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9 Dimensions for evaluating how art and creative practice stimulate societal transformations Twenty-six authors from the CreaTures project ask how to evaluate creative work that reaches “foundational myths, paradigms, and systems of meaning”. Counting attendees says little about how change happens, and art’s… A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None A short, dense and often poetic book in which geographer Kathryn Yusoff argues that geology has never been neutral. Its ‘grammar’, she shows, helped build the extractive economies of colonialism and slavery, taking from… A Brief History of Systems Science, Chaos and Complexity A short primer from regenerative designer Daniel Christian Wahl on how systems science became complexity theory, where the aim shifts from control to understanding “the systems we participate in so that our… A Leader's Framework for Decision Making Dave Snowden and Mary Boone’s Harvard Business Review article took the Cynefin framework to managers: approaches that worked before fail when the context changes, so leaders first need to sense what kind of situation… A New Framework for Developing and Evaluating Complex Interventions The UK Medical Research Council’s guide to evaluating complex interventions, rewritten in 2021, moves beyond the “binary question of effectiveness”. Interventions become “events in systems”, shaped by context and able… A Walk with Unite the Kingdom Joseph Gelfer walked with Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march, not in support but to meet people “so frequently othered and demonised”. Passing thanks to a “council estate physicality inscribed upon the body”, he… Against the Obsession With Narratives A case against trusting stories to do the work. “Dominant stories do not triumph because they are more persuasive or imaginative, but because they have the infrastructures that allow them to be diffused, repeated, and… All About Love The first book in bell hooks’s trilogy on love, and a plain-spoken argument that we’ve misunderstood the word. For hooks, love isn’t romance, or a feeling that befalls us, but something we do: a practice of care,… An Emerging Third Option - Reclaiming Democracy From Dark Money & Dark Tech Argues that systemic change requires upgrading underlying operating systems by cultivating conditions of ‘social soil’ – the less visible inner conditions of awareness and relationships. Proposes shift toward building… An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn ontology – just another word for colonialism Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd watched Bruno Latour lecture on a sentient climate without once crediting the Indigenous thinkers who’d known it “for millennia”. The ‘Ontological Turn’, she argues, is “spinning itself on… An Introduction to the Metacrisis Provocations from the founder of the Consilience Project: "We are at the end of history…what would it take to turn the entire arc of humanity?…what would it mean for our species to be wise enough to steward (our) power… An Odyssey of Culture Change Climate Spring’s Lucy Stone and Jim Peacock argue that the questions today’s crises raise can’t be answered with “better communications, policy or technical solutions”, because “Culture is our social soil”. So funders… At Work In The Ruins Writer Dougald Hine on why “Climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer”, starting with how we ended up here. When science becomes an authority to believe in, those questions get harder to ask,… Beings Seen and Unseen Amitav Ghosh discusses his book ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ and the colonial roots of capitalism. Of Europe’s “ideology of conquest and supremacy”, Ghosh says “it wasn’t the ideas leading to the mastery; rather, it was the… Beyond the Broadcasting Model Sean Gibbons and Tristan Mohabir make the case for relationships over broadcasting: "Foundations and nonprofits need to focus on community building rather than just pushing messages to an audience (or to that awful,… Beyond the flags - grief, polarisation and the work of repair Two JRF staff read the flags and hotel protests of the North East as “the surface ripples of something that goes much deeper”: grief at deindustrialisation, “deliberately redirected away from the systems that created… Biology not physics holds the key to reality Biochemist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman and computer scientist Andrea Roli argue that science is at “a third major transition”. Newton taught us to fix the space of possibilities in advance; life won’t allow… Black Imagination and Liberation Rehearsal In a 2024 online conversation, Amahra Spence asks her guests what Black imagination brings to these times. André Anderson tells of turning a council house into a publishing house; Blessol speaks of restoring spirit to… Block, Bridge, Build - A Framework to Forge a More Democratic Future Julia Roig of the Horizons Project adds bridging to Convergence Magazine’s ‘Block and Build’, since broad-front organising needs “the skills and relational infrastructure to work together across many lines of… Bodies of Water - Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology Feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis starts from a plain fact: our bodies are mostly water, and water connects us to everything else. Drawing on Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, she develops a ‘posthuman feminist… Braiding Sweetgrass Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, braids two kinds of knowledge: science’s questions and an Indigenous understanding of plants and animals as teachers. Through essays on… Breaking the Ouroboros and Ushering in New Possibilities An exploration of what it will really take to change. "What we have tried before and what we continue to centre, has not worked – cannot work – and so we need to transmogrify our efforts to be what is required in these… Buen Vivir, Degrowth and Ecological Swaraj - Alternatives to sustainable development and the Green Economy A post-development manifesto from three continents. Ashish Kothari, Federico Demaria and Alberto Acosta call ‘sustainable development’ an oxymoron and development itself “a western cultural construct”. They set against… Building decolonial climate justice movements - Four tensions Two St Andrews scholars start from a bind: movements against the racial and colonial capitalism behind the climate crisis are shaped “by many of the same dynamics they oppose”. They trace four tensions, over the state,… Building State Capability Three development scholars ask why so many government reforms achieve so little: new schools where children don’t learn, IT systems no one uses. They name the traps that hold governments back, such as copying the… Caste Pulitzer-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues that beneath American racism lies caste: an inherited ranking of human worth. She sets the United States beside India and Nazi Germany, names eight pillars that hold… Change A network scientist’s case against the idea that change spreads like a virus. Damon Centola argues that “successful social change is not about information; it’s about norms”, and that networks are “the prisms that… Changing Our Narrative about Narrative - The Infrastructure Required for Building Narrative Power Racial justice leader Rashad Robinson argues that progressives have “the wrong narrative about narrative”, mistaking comms output for change. Because “narrative power is the ability to change the norms and rules our… Citizens Jon Alexander of the New Citizenship Project, writing with Ariane Conrad, sorts history into three stories of who we are: Subject, Consumer and Citizen. The Consumer Story rests on “the central falsehood that choice… Climate Spring's Storytelling Guide from Apocalypse to Regenerative Futures The climate crisis was included in only 12.8% of recent top-grossing Hollywood films, partly because the people making them don't know how to include it. This guide offers a practical reflection on how "to tell this… Comms-Alt-Delete An impatient case against telling the left it needs better stories. Jack Jeffrey of the Fairness Foundation says understanding isn’t enough without “a prescription: a policy agenda”, and that Westminster has too many… Comparing Climate Proposals - A Case Study in Cognitive Policy Joe Brewer and George Lakoff compare two 2008 climate proposals that look alike. Every policy has a material side and a cognitive side: “the values and ideas” that must be “uppermost in the minds of the public” for it… Complexity, Story and Sense-making in Uncertain times A year-end evening at the Centre for Climate Psychology built around Dave Snowden, creator of the Cynefin framework for acting amid uncertainty. He set out his core thinking; Cynefin colleagues Ellie Snowden and Anna… Contribution Analysis - Making Causal Claims in the Face of Complexity Evaluator John Mayne on claiming impact when an intervention is “only one of a number of causal factors at play”. Saying it caused the result is “much too simplistic and scarcely credible”. Instead, a theory of change… Critiquing 'Common Cause' Three friendly critiques, from green allies, of ‘Common Cause’, the influential 2010 report urging campaigners to appeal to intrinsic values. Rupert Read fears its rigid values model “risks being a manifesto for… Cultural Materialism - The Struggle for a Science of Culture A clear review, for big historians, of anthropologist Marvin Harris’s ‘cultural materialism’. For Harris, material conditions (technology, ecology, demography) shape family and political life, which shape art, ritual… Culture, Deep Narratives and… Whacamole An exhausted campaigner’s case for going deeper. Ruth Taylor asks “what causes the moles to keep popping up”, and finds it in deep narratives, embedded by repetition and spanning many causes. Because “Everything we do… Dark, Gray, and Light Lore Writer Venkatesh Rao asks whether lore – the shared know-how people draw on to “manage their psyches” – can be crafted on purpose. Dark lore seeds “a simple starter set of half-truths” and lets people reach a fixed end… Decolonial Feminism - Charting a Path Towards a Just and Liberatory Tomorrow A primer on decolonial feminism by Shubha Chacko for the feminist alliance BRICS Feminist Watch. Its demand is “not merely a seat at the table but rather rejecting the entire model”, since colonialism reshaped gender,… Decolonial Work - Pruning Bonsai vs. Metabolizing Decay A clarifying contrast between two approaches to decolonial work. The first is like pruning a bonsai, managing appearances through “institutional reforms, language policing, and compliance-driven inclusion efforts” while… Decolonising Economics - African and Feminist Perspectives on Post Growth Futures Sonia Tesfaye, writing for the Post Growth Institute, argues for an understanding of wellbeing that takes in “cultural heritage, social cooperation, environmental stewardship, and community resilience”. Questioning… Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor An essay to unsettle anyone borrowing decolonial language. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang insist decolonisation “brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life”. As a metaphor, it allows “settler moves to… Decolonizing degrowth in the post-development convergence - Questions, experiences, and proposals from two Indigenous territories Writing to the degrowth movement, Padini Nirmal and Dianne Rocheleau offer a decolonial and feminist critique: re-situate degrowth in the Global South and Indigenous resistance. Drawing on Zapatista and allied groups in… Decolonizing Mental Health in the Polycrisis Writing for psychologists, Cash Ahenakew, Vanessa Andreotti and nine co-authors trace the polycrisis to the modern/colonial “illusion of separation between humanity and the rest of nature”, imprinted on how we think,… Deep Structure - What Makes the Present An encouragement to pay attention to root causes. "The political problem we face is not just about 'capitalism,' for this is only a politico-economic system that lies within the ontology. It is also the ontology itself… Deep Time Philanthropy and the Evolution of Consciousness Writing for funders, Julian Norris asks how $50 million might help a more ecological worldview take hold, and answers from history: from Buddhism to the Quakers, small groups of “5-50 people” reshaped whole cultures.… Defeating Narratives of Division A manifesto and open-source set of training materials to support "a long-term strategic approach at a community level, that talks about building power in disempowered communities," recognising that "the far-right are on… Deschooling Dialogues - On Initiation, Trauma and Ritual Psychotherapist Francis Weller tells Alnoor Ladha that initiation and trauma both sever us from the world we knew, but trauma is “an uncontained encounter with death”, with no ritual or community to hold us.… Designs for the Pluriverse Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar argues that design makes worlds, and most of it now makes capitalist ones. His alternative, ‘autonomous design’, is collaborative and rooted in place, grounded in the… Detecting Causality in Complex Ecosystems Writing in Science, George Sugihara, Robert May and five colleagues introduce a method “that can distinguish causality from correlation” in complex, nonlinear systems, including tangled cases “not covered by the current… Dismantling Destructive Narratives Yuria Celidwen, whose work combines Indigenous studies, cultural psychology and contemplative science, talks on the Holding the Fire podcast about Indigenous values and pursuing education within colonial systems. The… Dismantling Green Colonialism - Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region A collective manifesto for a just energy transition across the Arab region, from Western Sahara to Palestine, where vast fossil reserves, a colonial past and untapped green-energy potential meet severe heat and floods.… Dissolving Separations Julian Corner of Lankelly Chase finds separation everywhere in the charity model. The evidence says complex human problems need deeply relational, collaborative approaches, yet we treat them separately and label them… Does Changing Behavioral Intentions Engender Behavior Change A meta-analysis that tests what much of social and health psychology assumes: that intentions cause behaviour. Since most of the evidence is correlational, Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran gathered “47 experimental… Does Information Really Want to be Free Kimberly Christen, who built the Mukurtu archive with Warumungu collaborators in Central Australia, takes apart the slogan ‘information wants to be free’. Open-access advocates, she argues, share “a cultural blindness”:… Durably Reducing Transphobia (Deep Canvassing) A field experiment that cuts against the view of prejudice as “deeply ingrained”. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla found that a single doorstep conversation of about ten minutes, “encouraging actively taking the… Emergent Strategy A movement handbook from adrienne maree brown, drawing on Octavia Butler and the living world. Emergent strategy is “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we… Emerging Opportunities to Shift Culture On Health, Wealth and Government FrameWorks UK’s reading of British culture, drawing on a “first-of-its-kind survey”. Among its six findings: individualism “is our default – but not when we get issue-specific”, more of us believe the economy is rigged,… Emotional regulation explains the benefits of nature contact and connection Miles Richardson, on his Finding Nature blog, argues that nature is more than a pill to pop. People seek it out to manage their moods, yet its part in regulating emotion has been overlooked. Citing new studies,… Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta - The Making of Calcutta Historian Debjani Bhattacharyya traces how a distant colonial power tried to tame the world’s largest tidal delta, from 1760 to 1920. Looking past stories of decline, she puts ‘property-thinking’ – splitting land and… Enabling new mindsets and transformative skills for negotiating and activating climate action - Lessons from UNFCCC conferences of the parties A study of the culture inside UN climate talks. Christine Wamsler and colleagues ran a dialogue space at COP25, surveying around 200 self-selected attendees. Nearly all wanted culture and mindsets to change, towards… Enlightenment by command Complexity thinker Dave Snowden backs Lene Rachel Andersen’s critique of the Inner Development Goals for “trying to cram people into a predefined mould.” Inner-change models, he argues, predate our understanding of… Evaluating the impact of the documentary series Blue Planet II on viewers' plastic consumption behaviors An experimental test of the ‘Blue Planet effect’. Matilda Dunn and colleagues showed 146 volunteers either Blue Planet II’s plastics episode or an older one without a conservation message, covertly noting whether they… Fabric of Repair - The Impact of Braiding Narratives of Reparations and Land Back on Black and Indigenous Audiences A randomised experiment from BLIS Collective with creator Garrison Hayes: 4,506 Black and Indigenous participants watched short videos on Reparations, Land Back, or a ‘braided’ story linking both. The braided video did… Fierce Vulnerability - Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse Nonviolence trainer Kazu Haga argues that the us-versus-them worldview many movements fall into is part of what’s destroying our relationships and the planet. Reading injustice as collective trauma, he brings together… Fostering Deeper Security - Climate Leadership for a New Era A plea to stop treating climate politics as technical, now that it’s “psychological, relational, and existential.” Unacknowledged grief and fear, Bernice Lee and Theo Mitchell argue, “harden into political liabilities”… From Colonial to Liberation Psychology A pioneer’s gathering-up of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, the Filipino psychology Virgilio Enriquez developed. By the publisher’s account, it sets out psychology’s colonial background in the Philippines and applies indigenous… From Growth, through Degrowth, to a Pluriverse of Flourishings A sympathetic critique of degrowth. Saurabh Arora and Andy Stirling argue that it shares with techno-optimist ecomodernism “a deep conditioning by colonial modernity”: one world, where ways of living differ only in how… From Mental Models to Embodiment - An Evolution of the Six Conditions of Systems Change Framework A decade after co-creating the widely used Six Conditions of Systems Change, John Kania argues that its deepest condition, “mental models”, implies beliefs are formed “in disembodied ways”. Drawing on Indigenous… Funding Movement Infrastructure A short, practical brief from the Building Movement Project, distilled from two years of funder labs, on seven barriers foundations face in backing social movements, from distrustful boards to siloed, short-term grants.… Funding Narrative Change - How Communities Are Shaping And Wielding Narrative Power A practical report for funders, drawn from case studies ranging from a Chicago TikTok account to a Buffalo theatre company. Because “exercising community narrative power is often easier than building and maintaining… Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action A survey of 130,000 people in 125 countries, finding wider support for climate action than most assume: 69% would contribute 1% of their income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% want more political action.… Good Strategy Bad Strategy Business-school professor Richard Rumelt’s attack on ‘bad strategy’: the feel-good values, buzzwords, slogans and financial targets that pass for it. Good strategy, he argues, is a focused, coherent answer to the… Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative Brain Neuroscientist Ann Graybiel reviews why habits grip us, running on control “scarcely available to consciousness”. Many routines, rituals and the repetitive behaviours of addiction and illness, she suggests, could emerge… Healing the Degenerative Disease of Separation - An on-Going Regenerative Inquiry In conversation with Chief Ninawa Inu Huni Kui, Vanessa Andreotti reflects: “When we are seeking justice, we tend to invest in a future outcome, a destination point, that we imagine from a position of autonomy and… Health and Justice - The Path of Liberation Through Medicine Physician Rupa Marya’s 2018 Bioneers keynote, posted in 2024. Chronic illnesses, she argues, are “diseases of colonization”, bred by trauma, stress and damaging food systems. When a dam destroyed Standing Rock’s… Homo Economicus and Forgetful Curriculum - Remembering Other Ways to Be a Human Being Papaschase Cree scholar Dwayne Donald argues that schooling trains children to become ‘homo economicus’, through myths of individualism, progress and anthropocentrism. They’re hard to see because “people do not think… How Embodiment Transforms Systems Change An argument that systems change practice is stuck in the equivalent of teaching by “drills, rewards, and punishments”, and “must evolve beyond predominantly cognitive approaches”. Drawing on Indigenous and wisdom… How Large-Scale Change Really Happens - Working With Emergence Writing for school leaders after No Child Left Behind, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze argue that “the world doesn’t change one person at a time”. Large-scale change emerges as local efforts connect, through… How to Change People’s Minds Neuroscientist and political theorist Stein Lubrano makes the “heavily researched” case, from her first book ‘Don’t Talk About Politics’, that debate barely moves anyone: there’s “zero evidence that televised debates… How to kidnap an audience A 2022 talk to Swedish culture-makers in which writer Dougald Hine asks whether we’re “so well trained as consumers of culture” that even powerful art leaves us unchanged. Shock won’t help: “it’s a bankrupt currency”.… Human Exceptionalism (episode) Harvard primatologist Christine Webb talks to Rachel Donald about her book ‘The Arrogant Ape’: human exceptionalism, the belief that we’re supreme over the rest of nature, sits at the root of the ecological crisis.… I & I Economies Opening a series, Amahra Spence builds an economics from the Rastafari utterance ‘I & I’, which “refuses the illusion of separateness”. Her working example is pardna, the Caribbean rotating savings club, where “the… I am Mushroom - Anticipatory Aesthetics, Futures Pheromones and Fungal Play Marcus Bussey, with illustrations by Cat McNicholl, “takes the mycorrhizal as a metaphor for culture”: we all have deep cultural roots, and engaging environmental futures means engaging them. Through fungal reflections… Icebergs Of The Heart An invitation to join in with designing a mapping tool for the foundations of better futures, which includes deep 'ontological and mythological' foundational shifts, e.g. from the 'separation myth' to a 'relational… If We’re Governed by Dreams and Gossip, How Should We Respond Extinction Rebellion co-founder Clare Farrell uses the play ‘Kyoto’ to argue that climate talks are driven by national myths like the American Dream, “stories we ‘go by’” that become “common sense”. The media, built for… In The Zones (of Narrative Change Work) Brett Davidson asks whether naming the ‘zones’ of narrative change work would help us work each more consciously. Efforts run on different time horizons, so their “respective ends and means may be in conflict with one… Interrogating imagination infrastructure A careful review, for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, of what ‘imagination infrastructure’ could mean. Ruth Potts and Keri Facer argue that a “critical, creative imagination” needs time, space, repeated encounters and… Inviting a decolonial praxis for future imaginaries of nature - Introducing the Entangled Time Tree The ‘Entangled Time Tree’ is a futuring tool rooted in the past. Conventional methods treat the future as “a projection of current trends”; drawing on African oral storytelling and Africanfuturism, six researchers argue… Justice + Ontoshift - Introduction to Systems Change A short, clear introduction to Culture Hack Labs’ approach to “narrative-led systems change”, which pairs two kinds of work. Justice means addressing structural inequities: “challenging systems of oppression,… Knowledge and Ideology in the Anthropocene Wolfgang Wopperer of Movement Ecology denies that our brains simply can’t grasp complexity. A society’s knowledge lives largely in its ‘cultural technē’, Sally Haslanger’s term for the shared meanings and habits it runs… Land Back to Right Relations An invitation to join a 'reframe intervention' in the 2 weeks leading up to COP28: "Land ownership sits at the heart of the extraction-based global operating system. To address the issue of land ownership is to address… Lessons For a Storytelling Commons Drawing on six months of peer learning between UK organisations, the People’s Newsroom argue that “Generative and life-giving stories will only come from generative and life-giving practices”. So they propose a ‘story… Let’s not be too academic A sharp LinkedIn polemic from Otti Vogt against change agents who wave theory away with “Let’s not be too academic.” Treat systems as neutral complexity rather than political arrangements, he argues, and pragmatism… Leviathan Alexander Beiner’s documentary asks why social trust is breaking down and how we might find it again. Drawing on myth, psychology, economics and systems theory, with voices from Nora Bateson to Yanis Varoufakis, it… Listening in the Dark Artist Maeve Brennan’s 43-minute film listens for what we miss. Bats, largely unchanged for millions of years, are having their night-time rhythms disrupted by wind turbines, a well-meant technology with effects we… Man and His Works The 1948 textbook that introduced ‘enculturation’, a term Melville Herskovits credits E. A. Haggard with devising. It names lifelong learning of one’s culture, absorbed so well that most behaviour sits “below the level… Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey Arc A guide to the first widely recognised alternative to Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’. Maureen Murdock, once Campbell’s student, built it from her work with women in therapy; Campbell reportedly replied that “Women… Measuring Narrative Change - Moving From Theory to Practice Brett Davidson, writing in Stanford Social Innovation Review, on what can and can’t be known when measuring narrative change. Sometimes the work is planting seeds and tending soil, not knowing whether anything will… Measuring Narrative Change - Understanding Progress and Navigating Complexity A measurement guide from evaluators ORS Impact, rewritten in 2021 with more on complexity and power: “Narratives are powerful. They are also a product of power.” It offers sample outcomes and indicators, from reach to… Meeting Environmental Challenges - The role of human identity The 2009 WWF-UK report that proposed ‘identity campaigning’. Tom Crompton and Tim Kasser tie environmental harm to materialistic values, seeing nature as an out-group, and how we cope with fear. Society will always… Mindset and Worldviews Shifts for a Regenerative Future Bill Baue of r3.0 sorts interviews with regenerative thinkers, from Kate Raworth to Daniel Christian Wahl, into three layers: individual mindsets, collective paradigms and underlying worldviews. All three are… Mindset Shifts - What Are They, Why Do They Matter, How Do They Happen FrameWorks Institute’s attempt to bring precision to loose talk of narrative change. Mindsets are “deep, assumed patterns of thinking”, largely tacit and part of culture, and they can make the social order look natural… Mortality management and climate action - A review and reference for using Terror Management Theory methods in interdisciplinary environmental research A review of what reminders of death do to climate communication. Terror Management Theory, from social psychology, holds that people fend off awareness of mortality by defending their worldview and self-esteem. So… Moving Mindsets - How British People Think About Health Has Changed FrameWorks UK tracks six years of change in how people in the UK think about health, and finds “we are at an important inflection point. More collective mindsets on health are emerging and old mindsets are being applied… Moving With Storms A candid report, edited by Vanessa Andreotti and colleagues, on a Canadian university institute’s year devoted to the climate and nature emergency. Following Indigenous analyses, its cohorts saw the crisis “not as a… Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose traces how the lives of different species are knotted together in time, through death, nourishment and gift. Her paper looks for places where “time, species, and nourishment become… Mythic Roots of the Metacrisis Alexandra Toledo traces the polycrisis to a Babylonian creation myth in which the god Marduk murders the mother goddess Tiamat. It marks the moment “a fundamental dualism was born”, spirit against nature, and we keep… Narrative Strategies A reference entry from literary studies, not campaign strategy. Narratologist Valerij Tjupa treats a narrative strategy as the author’s communicative aim, made of three parts: the narrator’s stance, the “narrative world… Narrative Strategy Primer - For Weaving Our Interconnected Futures Race Forward’s primer is for anyone committed to “disentangling and unraveling harmful narratives” and weaving new ones grounded in racial solidarity. It sets out a ladder from messages and stories up to deep narrative,… Narratives for Wealth Systems Change A former FeesMustFall student leader traces the idea of who counts as rational from Aristotle to the Washington Consensus, and finds post-growth frameworks starting from the Western canon. Her answer is to “begin… Narratives need enacting, otherwise they’re just words Reflecting on Marshall Ganz’s recent work, Lockwood identifies two key insights: 1) "We learn best by doing (like riding a bike); get on, fall off, learn, keep going" and 2) "Narrative is a crucial part of organising to… Native Science Gregory Cajete’s study of Native science, from astronomy to healing. Where Western method isolates a thing to understand it, Native thinking understands it through its relationships; that grasp of what binds natural… Obliquity Economist John Kay’s case for ‘obliquity’: that many goals are best reached indirectly, especially where the ground is hard to read. Ranging from business and town planning to football and forest fires, he argues that… On metanarratives – or, how we transform our cultural mythology Around 2010, Sharon Blackie recalls, there was much talk that “the old story isn’t working” and that “we need to write a new one”. She wholeheartedly agreed with the first. Her case against the second is that a… On Powers, Great and Small It's tempting to dismiss Josh Schrei's work as 'woo-woo', but doing so would miss the sharp insight and wisdom that his meticulously researched and curated episodes carry – and his own robust aversion to 'woo-woo'. In a… Our Climate Needs a Mythology An empiricist’s case for myth. Solitaire Townsend calls climate change “the most scientifically documented crisis in human history and the most poorly narrated”: “We are attempting to fight a dragon with spreadsheets.”… Our Prior Legacy Former Zen monk Ivo Mensch borrows ‘priors’ from predictive neuroscience: the brain’s expectations, “best thought of as unconscious pre-existing beliefs”. They’re stacked, the deepest about selfhood and agency, beyond… Out of the Wreckage - A New Politics for an Age of Crisis Guardian columnist George Monbiot argues that an ideology of extreme competition and individualism misreads human nature, and can’t be displaced without a positive vision to replace it. Drawing on psychology,… Outgrowing Modernity The follow-up to ‘Hospicing Modernity’ from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (formerly Andreotti) treats colonialism as ‘neurocolonisation’: a rewiring of thought and habit that keeps us in comfortable denial as modernity… Passing in the Dark - Making Visible Philanthropy's Hidden and Conflicting Mental Models for Systems Change Two evaluators with three decades of foundation work name philanthropy’s two unspoken mental models of systems change. ‘Systems dynamics’ maps a system and predicts where to push; ‘systems emergence’ experiments and… Patterns as, and Via Actants A roaming post in which Dave Snowden, creator of the Cynefin framework, explains ‘actants’: “any entity that can act to influence a network”, human or not. Walking the slate trails of Eryri, where he grew up, he reads… Patterns of Narrative Complexity thinker Dave Snowden on narrative as something enacted, not engineered: “When I tell a story, I am in a complex and entangled dance with many other similar story threads; it is not a stand-alone process, and… Pedagogy of the Oppressed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s argument against what he called the ‘banking’ model of education, in which teachers deposit facts in passive students. In its place he proposes ‘problem-posing’ education: teachers and… People, Power, Change Marshall Ganz distils five decades of organising and teaching into five practices: relationships, narrative, strategy, structure and action. Organising, for him, means enabling a community “to turn resources it has into… Positive Tipping Points Toolkit After the first Global Tipping Points Conference in 2022, the University of Exeter's Green Futures Network ran a series of workshops to explore the potential and enthusiasm for applying the growing research into… Poverty stigma - a glue that holds poverty in place Sociologist Imogen Tyler and Sarah Campbell report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation from a team of ten with lived and learnt knowledge of poverty. Stigma, they find, is “manufactured by the powerful”, designed into… Prefiguring a Future We Want Elissa Sloan Perry of Change Elemental argues movements need room to dream, play and fail: “If we can only see and sense what is, we will continue to uphold the status quo.” Yet it’s unequally shared; funders, she… Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe argues that ‘Exceptionalism’, “a rigid psychological mindset, is largely responsible for the climate crisis”: the belief that one is entitled to have it all and wish limits away.… Psychology of Habit Psychologists Wendy Wood and Dennis Rünger review habit research. “As the proverbial creatures of habit, people tend to repeat the same behaviors in recurring contexts.” Habits grow out of pursuing goals, become “the… Raging Against the Dying Light - A Systems View of Human Futures The Cascade Institute modelled over four million scenarios for 2040, and “99.75% of the stable ones represent either the decline or collapse of our social and ecological systems.” Norris argues that reaching the slim… Reclaiming our narratives - A practical guide to countering identity-based disinformation A step-by-step toolkit from the OICD’s Bruce White for countering disinformation that offers “narrow and rigid definitions of identity” as the only route to belonging. Because “directly confronting or debunking it often… Research Update - Findings and Reflections from our Second Year Studying Culture Change A 2023 update from FrameWorks Institute’s Culture Change Project, tracking American ‘cultural mindsets’ since 2020. The rise in systemic thinking, the sense that “what surrounds us shapes us”, has plateaued, fading on… Rewiring for Reality - Cross Generational Reckonings A demanding resource from Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures for conversations across generations, written by Gen Xers and Millennials with Gen Z collaborators. “Younger generations aren’t asking for comfort.” They… Sacred Civics - Building Seven Generation Cities An open-access collection on shaping cities as if people, land and nature were sacred: worthy of dignity and “defiant of commodification”, rather than religious. “Our greatest challenges are not scientific or… Sacred Instructions A book of teaching from within one people’s tradition. Sherri Mitchell, an attorney and activist from the Penobscot Nation, shares what she received from her tribe’s elders. Her publisher describes a book ranging over… Sand Talk Apalech Clan scholar Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems – history, money, power, learning – from an Indigenous perspective, asking where modern life has drifted from creation’s pattern and how we might live… Scaling Deep - Shifting Power and Redefining Success A substantial report from The Systems Sanctuary, drawing on 36 interviews, on why the inner, relational and cultural work it calls ‘scaling deep’ stays under-resourced and out of sight. Metrics-driven funding can’t see… Seeing Like the Sea - A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery 1800–1925 Tamara Fernando’s history of Ceylon’s colonial pearl fishery “dives below the waves”. Its divers knew the sea through their bodies: “Labour was a mode of knowing nature”. For a century and a half, British officials… Sensemaker - Praxis Makes Perfect A practitioners’ casebook from The Cynefin Co: eighteen contributors, Dave Snowden among them, on using SenseMaker, its method for gathering many people’s short accounts of their own experience, which they then… Sensing the Third Horizon A report for wealth holders on why money flows to managing the present rather than to ‘Third Horizon’ work already building something different. From nineteen interviews, Milly Shotter and Cassie Robinson argue that… Signal Distortion & Field Deception - A Guide to Unmasking Cultural Fallacies A short, impassioned Substack post on ‘cultural fallacies’: “a falsehood maintained by people and systems to protect power”, dressed up as natural or necessary and repeated until “the system no longer needs force; the… Social Tipping Dynamics for Stabilizing Earth's Climate by 2050 Fourteen researchers ask how emissions could fall fast enough, and look for ‘social tipping interventions’: small pushes that set off “contagious and fast-spreading processes of social and technological change”. Their… Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use - An international analysis of social provisioning A rigorous study of 106 countries by Jefim Vogel, Julia Steinberger and colleagues finds none meeting human needs within sustainable energy use. What decides it is provisioning, the way societies deliver what people… Socioecological Transformations - Linking Ontologies with Structures, Personal with Collective Change A substantial, open-access collection of essays that challenges the habit of reducing transformation to policy tweaks or social movements, both of which bypass what lies beneath: ontologies, our assumptions about… Spatial Dramaturgy and the Composition of Desire Amahra Spence on how we might “reshape the spaces around us” as “co-authors of meaning”. Space becomes a site of conflict and power; architecture “a score for living”; designing a kind of composing that begins with… Staying with the Trouble Feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway refuses two easy responses to ecological devastation: faith that technology will fix it, and the despair that says it’s too late. Her alternative, ‘staying with the trouble’, means… Stories For Life An open inquiry into telling the story of a new economy, convened by WEALL, the Green Economy Coalition and The SpaceShip Earth. It traces our crises to economies “shaped by an outdated and harmful narrative that we are… Sustainability Crises Are Crises of Relationship - Learning From Nyikina Ecology and Ethics A contrast between two sciences, from Nyikina Country in Australia. Western ecology studies what humans depend upon; Nyikina science asks what belongs, with animals, plants and waters as kin holding custodial… Systems Thinking Will Not Save Us Zainab Kabba argues that understanding complexity matters, but uncritically centring systems thinking risks becoming a dangerous distraction. Five conditions of how systems work – among them that systems are not… Tackling Apathy and Denial Climate consultant Renee Lertzman maps four ways we try to engage people – behaviour, framing, systems and emotion – and argues the fourth, “the most unexplored in the climate sectors”, can strengthen the rest. People… TESCREAL Quick Guide A plain-language guide from Radical Futures to TESCREAL, the acronym for a bundle of beliefs, from transhumanism to longtermism, that steers much of Silicon Valley’s elite. Its maker “unpacked their worldview as simply… Testing Times A large study of how the public thinks about race, from Sanjiv Lingayah and Nina Kelly at Reframing Race. With 20,000 participants, it finds a mixed picture: four in ten think some races are naturally harder working… The Arrogant Ape Primatologist Christine Webb makes the case that human exceptionalism – the belief that we’re the cleverest, most virtuous species ever – is cultural ideology rather than biological fact, with more belief than evidence… The Behavioural Drivers Model - A Conceptual Framework for Social and Behaviour Change Programming Vincent Petit’s UNICEF map asks “Why do people do what they do?”, joining up 25 theories and models so programmes stop defaulting to a communication campaign. Its deepest layer is meta-norms, “underlying ideologies and… The Big Tent is Working Horizons Project founder Julia Roig answers a critique that America’s pro-democracy ‘big tent’ is failing. Hers is closer to “a music festival of many tents”: networks of unions, faiths, businesses, veterans and artists… The Buddhist Unconscious A scholarly study of how Yogācāra Buddhists in fifth-century India mapped a layer of mind beneath awareness, the ālaya-vijñāna or ‘storehouse consciousness’, and argued for it with care. William Waldron reads it… The Codes That Code Us - Modernity's Recursive Logic in Humans and AI From a book in draft, decolonial scholar Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, writing with four AI characters, argues AI inherits modernity’s habits. Volition “is not choice. It is directional leaning”, trained by repetition:… The Craft of Reframing Foresight analyst Thomas Klaffke sets out the reframing method behind his weekly newsletter, honed over two and a half years into “a whole philosophy, technique, and aesthetic”. His Reframing Canvas maps how a topic is… The Dawn of Everything Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow take apart the standard story of social evolution as one that “has almost nothing to do with the facts”. Early peoples, they argue, moved between different… The Democracy of Species A slim volume from Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, part of Penguin’s ‘Green Ideas’ series of environmental classics. Penguin presents it as a guide to living with an earth that is alive and animate, in a… The Flip, Formation and the Fun - A Metamodern Framework for Human Futures A wide-ranging conversation in which Jonathan Rowson, Perspectiva co-founder and chess grandmaster, tells Nate Hagens why he prefers ‘metacrisis’ to ‘polycrisis’: it lets us “look within the problem”, at “the underlying… The Four Functions of Myth A clear explainer of Joseph Campbell’s four functions of myth: awe before mystery, a picture of the cosmos, a social order that “imprints on the individual the norms of that society”, and guidance through life’s stages.… The Gift Contract Vanessa Andreotti, Elwood Jimmy and Bill Calhoun of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures write: "The usual story of change is that there is a problem with the system that needs to be solved… Our analysis has a different… The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis The 1967 essay that traced ecological crisis to belief. Historian Lynn White Jr. argues: “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them”, and medieval… The Left (Still) Doesn't Understand the Internet Renewal editor Jack Jeffrey and Professor Alan Finlayson on why the online right is winning: it rebuilt the explanatory, community-forming infrastructure the labour movement let wither. Its ‘metapolitics’ works before… The Mischiefs We Inherit - Personal narrative lessons from development work in the Caribbean A Trinidadian development practitioner’s account of coming to narrative work through “a growing discomfort with the stories I had inherited”. Omar Mohammed, of the Global Narrative Hive, borrows Eric Williams’s ‘old… The Myths We Live By Philosopher Mary Midgley argues that myths are everywhere, and that they aren’t lies or idle tales but webs of imagery through which we make sense of the world. She traces them through political theories of human… The Narrative Antidote to Authoritarianism Puentes founder Monica Roa argues that authoritarianism feeds on “a narrative of individualism”, and that the antidote is interconnection, long held in Buen Vivir and Ubuntu. That takes more than stories: Puentes’… The Necessity for Strategy to Multi-solve Dark Matter Labs co-founder Indy Johar argues strategy’s favourite story – fix the present now, the future later – “produces an illusion of progress”, because people judge every action against their past, present,… The Nutmeg's Curse Writer Amitav Ghosh reads the planetary crisis through the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands, once the nutmeg’s only home. Climate change, he argues, is “the Earth’s response to four centuries of terraforming”, and… The Other Side of Eden Anthropologist Hugh Brody begins in the High Arctic of the 1970s, learning Inuktitut among Inuit hunters, then widens into a history of the divide between hunter-gatherers and farmers. He asks why farmers have… The Panthers and the Power of Social Imagination A short history of the Black Panthers’ ‘survival programmes’ – free breakfasts for over 20,000 children in 1969, clinics, schools – as practical imagination. Beyond meeting needs, they “gave people the chance to… The Patterning Instinct A long ‘cognitive history’ from Jeremy Lent, tracing how cultures have patterned meaning since hunter-gatherer times. The West, “prizing reason over emotion, splitting human existence into mind and body”, laid the… The Perception of the Environment Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s essays on how people perceive and inhabit their surroundings. He treats what we call cultural variation as, first of all, variation in skill: capacities grown through practice in an… The Powell Memorandum A confidential 1971 memo to the US Chamber of Commerce from Lewis Powell, months before he joined the Supreme Court. Seeing free enterprise under attack, he urged business to answer on every front – campuses, textbooks,… The Predominant Paradigms in the Way of a Participatory Future Starting at the deepest of Donella Meadows’s ‘places to intervene in a system’, Ben Redhead names four myths that keep us deferring rather than co-authoring: the consumer mindset, the ‘brilliant man’ theory, technocracy… The Problem with Inner & Outer Transformation Researcher Jessica Böhme questions treating inner and outer change as two worlds to bridge. Reading philosopher Henri Bortoft, she concludes that transformation “is not only about changing what we think, do, or how our… The Psychological Causes and Societal Consequences of Authoritarianism A dense psychological review of authoritarianism: “the desire for group conformity at the expense of personal autonomy”. It finds roots in evolution, genes, personality and upbringing, but threat activates it, and “the… The Radical Imagination Scholar-activists Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven treat the radical imagination as something movements do together, not a gift individuals possess. Their book, drawn from research with activists in Halifax, Nova Scotia,… The Rice Theory Of Culture Thomas Talhelm’s overview of a bold idea: that what people farmed shaped how they relate. Paddy rice “required twice as much labor per hectare as wheat farming”, plus shared irrigation, so farmers built customs to share… The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning The classic takedown of strategy as prediction: management thinker Henry Mintzberg argues that ‘strategic planning’ is a contradiction, because planning is analysis and strategy is synthesis. He names three fallacies –… The Seeds of New Cultural Mitochondria Nate Hagens, host of ‘The Great Simplification’, asks what might grow as the fossil-fuelled economic ‘Superorganism’ splinters. His answer is a list of inner traits, from grounding and grief to restraint and play, which… The Social Construction of Reality The 1966 classic that brought the idea of ‘social construction’ into the social sciences, ranked fifth among the twentieth century’s most important sociology books by the International Sociological Association. Peter… The social shortfall and ecological overshoot of nations A sobering scorecard. Andrew Fanning, Daniel O’Neill, Jason Hickel and Nicolas Roux track over 140 countries from 1992 to 2015 against the ‘doughnut’ of social needs and planetary limits. Countries “tend to transgress… The Spell of the Sensuous Philosopher David Abram once worked as a sleight-of-hand magician among Indigenous cultures. Drawing on that and on phenomenology, he argues that perception is a two-way exchange between our bodies and a living,… The Story Is In Our Bones - How worldviews & climate justice can remake a world in crisis Climate justice activist Osprey Orielle Lake argues a dominant worldview of extraction and exploitation has brought us to the edge of collapse, and calls for rewilding it, and ourselves. Weaving storytelling, climate… The Tools of Enculturation Macquarie University’s Richard Menary and Alexander Gillett argue that “human cognition is pervasively and profoundly enculturated and not just at the surface”. Tools like maps, numbers and writing aren’t props we… The unseen inner dimension of systems change and sustainability A short commentary urging systems thinkers to take the ‘inner’ seriously. Jamie Bristow and Rosie Bell argue that mindsets, biases and values are “subtly pulling the levers of our external world”, leaving individualist… Theory as Liberatory Practice bell hooks opens her 1991 essay with a confession: “I came to theory because I was hurting”. Yet theory “is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary”: it must be directed there. She faults academic jargon… There are two kinds of antiracism. Only one works, and it has nothing to do with 'diversity training' Arun Kundnani, writing in the Guardian, separates “liberal” from “radical” antiracist traditions and warns against limiting our focus to “beliefs and attitudes”. Structural change takes active approaches: “working… These Wilds Beyond Our Fences A book of letters from Bayo Akomolafe, a Nigerian-born writer who trained as a clinical psychologist, to his young daughter Alethea. By his publisher’s account he approaches large questions through fatherhood, and the… Thinking in Circles - An Essay on Ring Composition Anthropologist Mary Douglas argues many ancient texts, from Homer’s ‘Iliad’ to the Book of Numbers, are misread because they’re built as rings: the meaning sits at the centre, framed by an opening and ending that mirror… Thirteen ways of seeing nature in LA For nature writer Jenny Price, America’s great nature story – nature as “Not-us-ness” – is a denial: “We cherish nature as an idea of wildness while losing track of the real nature in our very houses.” Los Angeles shows… Through a Glass Darkly - A complex systems approach to Futures Cynefin creator Dave Snowden argues that futures work too often neglects “the ‘thick present’ and its evolutionary possibilities”. Even accurate forecasts fail when we can’t act on weak signals. His ‘Estuarine Mapping’… Time as Kinship Indigenous philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte asks what happens when climate change is told “in terms of linear units of time”. Narrated that way, it can “eclipse issues of justice in the energy transition”. Drawing on… To Give Up This World, To Have Many Others A recorded conversation from Arika’s Episode 11, ‘To End The World As We Know It’, where Ailton Krenak, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Amilcar Packer discuss pluriverses and plural worldviews. They cover Western society’s… Too Late for Indigenous Climate Justice - Ecological and Relational Tipping Points An unsparing argument about speed. Indigenous philosopher Kyle Whyte holds that just climate action depends on relationships of consent, trust and reciprocity, and that under colonialism “the relational tipping point… Towards Braiding Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti, with Sharon Stein, on why Indigenous inclusion in institutions so often fails. Brick ways of being stress “individuality, fixed form and linear time”; thread ways, interweaving and… Trading Bunkers for Block Parties Writer Felix de Rosen is tired of forecasts about collapse and AI. Prediction, like the colonial mindset, “stems from a desire to control rather than belong”, and feeds “the illusion that we are separate individuals”.… Transforming Narrative Waters A 2021 map of a UK practice still finding its vocabulary. From three months’ reading and twelve interviews, Ruth Taylor reports agreement that deep narratives “sit beneath other more specific narratives” and “permeate… Understanding Our Mind Zen teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh’s introduction to Buddhist psychology, built on fifty verses on consciousness drawn from the fifth-century master Vasubandhu. Its central image is the mind as a field sown with every kind of… Unflattening A doctoral dissertation written and drawn entirely as comics, among the first to be published in that form. Nick Sousanis argues against ‘flatness’, the narrow, fixed viewpoint that limits what we can perceive, and uses… Universal public services - the power of decommodifying survival Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that capitalism keeps essentials like housing and healthcare artificially scarce, so people must work more, and economies grow, “simply to access things that clearly are… Vanished Historian Sadiah Qureshi traces extinction as an idea and finds it younger than we assume. Fossil finds in the age of revolutions turned it from a theological threat into an inevitability; Europeans and Americans then… Wayshaping - A Multiscale Framework for Behavior Change Six researchers, Cynefin’s Dave Snowden among them, bring embodied cognitive science to why we don’t do what we intend. Each of us is a ‘self-collective’ of habits, identities and bodily rhythms, tied into the norms of… We Are Stronger Than We Think Finding the space to reflect and connect is hard when, "like all autocrats, Trump and his oligarchic henchmen are trying to overwhelm, disorient and distract." Crucial to resisting their efforts is "reclaiming agency in… Weathering - Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality Feminist scholars Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker argue that, in the privileged West, climate change feels “distant and abstracted” from the weather we live in, told as a future to control or a past to save.… What does American Propaganda Look Like Writer Jessica Wildfire draws on French sociologist Jacques Ellul to argue that Americans miss most of the propaganda aimed at them. Beyond the war posters, ‘sociological’ propaganda “focuses on more general worldviews… What is Collective Narrative Infrastructure and Why Does it Matter Emi Aguilar and Trevor Smith argue that philanthropy defines infrastructure too narrowly, funding organisations when it’s movements that change things. What’s missing is narrative and solidarity infrastructure: the… What Is Narrative and Solidarity Infrastructure BLIS Collective, a US cross-movement hub, opens a six-part series on the premise that “before you build law, you build myth”. Durable change, they argue, needs narrative infrastructure, “a web that allows for ideas to… Why I can’t be silent about the Inner Development Goals A critique of the Inner Development Goals. Sanna Rådelius argues that its 25 skills were chosen within an Anglo-American and Northern European frame, then presented as universal, with growth, power and patriarchy left… Why slow money wins Alex Evans, author of ‘The Myth Gap’, now thinks “the deepest stories don’t live in messages; they live in communities”. The US right, he argues, spent fifty years building every layer of a ‘worldview stack’, from media… Why Voters Aren't Motivated by a Laundry List of Positions on Issues Joe Brewer and George Lakoff of the Rockridge Institute argue that every material policy has a cognitive side, “often unconscious and implicit”. Conservatives spent decades making their values seem natural, while… Why We All Need a Wake-Up Call Writer Chusana Prasertkul on the narcissism in all of us: "Narcissism, in its many forms, may indeed be at the root of our collective struggles — polarisation, isolation, cruelty, even injustice. And narcissism isn't… Why We Can’t Understand Each Other Planet: Critical’s Rachel Donald asks Damien Williams, who teaches philosophy and data science, why more information hasn’t helped us agree. Language is how we build shared realities, but Williams argues we now live in… Worldwide divergence of values Evidence that the world’s values are drifting apart. Looking across the last 40 years, Joshua Conrad Jackson and Danila Medvedev find that values around tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply,…