Dialogue series
Societal Dynamics, The Repatterning Collective, and Future Earth are jointly organising a series of curated interactive sessions in the second half of 2025 to support practitioners and those resourcing them with re-imagining sense making for resilient & inspired decision making in extraordinary times.
In anticipation of these sessions, we are hosting a short series of lightly curated and semi-informal, anticipatory dialogues for a select group of participants guided by the notion of staying with the trouble, while instigating opportunity.
In addition to creating an impromptu container for joint, iterative reflection and cross-fertilisation, the insights emerging from these initial dialogues also help inform the design of the 'sense making into decision making’ sessions.
Why this effort?
Current economic, social, environmental and political turmoil are increasingly fostering an atmosphere of uncertainty and upheaval, anxiety and insecurity. Many find themselves wondering how we can best meet this moment and rise to the occasion; or whether we can actually ‘meet’ the unprecedented circumstances at all.
The crises may feel too deep and convoluted, the powers fueling them too strong for our actions to make a meaningful difference. In this confusion, however, there is an opportunity to re-imagine and re-pattern, to reorganize and reformulate the pieces, and take deliberate actions now that can build real transformative momentum.
The question which therefore is guiding us is: how do we stay with the trouble, while instigating opportunity? By 'staying with the trouble', we mean embracing our response-ability (Haraway, 2016) to work with the present and all that is / are being affected, with the knowledge that things are imperfect and difficult. Meanwhile, by engaging our collective imaginations and fostering cross-fertilisation between efforts, we aim to identify means in which we can 'instigate opportunity' and find the cracks in our current systems where transformation can get a firmer foothold.
This work is grounded in ‘pattern literacy’, which invites us to look beyond the events, and discern and navigate the underlying rhythms and structures that weave through seemingly disparate occurrences; thereby not just seeing the connections but the patterns they make, the interplay of forces shaping our realities, and the way they cascade in chain reactions.
Although humanity’s current socio-economic and ecological predicament as it’s unfolding in front of us may feel very unfamiliar and uncomfortable, the patterns and dynamics underlying this polycrisis are anything but random. They are rooted in the history of human civilization and in human psychology. And mimic the ways many civilizations in the past few thousands of years tried to respond when faced with a critical rupture point.
Gaining a more granular understanding in the core patterns and dynamics that fuel these behaviours and outcomes in societies and in ourselves over time, using insights from deep history as well as behavioural psychology, can help us overcome confusion and ‘action paralysis’. It can create deeper clarity around how these processes can or are play(ing) out and where opportunities lie to act or intervene in order to disrupt respectively strengthen the cycle.
It also helps to remind ourselves that change is not linear. In dynamic systems, small changes can suddenly result in significant shifts. This tells us that taking many small, promising steps now as part of deliberate early preparation for when a "moment of the whirlwind" strikes, as "pre-emptive peace strikes", or as a form of anticipatory disaster recovery, can result in significantly amplified beneficial impacts later on.
