Intro
Explore the sources that have informed and challenged our thinking, with summaries and highlights for each. Each is categorised by Type and Focus; filter below. Each source has its own page.
Research · Library
Sources that shaped our thinking
All sources
Type
Focus
View
170 sources
Drag nodes · click a source to open it · click a hub to filter
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None Beautiful book. Dense but poetic. Short book. Unpicks racist origins of geology and the anthroprocene A Brief History of Systems Science, Chaos and Complexity An overview of how complex systems emerge, the recognition of which profoundly challenges dominant culture demand for simplicity, certainty and control. A Leader's Framework for Decision Making The citable Cynefin paper: clear, complicated, complex and chaotic domains each demand different action logics — plans work in complicated domains; complex domains want probe–sense–respond. The domain-scoping that keeps… A New Framework for Developing and Evaluating Complex Interventions The UK Medical Research Council's updated framework for complex interventions: complexity is embraced — and effectiveness and causal questions are retained, reframed rather than abandoned. The institutional proof that… A Walk with Unite the Kingdom How do we wrestle back the story of who we are as a people? As we’ve written about before, how do we do a Fred Hampton on the far-right? How do we resist the elites who profit from driving us apart by weaponising anger,… An Emerging Third Option - Reclaiming Democracy From Dark Money & Dark Tech Democracy is facing serious challenges, including misinformation and social disconnection, which threaten its foundation. To create meaningful change, we need to shift from top-down approaches to collaborative,… An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn ontology – just another word for colonialism When the European academy adopts "ontology" as a trendy lens while ignoring the living Indigenous people whose thought it echoes, it repeats colonialism rather than escaping it. An Introduction to the Metacrisis Brief (compared to his usual 3hr marathons) analysis and 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?" An Odyssey of Culture Change Culture as "our social soil": the enabling condition from which policy and economic decisions grow, and a self-referencing, looping ecosystem rather than a set of sectors to be picked and instrumentalised — "you cannot… At Work In The Ruins A book about how we find our bearings and what kind of tasks are worth giving our lives to, given all we know or have good grounds to fear about the trouble the world is in. Beyond the Broadcasting Model Today’s communications landscape demands that social sector organizations move away from a 20th-century broadcasting approach and toward dialogue, relationship-building, and fostering community. Beyond the flags - grief, polarisation and the work of repair Decades of economic decline and broken communities have caused deep grief, anger, and rising polarisation in the North East. This pain is being redirected at migrants and neighbours instead of the systems that caused… Biology not physics holds the key to reality Three centuries after Newton framed reality in fixed laws and deterministic equations, science has reached a radically new frontier, argue biochemist and complex systems theorist Stuart Kauffman and computer scientist… Block, Bridge, Build - A Framework to Forge a More Democratic Future Block-Bridge-Build offers a framework—rooted in theory and practice of conflict transformation, civil resistance, and democratic renewal—that aims to resist harm (block), facilitate dialogue across divides (bridge), and… Bodies of Water - Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology Dense but poetic. Traces in a feminist and anti-racist approach how our fates are interconnected - through the medium of water. Braiding Sweetgrass The awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings… Breaking the Ouroboros and Ushering in New Possibilities Ruth Taylor emphasizes the need to rethink our approaches to social and environmental justice, urging activists to slow down and reflect on their strategies. She argues that current methods often reinforce the very… Building decolonial climate justice movements - Four tensions Identifes 4 tensions decolonial climate justice movements need to grapple with - how coloniality shows up in different ways in climate justice movements Building State Capability Problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA): development economics rebuilding itself around the insight that complex institutional change can't be blueprinted — iterate on locally-nominated problems, authorise… Changing Our Narrative about Narrative - The Infrastructure Required for Building Narrative Power Discusses what ‘infratructure’ means in the narrative context Climate Spring's Storytelling Guide from Apocalypse to Regenerative Futures Advocates stories for systems change: - It is not enough that we just replace fossil fuels with renewables. To live within our planetary boundaries, we need to change our system. Emphasises stories that 1) reveal… Coalitional Value Theory - an Evolutionary Approach to Understanding Culture CVT contends that humans evolved unique mental mechanisms for assessing each other’s marginal value to a coalition (i.e., each other’s coalitional value). They defer to those with higher coalitional value, and they… Comms-Alt-Delete The dissenting voice on the shelf. Jack Jeffrey, interviewed: "what we do not need are better stories" — you develop a story by doing things and being seen to do them; the left's real problem is a Westminster overrun… Comparing Climate Proposals - A Case Study in Cognitive Policy Discusses the importance of ‘cognitive policy’ as a crucial companion to ‘material policy’, comparing two approaches to presenting a climate policy to the US public. Complexity, Story and Sense-making in Uncertain times An exploration of how story and narrative shape our sense-making and can transform our approaches to situations that don’t have straight line answers. Contribution Analysis - Making Causal Claims in the Face of Complexity The distinction our certainty rewrite rests on: attribution (tracing an outcome to a single cause) is the wrong test in complex change; contribution (showing your work plausibly mattered, against a theory of change,… Cultural Materialism - The Struggle for a Science of Culture To unite natural and human history big historians must try to describe carefully how material conditions and human cultural processes relate to each other. To do this, a plausible scientific theory of human culture is… Culture, Deep Narratives and… Whacamole Argues for 2 key practices: designing work in recognition of the cultural footprint it will leave & building collective influence. Dark, Gray, and Light Lore The text discusses three types of lore: dark, gray, and light. Gray lore is useful and attracts diverse people, offering some value while allowing for open exploration. Light lore fosters significant positive outcomes… Decolonial Work - Pruning Bonsai vs. Metabolizing Decay Decolonial work can be approached through two methods: pruning existing structures or nurturing the underlying systems of decay and regeneration. While pruning focuses on surface-level changes and control, a metabolic… Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor The essay that polices this whole space: decolonization means the repatriation of Indigenous land and life, not a metaphor for improving institutions — and the "moves to innocence" by which settler projects absorb the… Decolonizing degrowth in the post-development convergence - Questions, experiences, and proposals from two Indigenous territories A growing coalition of degrowth scholar-activist(s) seeks to transform degrowth into an interdisciplinary and international field bridging a rising network of social and environmental justice movements. We offer… Decolonizing Mental Health in the Polycrisis Names "separability" — the modern/colonial onto-epistemology that severs humans from nature, each other and their own bodies — as the root of the polycrisis, and proposes "neuro-decolonization" as the repair: those… Deep Narratives Dive - Research Database A couple of examples on our list but most aren’t deep enough Deep Structure - What Makes the Present The author, Carne Ross, explores how deep structures, particularly ontologies, shape political outcomes and societal norms. He argues that the dominant materialist and positivist worldview limits our understanding of… Deep Time Philanthropy and the Evolution of Consciousness Looks to historical movements (religious, artistic, scientific) to distill a) how to recognise transformational ideas/ work b) what it takes for these ideas to transform cultures c) non-linear phases of this work.… Defeating Narratives of Division Community organising approach to changing narratives around division ahead of the next election. DEI in a Time of Unraveling - The ImPossible Task of Metabolizing Polarization DEI initiatives in the U.S. often swing between enforcement and backlash, creating cycles of conflict. This ongoing struggle highlights the need for a shift from focusing on harm and entitlement to fostering deeper… Depth Education Collection Courses that support participants in confronting complicity in systemic harm, deepening relational intelligence and accountability, cultivating non-transactional partnerships with human and more-than-human… Deschooling Dialogues - On Initiation, Trauma and Ritual Francis Weller says that ancient rituals helped people heal together and feel connected. Today, we feel empty because we focus too much on being alone and forget community. To heal, we must return to shared stories,… Designs for the Pluriverse In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and… Detecting Causality in Complex Ecosystems Convergent cross mapping: a method that distinguishes causality from correlation in nonlinear systems "not covered by the current Granger causality paradigm." In the Garden as a precision instrument: it falsifies the… Dismantling Green Colonialism - Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region Explores how green colonialism is playing out today Does Changing Behavioral Intentions Engender Behavior Change The meta-analysis this field needs and rarely cites: across dozens of experimental tests, successfully changing people's intentions produced only modest behaviour change — and the effect collapses for behaviours that… Does Information Really Want to be Free The direct rebuttal to open-by-default archives: the free-information ethos is culturally specific, and Indigenous knowledge systems often depend on restricted, differentiated, relational circulation. The intellectual… Durably Reducing Transphobia (Deep Canvassing) The exception that defines the rule: the one form of communication with rigorously demonstrated, durable effects on deep attitudes. Roughly ten-minute doorstep conversations in Miami — non-judgmental, built on the… Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta - The Making of Calcutta Intro chapter is very helpful. Shows how pre-colonial relations of seeing land as in ‘flux’ with the monsoons rather than fixed in the Bengal delta was overriden with colonial property laws and relations, creating… Enlightenment by command Lene Rachel Andersen criticized the Inner Development Goals (IDG) for misusing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and misrepresenting her work. She argues that trying to force people into a fixed framework is… Fierce Vulnerability - Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse In times of collapse, we need a movement that recognizes injustice as a reflection of collective trauma and embraces its role as a catalyst for collective healing through transformative action. Fostering Deeper Security - Climate Leadership for a New Era Climate change is creating deep social and emotional challenges that traditional policies alone cannot fix. We need new leadership that listens to people's fears and builds trust, connection, and hope. True security… From Colonial to Liberation Psychology The founding text of Sikolohiyang Pilipino: Enriquez's argument that imported Western psychology mismeasured Filipino personhood, and his placement of kapwa — the shared self — as the core value beneath the surface… From Growth, through Degrowth, to a Pluriverse of Flourishings Authors caution against against reproducing colonial modernity through degrowth From Mental Models to Embodiment - An Evolution of the Six Conditions of Systems Change Framework In the process of what causes our world views to shift, more often the body, and not the brain, is driving the bus Funding Movement Infrastructure In this brief, we identify seven barriers that arise for funders seeking to invest in social movements, and provide openings to addressing them. Funding Narrative Change - How Communities Are Shaping And Wielding Narrative Power This report shows how communities build narrative power by owning and telling their own stories. Funders must invest long-term in community-led storytelling, platforms, and strategy. Strong local narratives shift public… Good Strategy Bad Strategy Rumelt's kernel — diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action — is the mainstream twin of our strategic ethos: a pattern firm enough to align action, loose enough to survive contact with complexity. Useful precisely… Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative Brain Graybiel's review of the neuroscience of habit: repeated action sequences are "chunked" by the basal ganglia — particularly the dorsolateral striatum — into units that run automatically, faster and with less effort than… Healing the Degenerative Disease of Separation - An on-Going Regenerative Inquiry Encouragement to face 'the shit'. "Rehabilitation only works when there is consent, not only intellectual, but affective and embodied consent and the first step is admitting we have a problem, in this case, it is also… Homo Economicus and Forgetful Curriculum - Remembering Other Ways to Be a Human Being A reflection on how education maintains deluded ideologies that support ‘homo economicus’, and keep us separated from sacred ecology in unsustainable systems. He calls for a new story to guide metarelational curricula. How Embodiment Transforms Systems Change An update to a model of ‘Six Conditions of Systems Change’ that saw Mental Models at the root, adding three further layers. How Large-Scale Change Really Happens - Working With Emergence “It’s not critical mass we have to achieve. It’s critical connections.” How to Change People’s Minds A discussion of why debate is a useless form of political communication; why citizens of the Western world are particularly prone to disbelieving their neighbour’s lived experience and the strategies which do work when… How to kidnap an audience On breaking the spell of our training as consumers Human Exceptionalism (episode) Discussion of The Arrogant Ape, and how almost all of the characteristics which we human beings have claimed distinguished ourselves from our kinfolk have eventually been found in other species. Perhaps most… I & I Economies An economic framework built from the Rastafari premise that divinity lives within and between us, so the economy must organise around interdependence and sacred reciprocity rather than accumulation. Grounded in pardna —… I am Mushroom - Anticipatory Aesthetics, Futures Pheromones and Fungal Play This paper takes the mycorrhizal as a metaphor for culture. It posits that we, you and I, and everyone else have deep roots in our cultures and that to engage environmental futures calls us to engage with this deeper… Icebergs Of The Heart Tazai’s second iceberg suggests the qualities/ approaches at ever deeper levels necessary to cultivate a life affirming future/ world. If We’re Governed by Dreams and Gossip, How Should We Respond The media often fails to highlight how powerful national stories, like the American Dream, drive actions that harm our climate. The play "Kyoto" illustrates how these narratives shape attitudes and behaviors in climate… Interrogating imagination infrastructure Asks what forms of ‘imagination infrastructure’ might help foster a critical, creative imagination to take us beyond existing social arrangements and open-up pathways beyond and outside the current polycrisis. Inviting a decolonial praxis for future imaginaries of nature - Introducing the Entangled Time Tree The practice of envisioning the future has deep roots in the past. In a decolonial approach, it is necessary to consider a multiplicity of pasts that lead to diverse presents and futures. Africa has traditions of… Knowledge and Ideology in the Anthropocene Our civilization’s collective knowledge is flawed because it wrongly treats shared understanding as just a sum of individual knowledge. This failure is tied to ideology, which supports harmful behaviors like… Land Back to Right Relations To address the issue of land ownership is to address the root causes of the polycrisis: the interlinked systems of capitalism and colonialism. To change the system we need to change the narrative. We change the… Lessons For a Storytelling Commons A commons is a collective resource sustained by those who rely on it, which is cared for by a community according to a set of mutually agreed rules. Crucially, this is a very different way of organising our information… Let’s not be too academic A challenge to the pragmatists, who are critiqued as enablers of harmful ideology. “The infrastructure of justice demands philosophical literacy, historical consciousness, and moral seriousness—precisely what… Leviathan Investigates why trust in our institutions declining so rapidly, what social media is really doing to our hearts and minds, and how we can move into a new economic paradigm that chooses life over blind extraction. A… Listening in the Dark Questions multi-species justice in the context of renewable energy/ wind turbines Man and His Works Where "enculturation" was coined: Herskovits' account of how an individual acquires the culture of their society, already distinguishing an early, largely unconscious phase from a later conscious one in which people… Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey Arc A summary of Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness – the first alternative to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey narrative paradigm that is more appropriate for women’s life journeys. Me Or Us - The Thrutopian Project A place for people who sense that the system is collapsing – not just economically or ecologically, but morally – and know it’s time to step into something deeper, braver, and more beautiful. Meeting Environmental Challenges - The role of human identity An examination of particular aspects of human identity and how they are associated with environmental problems, before identifying strategies to mitigate the extent to which these aspects are encouraged in our culture,… Mindset and Worldviews Shifts for a Regenerative Future A map of nine systems-change thinkers laid across three nested layers of cognition — individual mindsets (Raworth, Keen), collective paradigms (Bustani, Herrington) and underlying worldviews (Currivan, Kothari,… Mindset Shifts - What Are They, Why Do They Matter, How Do They Happen FrameWorks' definitional statement on mindsets: "fundamental, assumed patterns of thinking that shape how we make sense of the world and act in it," which "emerge from and are tied to social practices and institutions… Mortality management and climate action - A review and reference for using Terror Management Theory methods in interdisciplinary environmental research A methodological framework for interdisciplinary researchers to incorporate TMT into their research designs and to help practitioners anticipate how their mortality-laden messaging could trigger unintentional… Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time Discusses a different conceptulisation of time than linear Mythic Roots of the Metacrisis The article discusses how an ancient Babylonian myth, where the god Marduk kills the goddess Tiamat, reflects a shift from honoring nature and the feminine to a patriarchal worldview. This change has led to modern… Narrative Strategies Fairly academic type article providing a (western focussed?) historical study of “narrative strategy” defined as comprising of narrative modality, narrative world picture, narrative intrigue. Concludes: Systematic study… Narrative Strategy Primer - For Weaving Our Interconnected Futures A starting point for anyone committed to disentangling and unraveling harmful narratives and to weaving new ones grounded in racial solidarity. Here, folks will find key concepts and definitions, practical tools for… Narrative, Hope and Agency in Complexity Practical, participatory training from the renowned Cynefin Company draws from complexity science and specific frameworks developed by Dave Snowden to help you work more effectively on the ground, in the moment, with… Narratives for Wealth Systems Change Post-growth and degrowth still borrow their authority from the Western canon they critique — Doughnut from Oxford welfare economics, degrowth from French philosophy — and the piece traces the narrative of rational… Narratives need enacting, otherwise they’re just words Narratives are important for social change, but they need to be actively enacted, not just talked about. People learn by doing, and to create real change, we must engage others in action. Successful campaigns show that… Native Science Cajete examines the multiple levels of meaning that inform Native astronomy, cosmology, psychology, agriculture, and the healing arts. Unlike the western scientific method, native thinking does not isolate an object or… Obliquity The readable case that complex goals are best pursued indirectly — profit, happiness and social change alike arrive as by-products of purposes held obliquely. The funder-conversation version of the pattern-not-plan… On metanarratives – or, how we transform our cultural mythology Stories shape how we see ourselves and the world around us. Changing culture’s big stories, or metanarratives, takes time and many smaller stories growing together. New myths can help us live better, but they must be… On Powers, Great and Small Power is on the mind these days, as the world grapples with shifting global power dynamics, old powers crumbling, new ones rising, and archaic power paradigms resurfacing… Yes, issues of power run rampant and… Our Climate Needs a Mythology Climate action needs a coherent shared meta-narrative based in the heroes journey structure. Our Prior Legacy Detailed academic overview of Priors, including a suggestion of how to change deep ones (embodied, emotional, using metaphor and art) are unconscious beliefs that shape how we see ourselves and the world. They influence… Out of the Wreckage - A New Politics for an Age of Crisis George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast humans in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how both democracy and economic… Outgrowing Modernity An invitation to widen our horizons and engage in a politics that holds multiple truths, acknowledges our shared dis-ease, and works toward collective healing and wellbeing as a legible political practice. Patterns as, and Via Actants Actants play a crucial role in understanding the interconnectedness of human and non-human entities in shaping social, technological, and scientific realities. The concept of Actant broadens our perspective to view… Patterns of Narrative Dave Snowden discusses the importance of narrative in understanding culture and identity. He emphasizes that narratives are dynamic and evolve through interactions, rather than being simply created or told.… Positive Tipping Points Toolkit This Toolkit has been created to support transformational change at all levels. It aims to make working with systems more accessible, rewarding, and collaborative. Prefiguring a Future We Want Imagining and living into a new world requires freedom, space, and support to dream and take risks. Psychology of Habit The standard scholarly review of habit: formed by repetition in stable contexts, cued by environment rather than intention, and — crucially for us — most successfully changed by deliberate, effortful strategies that… Raging Against the Dying Light - A Systems View of Human Futures A model of four million 2040 scenarios finds most futures end in decline or collapse; the Hope attractor is tiny. Polity type—strong democracy—is the crucial variable that makes hope possible. We must shift worldviews… Reclaiming our narratives - A practical guide to countering identity-based disinformation An approach to tackling ‘Identity-Based Disinformation’ with ‘Positive Identity Expansion’ through alternative narratives. Rewilding Mythology For most of human history, myth was a durable mode of knowledge transmission, kept alive and resilient by the breath-laced web of communal storytelling. But the rise of empire depended on the deracination of… Rewiring for Reality - Cross Generational Reckonings Report provides a methodology and a resource to hold space for inter and intragenerational conversations that grapple with complexity, uncover inherited patterns, and cultivate relationships across generations that are… Sacred Civics - Building Seven Generation Cities Abstract: Sacred Civics argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute… Sand Talk Yunkaporta — Apalech clan, Deakin University — on Indigenous pattern thinking as a living systems science: kinship-mind, story-mind, and knowledge that exists in relationship rather than storage. Directly relevant to… Scaling Deep - Evaluation & Funding Inquiry Explores how we can move beyond metrics to redefine success, reframe outcomes, and measure what truly matters in systems change. Drawing on insights from funders, evaluators, and practitioners, it offers practical… Scaling Deep - Pathways to Scale Companion document to Scaling Deep - Shifting Power and Redefining Success. Drawing on conversations with over 70 practitioners, it maps unconventional pathways to scale rooted in relational wisdom and collective… Scaling Deep - Shifting Power and Redefining Success Durable systems change depends on slow, relational and inner work — "Scaling Deep" — that is systematically under-resourced because it does not fit metrics-driven funding and evaluation. The report argues that Scaling… Seeing Like the Sea - A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery 1800–1925 Historical research into indigenous ways of relating to nature in South Asia. Sensemaker - Praxis Makes Perfect An essential guide for those navigating today’s unpredictable world. Rooted in the pioneering work of Dave Snowden and the Cynefin® Framework, this book unveils the power of SenseMaker®, a revolutionary approach to… Sensing the Third Horizon Right now we are in the in-between. That moment when the lights go out and there is a pause of darkness while our eyes adjust. Before outlines appear, then shapes, then detail. In this uncertain moment of darkness,… Signal Distortion & Field Deception - A Guide to Unmasking Cultural Fallacies ‘Cultural Fallacies’ are used to ‘distort signal’, installed as ‘beliefs’. Social Tipping Dynamics for Stabilizing Earth's Climate by 2050 Complexity science's own applied answer to "you can't target anything in a complex system": named social tipping interventions — removing fossil-fuel subsidies, divestment, emissions disclosure, decentralised energy —… Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use - An international analysis of social provisioning Research by Vogel et al dug deeper into the question of redesign. Their findings are that satisfaction of fundamental human needs does not only depend on energy use, but also on a broad range of provisioning factors… Socioecological Transformations - Linking Ontologies with Structures, Personal with Collective Change Discusses how the overemphasis on structures/ structural violence often precludes any meaningful and deeper engagement with the ontological and epistemic assumptions that legitimize and discursively enable structural… Stories For Life Proposes two story shifts around our relationship to nature and wellbeing to support a deeper shift from 'separation' to 'interbeing'. Tackling Apathy and Denial Many climate communication efforts focus on changing individual behaviour or messaging but often ignore emotion and social context. Research shows feelings like fear, guilt, hope, and belonging strongly shape engagement… TESCREAL Quick Guide Unpicks TESCREAL, the ideologies guiding Silicon Valley elite The Arrogant Ape ‘Human entitlement’ sits at the root of the ecological overshoot. and breakdown; it is inculcated in children from age 5 as a result of them observing behaviours and protocols around them. The Behavioural Drivers Model - A Conceptual Framework for Social and Behaviour Change Programming Behaviour change programmes should start by working out why people act as they do, rather than reaching for a communication campaign by default. That complaint is the reason this framework exists: Petit argues that… The Big Tent is Working Julia Roig argues that a diverse "big tent" of civic groups can protect democracy by working together across sectors and ideologies. Horizons focuses on building relationships, shared goals, and flexible tactics… The Buddhist Unconscious The scholarly bridge behind our Ālaya-vijñāna entry: Waldron reads Yogācāra's storehouse consciousness alongside cognitive science, showing a fifteen-centuries-early account of experience-derived structures beneath… The Codes That Code Us - Modernity's Recursive Logic in Humans and AI Introduction and first chapter of a working draft arguing that AI brings no new logic: it intensifies the recursive pattern of extraction and separation that modernity already trained into humans — a "recursive… The Craft of Reframing A framework for narrative change, which mentions ‘Hidden Assumptions’ as a layer – “Surface the unstated beliefs or taken-for-granted logics that drive this system–things people rarely question. (Extra: The beliefs… The Democracy of Species Follow up book to Braiding Sweetgrass The Flip, Formation and the Fun - A Metamodern Framework for Human Futures A call for three cultural shifts: a metaphysical "flip" that treats consciousness and value as fundamental. Next, a moral "formation" that moves from utilitarianism to virtue ethics and education for character. Finally,… The Four Functions of Myth According to Campbell, a mythology serves four primary functions. Though not the only functions a mythology can perform, these four are essential to any active, living mythology. The Gift Contract An overview of GTDF's position. "Violence and unsustainability are conditions that are necessary for the system (that is ‘not working’) to exist, how we are part of this system (and complicit in harm) and how this… The Left (Still) Doesn't Understand the Internet Finlayson on how the right rebuilt, online, the community-forming and explanatory infrastructure the labour movement once had and abandoned: a "metapolitics" of culture and entertainment that normalises values and… The Mythic Body A yearlong course of mythic study, somatic practice, storytelling, song, threshold exploration and nature immersion with The Emerald podcast’s Josh Schrei and many special guests. The Myths We Live By Myths are neither lies nor mere stories but a network of powerful symbols for interpreting the world. Tackling a dazzling array of subjects such as philosophy, evolutionary psychology, animals, consciousness and the… The Narrative Antidote to Authoritarianism The article discusses how narratives of interconnection can counter authoritarianism and individualism. It emphasizes that well-being comes from relationships and collective effort, rather than isolation and… The Necessity for Strategy to Multi-solve Strategy must multi-solve. It must be designed not as a sequence but as a simultaneity, where every action is judged across past, present, future, and mission at once. The Panthers and the Power of Social Imagination Alongside their militancy, revolutionary movements like the Black Panthers realised a tender vision of the future. The Perception of the Environment Ingold's alternative to transmission accounts of culture: "it is through a process of enskilment, not enculturation, that every generation grows into — and beyond — the wisdom of its predecessors"; what passes between… The Powell Memorandum The primary document at the start of the opponents' fifty-year arc: a confidential memo to the US Chamber of Commerce proposing sustained, coordinated, well-funded investment in courts, campuses, media and think tanks… The Predominant Paradigms in the Way of a Participatory Future Starts at Meadows's deepest leverage point and names four myths that keep people deferring rather than co-authoring: the consumer mindset, the "brilliant man" theory of progress, the technocratic worldview and… The Psychological Causes and Societal Consequences of Authoritarianism Over the past two decades, citizens’ political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that… The Rice Theory Of Culture Rice farming needs shared water and teamwork, so it creates cultures that value cooperation and close relationships. Wheat farming is easier to do alone, so it leads to cultures that focus on independence and clear… The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning The thirty-year-old obituary for strategy-as-prediction: planning's fallacies of predetermination, detachment and formalisation, from inside the management academy. Read with Mintzberg & Waters' 'Of Strategies,… The Seeds of New Cultural Mitochondria The behaviors that the current economic superstructure rewards cannot form the basis of what emerges from its ashes…we require new ways of thinking and living that put us in closer relationship to one another and the… The Social Construction of Reality The canonical account of the feedback loop we describe: we externalise culture, it hardens into an apparently independent reality, and we internalise it again as the way things are. "Society is a human product. Society… The social shortfall and ecological overshoot of nations Academic research by Fanning et al, which applied the Doughnut model, found that no country is currently moving towards the doughnut-shaped safe and just space. Current trends are likely to deepen the climate and… The Story Is In Our Bones - How worldviews & climate justice can remake a world in crisis A dominant, human-centered worldview has brought us to the brink of social, ecological, and climate collapse. Braiding poetic storytelling, deep cultural and climate justice analyses, and knowledge of Earth-centered… The Tools of Enculturation The current peer-reviewed statement of enculturated cognition: cultural practices, symbol systems and tools don't just fill minds with content, they transform how thinking works, through learning-driven plasticity.… The Undergrowth Protocol The text discusses humanity's disconnection from nature due to the complexities of modern life and artificial intelligence. It proposes a mission to reprogram our collective understanding and relationships to avoid… The unseen inner dimension of systems change and sustainability Lack of attention to the psychological and cultural dimension of systems is widespread – but inner factors are fundamental to global crises like climate change and the approaches we require to tackle them Thinking in Circles - An Essay on Ring Composition Exploring beyond the usual boundaries of social anthropology, a leader in the field shows why our readings of ancient literary texts may be off the mark Thirteen ways of seeing nature in LA Challenges worldview that cities are not ‘nature’ - challenges a romanticised view of what is nature Through a Glass Darkly - A complex systems approach to Futures Humans tend to focus only on the near future, missing complex patterns and unexpected possibilities. This work uses complexity science and narrative to better understand and manage social systems and their futures. It… Time as Kinship Discusses linear vs kinship time Towards Braiding The GTDF collective's account of what Indigenous–non-Indigenous collaboration requires before it can honestly be called braiding: historical harm becoming common sense, a shared language for generative and… Trading Bunkers for Block Parties The text discusses the limitations of predictive thinking and emphasizes the importance of participation in a rapidly changing world. It argues for building relationships and community as a way to navigate challenges… Transforming Narrative Waters The closest published precedent to this whole inquiry: a UK-focused study of deep narrative change practice, built from literature review and practitioner interviews — the same method, the same country, four years… Understanding Our Mind Fifty verses on the nature of consciousness, based on Vasubandhu — Thích Nhất Hạnh's teaching of store consciousness for contemporary readers. Our relational route into ālaya-vijñāna: the teacher whose 'interbeing'… Universal public services - the power of decommodifying survival Linking degrowth and public services Vanished Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or… Wayshaping - A Multiscale Framework for Behavior Change Wayshaping is a behaviour change framework grounded in embodied cognitive science and complexity theory. It argues that individuals are best understood as nested, multilevel systems — "self-collectives" — in which… We Are Stronger Than We Think The Trump-Musk administration is pushing authoritarian control and targeting vulnerable communities, which threatens our freedoms. History shows that organized nonviolent resistance can effectively combat such tyranny.… Weathering - Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality Discusses how different bodies are weathering climate change and that time is not just ‘linear’. What does American Propaganda Look Like propaganda doesn’t just come from your government. It comes from everywhere. It’s not as blunt and obvious as we’re taught in school. It’s slower, more insidious. It sneaks into you over time. It promotes bigger ideas,… What is Collective Narrative Infrastructure and Why Does it Matter Philanthropy underfunds movement infrastructure and often ignores the storytelling and solidarity work movements need. Narrative infrastructure (story-building and distribution) plus solidarity infrastructure… What Is Narrative and Solidarity Infrastructure "Before you build law, you build myth." Part one of a series arguing that durable transformation needs narrative infrastructure (the systems that let ideas take root in culture) and solidarity infrastructure (the… Why Voters Aren't Motivated by a Laundry List of Positions on Issues Provides an introduction to cognitive policy – the values, frames, and arguments that makesense of the political process. Why We All Need a Wake-Up Call The author discusses how our thoughts shape our actions and the importance of self-awareness in combating narcissism, which exists in everyone. Mindfulness and honest conversations with trusted friends can help reveal… Why We Can’t Understand Each Other We live in a world of “bespoke realities” whereby people’s lived experiences are seemingly so different they cannot even come to a mutual understanding of the parts that are objective — like science. He explains why…