Meet Simoon Fransen
On Seeding Change and Bumblebees
Going Where the Water is Needed
In a recollection that arrives at the end of the interview, Simoon thinks back to a time in her own beginnings. She returned to formal schooling at age 16 in the Netherlands after two years in which she had lived largely on her own in the streets, caring for the city horses. She realized she needed to step back in the system, deciding that she had to select a career. She felt an urge to care for people; she decided the career would be nursing. The class was instructed to introduce themselves and their career goals in front of a camera. Standing up in front of the class, feeling self-conscious as an older student, Simoon — ready to say she would become a nurse — suddenly found herself saying something else. “I want to be a farmer.” She didn’t know where it came from. She remembers her own surprise, and not knowing quite what to do with the information that had emerged.
Simoon’s farm with animals wouldn’t happen until many years later, and in the interim would come a career in government as a project leader in innovation, and in partnering with organizations big and small across her own country and across the world. In that time and into the future, Simoon sees that she was still a farmer. “I have become a social farmer,” Simoon says. “I am good at seeding, and tending to the soil.”
Among the many projects that Simoon has seeded and cultivated, several in partnership with PI and Theory U, include working in the hub host space around u.lab, an ecosystem development project in Macedonia, working on the quality of education in Amsterdam, facilitating workshops on climate adaptation and drought, and integrating the U process with Biomimicry, currently through the Spinwaves lab which focuses on the energy and construction sector in the Netherlands. She is co-founder and facilitator of the “For Tomorrow’s Harvest” social lab, focusing on redesigning agriculture, and works with Margaret Wheatley as a program officer. Simoon has led PI workshops in Europe and was also the program manager for u.lab.
In response to the label of ‘pathological optimist,’ which she has been given on occasion (and says she takes as a compliment), Simoon responds: it is not about whether the glass is half full or half empty. That question is often irrelevant. It is about where the water is needed, and how can you get it there? Tuning into what’s possible and who cares — this is the ultimate embodiment of both her own approach and Theory U for her. This tuning in, she says, creates the enabling conditions for things to evolve. “And evolve the way they want,” Simoon adds. “Not because I think it’s good.”
Systems, and Change
Simoon first encountered PI while searching for resources on creative thinking and problem solving. Julie Arts was her colleague at an organization called new shoes today where they focused on creativity and change, with a range of methods and tools. Simoon was interested in the process, but she remembered a part of her which thought, in approaching a given problem: “why do all of this when there exists an obvious solution?” But as Simoon continued to feel concerned at how people worked collectively to arrive at results that were not what they actually wanted, or could be sustained, she returned to Julie and asked for more information on the U process and other Presencing tools. It moved quickly from there: Julie facilitated trainings and became integrated in Simoon’s government management development program, which soon expanded to not just internal partners but inviting people in “welfare organizations, local entrepreneurs, the education sector.”
As more and more people became interested, Simoon recalls, she became trained as a trainer and facilitator. As she took a sabbatical from her government work, in the year u.lab was launched, she re-connected with groups who had been involved in the trainings previously. “Since we had been training all these different groups of people, I thought: I’m going to do a sort of traveling circus. I’m going to invite all these people in a hub around u.lab. It’s all free of money. We can just be together. I had no idea by the time that I was doing something that in the end would become a job.” As hundreds of people joined hubs across countries, she became the hub-host coordinator for PI as local and global, online and offline hubs had crystallized around the world. “A lot of learning, a lot of joy,” remembers Simoon. “It emerged without a plan it was hard work, with a lot of ease.”
“The truth that is in the air”
Spinwaves Lab, Simoon’s current social innovation lab, recognizes the position of the construction and real estate sector in realizing our needed ecological transition and seeks to empower the sectors’ leadership toward making the built environment of the Netherlands sustainable. Using tools from both Biomimicry (modeling after nature) and Theory U to innovate, the lab posits that ‘the way out of this system requires a drastic redesign of the solutions and of the system itself.’ On Theory U and Biomimicry, “these frameworks are a wonderful marriage,” says Simoon. “Part of biomimicry is learning how nature designs. If it comes from natural design, it is already sustainable. With Theory U we learn from the emerging future, with Biomimicry we learn from Nature.”
Structures and businesses can change, Simoon says. Just like people can. “If there is no change, there is no survival. It is about the conditions, and capacity.” Not only about the will to change, she emphasizes, but about being given the space and conditions to change. Our systems are focused on maintaining the status quo, Simoon notes. And there is resistance against everything that challenges the status quo. It is this space, and this container, that helps see what needs to be changed — the “truth that is in the air,” and create the conditions for change to happen.
Biomimicry, Nature as Guiding framework
Simoon and her family moved to a farm in a small village while her children were already teenagers. It had always been her dream. While living in the city, she assumed her children wouldn’t want to move to a tiny village. So she did not pursue it. When they learned of this, they said to her, “Well, did you ever ask?” She hadn’t. In the end, her children found the listing for the house, and Simoon and her family moved there. Her daughter, in particular, loves spending time with the horses.
For Simoon, nature is sanity. Nature is what keeps her grounded. “And Nature is my teacher,” she says, on both a mental and spiritual level. In Biomimicry, Simoon is studying how life or nature designs. “And the lovely thing is,” adds Simoon, “that if it comes from natural design, it’s already sustainable because nature doesn’t create waste.”
Nature is also the place that gives her relaxation. “The important moments are never during a meeting,” she says. “I have my best ideas when I am cleaning the barn.” Relaxation in nature, for Simoon, draws on environmentalist John Milton’s Way of Nature teachings. “Relaxation is not just, oh, relax and have some fun. It is often the hard work of getting yourself into a space where you feel connected again.”
Simoon remembers her first meeting with John Milton, who would become one of her teachers in life. She was the last to arrive at the meeting, which meant the only seat open was the one left next to Milton. As an introduction, the group had to turn to their neighbor and introduce themselves; in turn, their neighbor would then present them to the room. As Milton presented Simoon to the group she found herself interested and surprised by his framing of her story. “This is Simoon,” she remembers him saying. “And she has this big extended family that exists, of dogs and cats and guinea pigs, and horses.”
Cultivating Heart Intelligence
Milton’s framing stayed with Simoon and led to an enduring friendship and inspired her farm; he will be guest faculty in the Spinwaves lab. Looking back and feeling into the now, she notices that the projects that remain the most alive, or important, are the ones that she hadn’t planned for. Simoon views the bumblebee as a metaphor. There is the myth of the bumblebee, that they should not be able to fly, physiologically, but they do anyway — because they don’t know they cannot. There is another scientific explanation for the bumblebee’s ability to be airborne — that they do so in a completely different way than the way we conceptualize flying.
Perhaps both apply here. Simoon recognizes a strength of hers after these years: cultivating heart intelligence. In Theory U, there is an intelligence of the head, the hand, and the heart. She is skilled at this, the navigation of the information that her heart is giving her. Some of “the best things that I achieved in my work life are those that in the beginning, if someone would have asked me, Do you want to do this? Can you do this? Maybe I would have said yes, I don’t think so.”
Simoon doesn’t think she will acquire the in-depth knowledge of the soil that it would take to do scaled farming on her land; that takes a lifetime, she says. But on her farm of many horses, bees, dogs, cats, chickens, worms (as part of a worm factory), and other animals, she has started beekeeping and making her own honey, recently completed a Permaculture Design Course and is considering restarting her equine program and other social farming programs that work with Nature as a teacher. Currently, Simoon is also working with an organization that addresses the youth services gap in her region. There is a lot of sadness involved, she acknowledges. She seeks to improve collaboration between the organizations involved in youthcare, to help create results that people actually want.
“The Success of an Intervention”
Simoon’s first baby horse was born just as she was working as the program manager of u.lab. In the end, she felt the horse became a living example of the process. It struggled to be born. Simoon slept in the barn every night for three weeks, just in case she was needed. She remembers that time with the swallows above her head and the light coming in the mornings. Finally, the baby horse emerged. She named the horse Billy, after Bill o’Brian, who coined an often used PI quote: “the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”
Simoon appreciates complexity and believes it is also about practicing what she preaches. “If I am not following that gut feeling, or I am not willing to take that leap, then who am I speaking about this?” Simoon acknowledges that there is failure, and falling, but also trust and joy. “I think that is an important thing,” Simoon says. “I go where the synchronicity wants me to go. And there is fun in facing the challenges.”
To learn more about SpinWaves lab, watch the intro video here:
Listen to podcast-style pieces of Simoon’s interview below:
Thanks to the Randi and Hannah for teamwork in interviewing, notes and video!
