stars within a constellation are often better perceived when situated in relationship to other stars. Likewise, when the relationships (similarities and complementarities) between the distinct TSS are understood, the brilliance of each is more evident and accessible. And similar to how a constellation gives outlines to a form, there is important work to be done around defining the contours of what is (and is not) a TSS.

Note: The image above highlights mostly modern TSS although there is much ancient and indigenous wisdom from around the world that figures into the constellation. There is a plethora of other TSS that exist that are not in this figure, including those that the authors are not yet familiar with. The Euro-centricity we observe in the field highlights systemic oppression and the epistemecide that goes with our long histories of colonization, i.e., the silencing and invisibilizing of other ways of knowing than Euro-leaning. By opening up the conversation with this White Paper, we can (re)invite in the depth and breadth of wisdom of larger communities and learn as we go.

The Need: Helping the TSS Ecosystem to Cohere

“To make a system stronger, we need to create stronger relationships. To bring health to a system, connect it more to itself…to learn more about itself from itself.” ~Margaret Wheatley, Leadership & the New Science

There is a lot at stake today! TSS offer the potential to help humans collectively and harmoniously engage with the rapid and immense changes that are ahead. What is so powerful about TSS is both the similarity between them (there are a majority of elements that can be seen as transversal across the TSS landscape), as well as how their differences enhance each other.

In order for TSS to help our global community to meaningfully respond to The Learning Imperative, we need a group of TSS practitioners, leaders, creators, and researchers who are deeply versed in one TSS, and familiar with several, to come together to (1) collaboratively distill the most important transversals across the fields of TSS, as well as their areas of distinctions, and (2) cultivate the conditions to spread them widely and quickly.

Competency and Activity-Based Clusters

Constellations of TSS seem to cluster around certain competencies and activities. Making these competencies visible can help us more consciously engage with them. Below are two examples (Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard, 2019) of such clusters (or practices that connect between the the siloed communities described above:

• FEEDBACK: The fact that so many TSS offer feedback as an important developmental process alerts us to the importance of paying specific attention to feedback in our approaches to how we are living, working, and being together. Many TSS offer methods to enhance how we give and receive feedback, learn through feedback, and make good use of the data that feedback gives us. A constellation of TSS clustering around developing feedback skills include Permaculture, Sociocracy, 360°, De Bono’s 6-Hats, Theory U, Learning Organization, Growth mindset, Action Research, etc.
• BEING and “INTERIOR CONDITIONS”: In addition to the way TSS help us put in place virtuous EXTERNAL structures for groups (governance, decision-making, democratic “power-with’ culture), many TSS also cluster around evolving our INTERNAL ways of being. This is important for addressing The Learning Imperative as “transformation occurs when the being of the person is addressed…the unity of our being…how we organize ourselves towards life (or not).” Thus, to focus on inner development one can draw from all these TSS: Theory U, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), Spiral dynamics, Teal, etc. and a plethora of smaller communities such as Prosocial or Cards for Democracy for example.

Our Theory of Change

We believe there is a “movement of movements” working to restore wholeness and well-being to people and the planet[7] and that TSS practitioners and organizations are an essential part of this movement. However, there is work that needs to be done to unleash the paradigm-shifting potential TSS offer.

In our theory of change…

• The TSS field is cohering because the core and transversal elements of TSS have been researched and disseminated amongst a great number of motivated social actors.
• TSS are more easily adopted by many more people.
• As people learn these methods, they find that they apply to all areas of their life — personal and professional, work, family, and community.
• TSS support emergence of essential capacities through methods and practices to accomplish the systems-wide changes that are so needed at this time.
• Policymakers and administrators now include TSS in their decision making processes.
• Pioneers of TSS become wisdom-keepers for their communities.
• Past critics who said such an endeavor could not be done see it happening and become eager supporters.

In summary, by focusing on helping the TSS ecosystem to cohere (evolving itself from loose networks, through Communities of Practice, to a System of Influence)[8], large numbers of people (social actors) will be better able to learn TSS quickly so we can all meaningfully improve the way we collectively engage. To actualize this vision, we propose the work described below in “The Dream.”

The Dream

Our dream is that by launching a reflection on TSS, we can launch a reflection on what it is that lies at the core of these practices, methods, and technologies. By doing this, we want to draw public awareness to their immense potential, link the practices, support the practitioners who use them, and help lots of people learn them by promoting their practice and study.

One single method never does it all. What is so powerful about TSS is their similar aspects (elements that can be seen as transversals in the TSS landscape) while their differences offer the potential to enhance each other. If we observe the TSS through the lens of learning outcomes, we encounter common goals among them.

The work of the dream is to engage a group of practitioners, leaders, creators, and researchers who are deeply practiced in at least one, and well versed in a few, TSS to come together to collaboratively distill the most important teachings of TSS and to then set up the conditions to help spread TSS widely and quickly.

Following our Theory of Change, we dream that these practices will become so widespread and mainstream that they will become the new ‘parallel systems’ (‘parallel institutions’) slowly and steadily replacing the old structures. People with shared vision will then have the chance to invent new institutions rooted firmly in the soil of our values and new awarenesses. The institutions will have grown from the seeds of the organizing stage: the alternative institutions, the networks, radical caucuses, and affinity groups[9]. In these new systems (be they organizations, institutions, communities, small and big groups, etc.) people’s learning and development needs can be realized in ways where (1) learning can happen in real time (learning while we work, through thinking, talking and doing, rather than learning that is separate from work) and (2) as needed (“just in time” and “on demand” learning centered on learner’s readiness rather than scheduled offerings).

In our dream, there is a new pedagogy and new content and methods that are suited for the 21st Century, as well as diverse and plentiful spaces for this new kind of learning (such spaces participate in a democratic culture where the fate of all does not depend on the decisions of too few).

“To meaningfully address The Learning Imperative, work must be done to sift through the variety of TSS to glean their key elements and create a coherent approach to spreading the competencies they cultivate.” ~Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard & Laureen Golden

The Call to Action

We, the authors, are calling attention to the overarching movement that we call TSS, to which ancient and modern wisdom traditions belong. We hope that distinguishing TSS will draw public awareness to the immense potential of these practices. Therefore we are proposing to hold a space for actions that:

1. Galvanize support for further study of the field of Transformative Social Systems to develop criteria and indicators for what is a TSS and what isn’t, and to understand the potential of TSS, as well as the obstacles blocking their flourishing (for example, too many in the TSS field are already spending more of their time than is healthy doing unpaid or badly paid labor);
2. Promote connections, synergies and interoperability between TSS (as individual systems of communities of practice that are relevant within a larger whole of movements for social change).
3. Evolve the networks of TSS practitioners from operating as scattered fragments into a powerful system of influence.
4. Raise public awareness and educate to inspire more people to consider incorporating these practices into their daily lives; educate youth and adults about the practical support TSS provide; learn to facilitate community work with TSS practices, and support “bite-sized” experimentations.

These goals might also inspire specific actions such as:

• Hosting a community. A non-formal educational space steeped in lifelong and lifewide learning: TSS dissemination from chunks for all to in-depth practice for many.
• Developing a “new curriculum,” a “new pedagogy” — and andragogy — that includes ethics of care, awareness, interior condition, cooperation, collaboration … and develops a competence-based approach to human learning and development, in practice and reflection, in body, mind and spirit.
• Finding resources and funding for The Work. Substantial financial backing will be needed to do the work professionally. The TSS publications and other activities may help give us additional elements and proof of concept.

Conclusion

Transformative Social Systems (TSS) are crucial for preparing people to meaningfully navigate today’s complex challenges. They are one of the most powerful ways to meaningfully respond to The Learning Imperative. As a global society we are facing a future of continuous negotiation and decision making that will occur under the pressure of economic, environmental, and climate-related chaos. We, the authors, are sounding the alarm for focused intervention to shift the rate of human and organizational development. Learning in our new world can no longer be relegated to childhood and formal education institutions. Amidst the growing challenges and changing conditions, continuous, lifelong, and lifewide learning is essential for people of all ages to survive and thrive.

Attribution/Gratitude

We are grateful to all of those with whom we have had the pleasure to be in conversation with during almost a decade of work defining the contours of the TSS concept. This includes members of learning communities we’ve been deeply involved with such as the Ohio Montessori Alliance, Pestalozzi Community of Practice, Learn to change (L2C), and Healing Our World (HOW).

Furthermore, this white paper has undergone extensive peer review through two cycles of consultations, with consultants, trainers and researchers from the movement of movements that we describe in the paper. The members of the consultation groups gave us courage and guidance to achieve our goal. Gratitude to… Ted Rau, John Buck, François Knuchel, Stephanie Nestlerode, Brandon Dube, Paula Leigh-Doyle, Tania Bertolone, Bernadette Wesley, Karen Gimnig, Alain Gaillard, Graham Boyd, Jerry Koch Gonzalez, Rodger Matlage, Deborah Chang, Nara Pais, Jacqui Miller, Marie Schuster, Idit Rose, Rhonda Baird, Carol Xu, Meg Buzzi, Katrin Wenzel and Yves Abanda, and mentors such as Chris Corrigan and John Buck.

Footnotes

[1] Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

[2] See Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze’s article, Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale for more information.

[3] Richard Strozzi-Heckler, The Art of Somatic Coaching.

[4] “What is Collective Impact” is a helpful resource to learning more about this approach.

[5] Funding, for example, can foster incoherence by creating a competitive stance that traps the movement in the scarcity model.

[6] David Peter Stroh, Systems thinking for Social Change.

[7] This idea is beautifully addressed in Paul Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World.

[8] See Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze’s article, Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale for more information.

[9] George Lakey, Toward a Living Revolution.

Introducing “Transformative Social Systems” (TSS) was originally published in Transformative Social Systems (TSS) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Starting point and overview

The work on Transformative Social Systems (TSS) by Laureen Golden and Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard (Pascale & Laureen @ TSS) provides a powerful lens for understanding the need and pathways for accelerating human learning and development to navigate today’s increasing complexities.

In this paper, I want to suggest a context for the TSS as laid out by Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden and add to it — like encountering a beautiful mosaic and feeling compelled to add to it in the spirit of “Yes! And…!”

For disclosure, the convergence between their and my approach isn’t a coincidence — their thinking has influenced my thinking deeply and for years. Naming and describing TSS made it possible for me to recognize the ecosystem of practices that support holistic, multi-modal, and transformative learning and understanding.

In my approach, I will add two areas to their mosaic which are both part of a bigger body of work I’m exploring under the working title Wiser Organizations.

• Meaning as a side-product of transformative learning can serve as an incentive for building more resilience.
• Relevance and agency, supported by TSS and appropriate organizational structures, support an effective co-evolution of organizations and their ecosystem and reduce feelings of overwhelm.

Learn more about the Wiser Organizations work on the page: https://wiserorganizations.org. My bio is below this article.

The problem: complexity gap

Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden look at TSS in the context of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) and the complexity gap — the growing differential between the complexities around us and our capacity to deal with them.

This, of course, is not only an issue on a personal level but also for collective on all levels — teams, organizations, alliances, nations, and regions, as well as the planetary community.

In organizations, what this looks like is lots of overwhelm and confusion (often without being able to point to the source of confusion), disorientation, missed opportunity, reductionist focus on (questionable) metrics, flip-flopping between half-hearted self-organization and top-down directives in a haphazard attempt to gain ground under our feet.

The individuals don’t feel good either: there’s anxiety, disenfranchisement, and a loss of purpose or meaning.

At the same time, the planet is in trouble because of overshoot, mass extinction and climate changes. It’s easy to see that organizations and individuals are overwhelmed, and the planet is also overwhelmed.

What’s up with all that overwhelm? And what do TSS have to do with it? I will argue that TSS can be part of the solution to overwhelm and that the framing of John Vervaeke in Awakening From the Meaning Crisis can enlighten how and why.

TSS and Meaning — Vervaeke’s work

Learning creates more possibilities. The more different frames and modalities we can hold, the more likely it is that we can grasp new understandings and transform ourselves to become a person with new eyes to see (and a bigger heart to sense, a better toolset to get a grasp on needed actions). The more possibilities we have access to, the better we can respond. This is a fundamental skill for navigating complexity.

So far, so good. But there’s more! If we connect the work of the TSS with cognitive scientist John Vervaeke’s work, we can even reconnect to our sense of meaning and find better ways of dealing with our overwhelm.

In his work on the Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, Vervaeke analyzes the cognitive styles and practices to foster wisdom. Wisdom is different from amassing information because it needs to include transformation. Wisdom, he says, is the ability to learn and unlearn, become someone else and see outside of our frames and seeing with “new eyes.” By doing so with different angles and mechanisms, we can reduce the self-deceptions we habitually fall prey to. Wisdom, he says, means to continuously become less foolish.

Vervaeke proposes that it’s wisdom practices that support that journey. He mentions a host of practices like meditation, dialogue practices, shamanic practices, psychedelics and others. I propose that those wisdom practices in Vervaeke’s work are equivalent to TSS in Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden.

Both emphasize that

• Learning is non-linear. There’s not one set of practices that will guarantee this or that insight.
• Learning is transformational.
• Learning is multimodal (more-than-propositional, i.e. it can be thought and put into words like a statement)
• Learning is deeply relational.

While TSS emphasize collective practices, Vervaeke’s focus is more on individually based practices but the lines blur between the collectiveness of practices, and between individuals and collectives — and they are constituted by each other.

Vervaeke mentions that every cognitive style (and therefore every practice) comes with a certain bias. What is needed is a combination (synchronously or over time) to mitigate those effects. Maybe Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden make a similar observation when they say that there are constellations of TSS that relate to each other. It would be interesting to examine the biases of TSS more systematically and observe whether typical combinations build more robust “stacks” that counterbalance their individual biases.

The comparison between Vervaeke’s wisdom practices and TSS in Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden is not only affirming, Vervaeke also brings in two other elements that can positively contribute to the mission of Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden and improve the capacity of organizations to deal with the complexity gap: meaning and relevance.

Meaning

To Vervaeke, the path to wisdom is, at the same time, the path to meaning.¹

¹Meaningfulness is more than just purpose! Purpose is aspirational (and as such, further distant) while meaning is experienced in day-to-day interactions with colleagues, customers, performing and mastering tasks and “interacting” with ourselves. Meaning is what’s between us, penetrating our selves, our relationships and our actions. It’s not something that can be expressed in words because it is inherently non-propositional, multi-faceted and polycentric.

Vervaeke lays out that the same cognitive and psychological mechanisms that allow wisdom are also the mechanisms that create meaning.

He explores meaning as something that is not merely about achieving happiness or contentment but rather involves a deep sense of being connected in a valuable way to oneself, others, and the world. As such, meaning is deeply intertwined with the concept of wisdom and the notion of self-transcendence.

Meaning is not just out there waiting to be discovered, but it is created in our relationships, and in our learning. In my own words, meaning is in all the connections between us and the world around us. Vervaeke shows that most cognitive processes that contribute to finding things meaningful are not in propositional thinking but they are sub-propositional. Meaning is in comforting a child, jumping into a cold stream, in deep conversation, in a new insight, a new perspective. Words, on the other hand, may contribute to meaning but are also prone to deconstructing meaning. (A simple example is that we can feel someone’s love, but minds are really good at questioning whether they really meant it, deconstructing our sense of mattering.) So propositional thinking is a gamble — it can support meaning but also disintegrate it.

TSS can add to meaningfulness because they help us connect more deeply with ourselves and each other. They are often non-propositional or at least include non-propositional parts like sensing (like Theory U), connecting empathetically (like NVC), learning through relationships and feedback (many TSS), or tapping into our sense of aspiration.

This is worth considering for the proponents of TSS because it adds to the discussion and can serve as an incentive (a third attractor, in Schmachtenberger’s words) for transformative learning. If the same practices that help us be resilient, wise and resourceful are the ones that create meaning for the people involved, then there’s a positive reward loop to be uncovered that can support the learning path.

Just like a toddler or child seems to enjoy exactly the activities and games that she needs to make a developmental leap, meaning is the reward for the effort it takes to learn. Maybe meaningfulness is simply the adult version of a child's joy when practicing a new skill.

That means it might benefit proponents of TSS to center meaningfulness in how they talk about and design learning paths for those practices. A simple example is that sometimes practitioners of sociocracy tell me that the most striking benefit of rounds in meetings (the practice of speaking one by one until everyone has spoken once) is that meetings feel more connected and relationships more meaningful. People feel nourished. How can these TSS be taught so people experience that meaningfulness early on, and it might whet their appetite for more practice to bridge over some of the early bumps of learning a new skill?

Relevance

Wisdom is not just knowing a lot or having a lot of experience; someone can be very smart or experienced and yet not wise. It’s also not about being “good.” What “good” means changes depending on the context, for example we might need to prioritize honesty in one context, and kindness in another. So ironically, if we defined wisdom as being good, one would need be wise to know which one to prioritize, which means one would need to be wise to know how to be wise — a circular and unhelpful definition. So it’s not that virtues in an absolute form “make” us wise but that having more wisdom helps prioritize virtues effectively in a given situation. Wisdom is knowing what matters in what context.

To Vervaeke, all the processes that help us determine what’s relevant — cognitive processes along with sensation, feelings, intuition, values, frames help us have appropriate relationships with the world. If we can’t choose what’s relevant then all the information around us will paralyze us. Relevance Realization helps us select, align with our intentions, adapt, grow, and connect with others. It’s a helpful, adaptive, dynamic, and caring constraint.

He poses that the same mechanisms that create meaning help us know what’s relevant. This means that following this article, TSS help increase our capacity to know what’s relevant. And that’s a big deal if we consider that overwhelm is a lack of capacity to filter what’s relevant.

Here’s how Vervaeke puts it:

“Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies and cognitive styles that dynamically (i.e. reciprocally) constrain and optimize each other such that there is an overall enhancement of relevance realization — relevance realization within inference, insight & intuition, internalization, understanding & gnosis, transformation, and aspiration.”

(John Vervaeke, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis)

Agency

Mastering different TSS now offers a collective “new eyes” and new modes. For example, if there’s an issue in the organization, groups in the organization can look at the issue “with a Theory U lens” or go about solving it sociocratically, or NVC-ly. With more options, the chances of grasping and transforming the issue increase. The more We (as a collective) understand Ourselves, the more effectively we can act because what we understand about ourselves and the world around us gives us a better handle on what’s relevant. Knowing what’s relevant makes us more capable of acting.

Relevance is highly dependent on the context. That means understanding what’s relevant requires familiarity with the context. For organizations, that means they need to be directly connected to their environment — whoever sits in an ivory tower or a marble board room will not understand the needs on the ground. That’s why TSS need to include patterns and practices that increase the connection between those serving and those served in organizations, like agile, Design Thinking or decentralized decision-making (like in sociocracy and Holacracy) where workers can make local decisions depending on immediate needs.

Taken even further, we need to ask ourselves what organizational structures are apt to support direct experience and flexibility for an organization to be shaped — to co-evolve — with its environment, like a fox with its habitat. Co-evolution requires a willingness to be changed, and acknowledges the power we have in shaping the world around us.

And that’s where all threads connect: if we fit into a context because we are intricately familiar and participants in a context, our work will feel meaningful, and we will have a good sense of what matters.

The absurdity of detached behavior of large corporations, the lack of sensitivity of what kinds of products and services matter in a world running in overshoot mode, the sense of utter meaninglessness and our overwhelm and lack of perceived agency — they might all be connected.

TSS are one building block to increase our capacity, build our resilience, manage our overwhelm, and re-create meaning between us.

Attunement

Our relevance realization mechanisms, as described by Vervaeke, happen on an individual basis. Relevance realization includes intuition, mental frames, and many other propositional and sub-propositional cognitive processes.

I am curious about how to transfer relevance realization to a collective level. In order to agree on what’s relevant, it helps to have shared experiences, mental models, intuition, intentions, and aspirations. How can we collectivize that?

I argue that a prerequisite of collective relevance realization is attunement — a way to “be on the same page” and have a shared reality, somewhat shared sense-making and share an outlook on the collective future, including each other’s emotional spaces and mental frames. For example, a TSS including a shared visioning exercise or ritualized sensing session might build that shared sense.

The more attuned we are, the less we have to make explicit, making it possible to retain the holistic, multi-modal and rich, context-connected quality of information (propositional and non-propositional) as a group or organization. Among the TSS, there are practices that lend themselves to holding complex information collectively without “flattening” it into propositional one-pagers, like rituals or constellation work, that let us grasp a lot of ineffable information quickly. In my work in Wiser Organizations, I am therefore most interested in those TSS that apply to that level and carry more information than propositional information. This is the current growing edge of my work as it connects to exploring TSS.

Call to action

Knowing what I know about what’s relevant in the context of overwhelm, disenfranchisement and the possible contribution of TSS to outbalance those negative effects, I want to encourage both leaders and practitioners of TSS to cohere and integrate the work of spreading and improving TSS.

These connections have to be both horizontal and vertical:

• Those working on different TSS are part of the same bigger movement. Instead of competing, we need to nourish and support practitioner interest in learning about adjacent other TSS.
• Those working on different levels (individual, organizational, systems) are part of the same bigger movement. Only a multi-point change effort will overcome the resistance in the system; all our work is needed and points into the same direction.

All TSS need to support more literacy and ease of learning of all TSS in the commons. All proponents of TSS need to work to make learning and cross-connection of TSS easier.

References

• Vervaeke, J. 2019. Awakening From the Meaning Crises (YouTube playlist): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ
• Mompoint, P. & Golden, L., 2023. Introducing Transformative Social Systems. Medium pub. https://medium.com/@transformativesocialsystems/introducing-transformative-social-systems-tss-7ee5bdc6f274
• Schmachtenberger, D., 2022 (with Rebel Wisdom). In Search of the Third Attractor Part 1. https://consilienceproject.org/media/daniel-schmachtenberger-in-search-of-the-third-attractor-part-1/

Author bio

Ted is an advocate, trainer and consultant for self-governance. His main focus is sociocracy. After his PhD in linguistics and work in Academia, he co-founded the membership organization Sociocracy For All in 2016 which has grown to 250 members with several international and topic-focused departments and action teams. Ted spends his days consulting with mission-driven organizations, teaching and deeply immersed in the work as a member within Sociocracy For All. Ted identifies as a transgender man; he has 5 children between 10 and 20. A German citizen, he has lived in Massachusetts since 2010. He is (co)-author of three books on self-governance, Many Voices One Song (2018), Who Decides Who Decides (2021), and Collective Power (2023) and working on a book on the interface between governance and wisdom.

Reach me under info@wiserorganizations.org or ted@sociocracyforall.org

How Transformative Social Systems help to recreate meaning was originally published in Transformative Social Systems (TSS) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.