Synthesis

Six headlines

1. Lots of terms, lots in common

What we are calling ‘deep disposition’ is described in many different ways and places. This is complex and nuanced, but there are some simple things we can draw from all of this, without needing to know what an Egregore is, or earning a PHD in Relational Quantum Mechanics.

One such thing is the concept of Enculturation, which we have referenced in the building of the Canvas. This is a social and anthropological theory describing “the process of learning one’s own culture.” It’s how ‘culture gets into people’ and reproduces itself through its members, and how this operates as a feedback loop: a process of both shaping culture and being shaped by it in return.

We have however been wary that many of the frameworks and theories of change we are familiar with use terms that are rooted in linear rational cognition – they are ‘head-first’ – e.g. mindsets, worldviews, mental models, consciousness shift. That’s not to say that people using these terms are themselves seeing the work as linear or disembodied, but it may be worth checking how such terms are being understood, to avoid the work being misrepresented.

2. Is Narrative Change ‘Deep’?

‘Narrative change’ is becoming accepted internationally as a way to shift power and bring about/accompany systems change, and in many cases uses ‘Deep Disposition’ to refer to an underpinning layer of values and foundational stories.

However in many cases ‘Narrative Change’ is used to only mean changing a live media narrative about a particular issue, or the narrative that a single organisation is telling about itself to the world. So is ‘surface’, and often short-term.

‘Deep Disposition’ is not a perfect term, but it does draw attention to something embodied, relational and distributed, beyond the surface layers of discourse and influence that established change practices often default to.

3. ‘Deep Disposition’ is like a Cultural Habit

When we form a habit as an individual, what’s happening is that repetition in a consistent context gradually shifts control of the behaviour from deliberate, goal-directed circuits to automatic ones. The best-evidenced account centres on the basal ganglia, and particularly the dorsolateral striatum, where frequently repeated action sequences get bound into single units — what Ann Graybiel calls ‘chunking’ — so the routine runs faster, with less effort, and arrives first. To change the habit, a new one has to be established that does something different in the same context.

(We previously described this as myelin — white matter — thickening around a neural pathway until it becomes hard to break down. That is the popular telling, and it overstates a real but secondary mechanism: activity-dependent myelination is genuinely involved in skill learning and the timing of circuits, but it is not the accepted explanation of habit strength, and myelin is the sheath rather than the tissue. Corrected 2026-07-20. See Ann Graybiel, ‘Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative Brain’, Annual Review of Neuroscience 31 (2008), and Wendy Wood and Dennis Rünger, ‘Psychology of Habit’, Annual Review of Psychology 67 (2016).)

This change in habit may have to be quite abrupt, with some kind of break – like cold turkey – to avoid being dragged back to the old habit. Or it may take time – either way a change to the surrounding environment/conditions is always essential. For example, if you want to stop eating chocolate during the day, you have to remove chocolate from nearby – no amount of wishing or willing alone will work if the chocolate stays within reach: the conditions have to change.

We have found it helpful to think of Deep Dispositions like a large-scale version of this. If our habitual ways of relating to the world (e.g. the Ten Hallucinations of Modernity) are to be reoriented away from being destructive (or simply mistaken), then we need to be working on the conditions and environments that are bodily maintaining those habits.

4. Meaning-making is entangled

Indigenous and modern sciences (e.g. Complexity Science, Neuroscience, New Materialism) understand that our cognition is embodied and distributed, and that meaning is made between us in relationship, not within us.

Much of what guides our daily activity is unconscious, hidden, being reinforced by our interactions and experiences, and unfolding along complex pathways that we struggle to perceive or predict. It is entangled with the world around us in ways that can be hard to identify or precisely intervene in.

5. Impact is complex

The latest sciences also point to the limits of what we can affect, suggesting an approach that looks like pragmatic incrementalism – approaching change obliquely and granularly, hyperlocally, and nudging towards positive ‘adjacent possibles’.

There is a crucial difference with typical (what might be called ‘technocratic’) pragmatism: the view that change is dispositional as much as causal, and that charting a clean linear cause-and-effect pathway, backwards or forwards, is rarely available. Unintended consequences are the norm rather than the exception. Much of what we can understand is how a complex adaptive system is disposed in a given moment — what the complex potential states might be.

To be precise about what that does and doesn’t rule out, because we have previously overstated it: what fails here is attribution — the claim that a specific outcome can be traced back to a specific intervention as its cause. Contribution is a different and weaker claim, and it remains available; there is a developed methodological literature for making it (contribution analysis, developmental evaluation, outcome harvesting, emergent learning), some of which sits in our own Library. Nor does complexity rule out identifying where in a system intervention pays off disproportionately — that is exactly what leverage points and phase-shift thinking are for, and we use both elsewhere on this site. Saying causal tracing is impossible contradicted our own toolkit, and it handed anyone assessing this work a reason to conclude it cannot be evaluated at all.

The second is that the intention is ultimately transformative, rather than reactionary – there is a recognition that transformation is necessary to move towards ‘better’ pathways, just that this can’t be sought ‘head on’.

6. Community is strategic

The science, wisdom and practice all point towards working cosmolocally – both cultivating community hyperlocally in practical projects, and nationally/trans-nationally/globally networking to share intelligence and resources.

This provides a strategic buffer against authoritarianism and ‘separation’, offering the opportunity for people to have a felt sense of connection to counter the propaganda that seeks to foster rivalrous division.

Working cosmolocally also offers the chance to re-root our ontology in relationship with the land/more-than-human world – an orientation that is much older than the more recent, relatively shallow ‘separation’ orientation – in a way that cannot be achieved through established top-down campaigning approaches. And it offers the opportunity for different ways to emerge that are genuinely suited to peoples’ needs, rather than generalised and suited to a more mobile wealthy class.

Three deep dives

1. Why ‘Deep Disposition’?

This work uses the term ‘Deep Disposition’ to refer to the ‘systems of meaning-making’, the cultural bedrock ‘underneath’ our systems and cultures.

Different terms describe a similar thing, varying depending on field (social science, neuroscience, psychology, political science, complexity science, philosophy, futurism, design etc.) culture (industrial, indigenous, eastern, western etc.) and knowledge tradition (enlightenment, non-enlightenment, animist etc.).

The word ‘narrative’ here works from the theory/assumption that humans generate patterns to navigate a world that is too complex for us to understand. These patterns save us energy and are shareable in a way that supports cooperation. These patterns can be called ‘stories’. Some define us as homo narrans with this in mind.

This work is concerned with how we are determining our relationship to the world around us – our onto-epistemological orientation – and what powers are involved in maintaining it. For us that’s what distinguishes ‘deep disposition’ from ‘narrative’ – but the term is not perfect, and is also used in different ways. There is also some concern (as you’ll see from our interviewees below) about the focus on ‘depth’.

What follows is an imperfect, somewhat rigorous navigation of this complexity, to give a sense of what has gone into the work elsewhere on this site.

Heard in interviews

“I’m appreciating more and more when the meaning-making system is embodied and not just expressed. It’s not just we’re elaborating a story and we’re sharing it with people, but our presence – the way we’re showing up – is the narrative that we want to see.”

“Deep dispositions are grounded in behaviour but with an overarching political framework that is giving a different intention for why that behaviour is important.”

“It’s like an operating system, how people operate based on beliefs and values that have been shaped across generations. We could call it ‘culture and values’.”

“Deep dispositions are deeply related to values and the values associated with social identity at the collective scale e.g. national identity”

“We tend to use ‘dominant narrative’ more than ‘deep disposition’, but feel they are probably interchangeable. We lean towards focusing on ‘systems of meaning-making’ and talk about how much of this is unconscious or in our subconscious.”

“I get a bit worried about anything ‘deep’ because it reminds me of people like Jonathan Haidt. I think people like Haidt basically have a perspective that issues like racism are expressions of these deeply held psycho-cultural dispositions. I just think that’s wrong. It doesn’t explain how voter groups change how they vote at different times”

“The concept of ‘Deep Disposition’ is ontologically mistaken, what matters is superficial – ‘street narrative’ – there’s not something underpinning driving it, not something inner driving something outer. That’s a hangover from enlightenment cause/effect, Freud, and Dawkins’ meme theory.”

Found in research

What seems to be common among efforts addressing our poly-&-metacrisis (or polyculmination and metaconsequences, as some describe it) – which is often described as getting to the ‘roots’, or ‘going upstream’ – is a recognition that there is ‘something’ that exists subconsciously within and between us, shaping the way we think, feel and act.

This is described as something ‘gestalt’ or emergent – different than the sum of its parts – and is referred to variously as the collective unconscious, third entity or egregore, or the substrate. We have referred to it as ‘the bedrock’.

It’s suggested that this ‘something’ is produced within and between us through our experiences of the world. This can be described as our interactions with actants, within an affordance landscape, especially in the third space where we encounter most other people. This is explained by ecological systems theory, embodied cognition, cultural materialism, the Indigenous concept of worlding the world, and distributed cognition.

This experience of the world around us generates priors aka hidden assumptions, and memes and memeplexes (although new science suggests meme theory to be mistaken) that provide navigational ‘shortcuts’ through a reality that is too complex for our limited cognition and metabolism to fully comprehend. These hidden guides can be hard to shift, especially when they are established or enculturated early in our life, as core beliefs, or are central to our way of living – e.g. the assumption that we have a ‘self’ – or have been developed over time through evolution.

This ‘something’, being produced between us, by our experiences and interactions with each other and other actants, is often described as an ecosystem of parts. It is the social soil, narrative ocean or small ‘c’ culture – what is known as an assemblage or rhizome in social science – and is made up of and maintained by cultural values, beliefs, norms, bildungs, habitus, mindsets and social imaginaries – which together might be called our cultural mitochondria.

Depending on how you look at it, this ecosystem is then gathered in a worldview (some would say a worldview is just another component of the ecosystem of parts), forming a cultural hegemony – or ‘common sense’ – that centralised power in society attempts to maintain, usually to that group’s exclusive and narrow benefit.

Much of this culture is developing in an uncontrollable, emergent way, as the actants in the world produce attractors, which over time create path dependencies that steer a culture/assemblage in a particular trajectory(ies). We can think of this as similar to individual habit-forming, where repeated activity in a stable context consolidates into automatic routines that are hard to break.

This hegemony often uses meta narratives that seek to cohere the ruling class’s ideas to legitimate them, for example what is often referred to as neoliberalism, or The American Dream. This can then become locked in tacit futures, or fatalistic expectations of ‘that’s just how it is/has always been/always will be’. Capitalism, only a few hundred years old, has been especially successful at establishing this sense of there being ‘no alternative’.

Power in the current global political economy typically relies on fostering social division to maintain the extractive, exploitative systems it serves. It can do this by seeking to influence micronarratives and mesonarratives, encouraging the development of bespoke realities so that the shared sense and meaning required for communitarian social coordination is denied, replaced instead by peer-group rivalry that distracts people from what is really going on, and makes them distrustful of coming together.

Similarly, by sowing fear, they can take advantage of human psychological phenomena like terror management (under threat, people retreat from larger groups and cling onto comforting beliefs and worldviews) as well as internalised oppression and systems justification, which suggest people can support a hegemony even if it harms them.

Even if an individual member of society experiences a sufficiently severe epistemic threat – i.e. from being exposed to experience that challenged the hegemony’s cultural fallacies – to cause an ontological shock and deterritorialise the hegemony’s grasp, their isolation can make it hard for them to challenge the power.

So… what?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what we call this ‘something’ that exists within and between us, formed through our experience.

It’s a bit like the Blind Men and an Elephant parable – we’re all describing the same thing, using different words and theories depending on which route to it we’ve taken.

For the sake of having to call it something, and based on the recognition that change efforts are too often reacting to surface events with the mistaken expectation that we can control and fundamentally change them with words, we’ve been calling it deep disposition.

But we’ve been challenged on this by complexity science, which suggests this term is ‘ontologically mistaken’ because it implies a degree of discernible vertical causality – i.e. it does not acknowledge that systems are emerging in unknowable, unpredictable ways, and any attempt to claim a ‘root cause’, or anticipate a particular outcome, is inherently flawed – based in the same Enlightenment fallacies of linear control and certainty that elevate messaging as the primary change intervention: reality is dispositional, not causal.

Complexity science also challenges our use of the term ‘narrative’, which it sees as a specific, conscious phenomenon, for which there is no subconscious equivalent. What we are referring to as ‘narrative’ would not be classed as such, instead being called substrate.

This is reflected in – or rather is a reflection of – Indigenous scholarship and practice, which also emphasises non-linearity and practical, reciprocal relationality over distanced cognitive theorising, as well as animism and land-stewardship, and the recognition that changing the narrative alone does not change our neuro-physical habits and addictions.

We may be better off seeing this process as one of seeking to more adequately situate narrative change efforts within an appropriate understanding of the science and situation, as far as that is possible, with humility. Which includes the ‘substrate’ of all the things we’ve mentioned above, and the nature of how systems are behaving now.

What does matter is what we do about this – and what’s been clear in this research is that this ‘something’ in between us can only be responded to through practical, immediate, real-time intervention. Which the next section will expand on.

2. How do you reorient them?

Heard in interviews

“There isn’t some magical formula that you’re going to get… You don’t change people’s minds just by telling them the right stories.”

“The only way to do this work is collectively and in right relationships, with ourselves and with other folks in our environment… Narratives are not universal or global – the world is a place of vast difference and our propensity to want narrative in a box is already missing the boat.”

“We have to have the discipline to practice what we preach - we have to start behaving as though the narratives we want is the narratives we have - it’s through practicing them that we make them reality.”

“We cannot ‘think holistically’, the best we can do is map existing narrative patterns, identifying the ‘actants’ to develop ‘constructors’, about which we can have some degree of knowledge (if people do this thing, there will be this result). This then fractally affects the dispositional thing at scale.”

“In our day-to-day behaviour we are either reinforcing harmful scripts or making space for the narratives we want by behaving in alignment with the narratives we want to see in the world.”

“Individualism / neoliberalism vs Collectivism – but it is not about ‘replacement’, things have to be in balance. We need personal agency and community, we don’t want to completely replace individualism with collectivism. The replacement idea comes from either / or or zero sum narrative framework – which is a result of our conditioning.”

“There are no root causes. Complex systems are dispositional, not causal. The substrate matters – its the environment, which has patterns. Communication is part of this, but the way through is not just a better message.”

“This is tied up to structural, systemic, power relations – doesn’t exist in a vacuum of comms. Our approach is not only something done through comms – but mainstreamed through campaigning, organising, education etc. It’s in the battlefield of culture – in all aspects, and comms is just one part of it.”

“When we talk about shifting, we mean shifting to liberatory social identities, which we define as ‘a social identity that can activate or rally individuals within a group to collective action that is grounded in the values of liberation, collectivism, freedom and justice.’ This identity is rooted in the belief that true freedom is collective and liberation is a shared journey.”

“We don’t talk about ‘shifting’ or ‘changing’, but instead we talk about ‘engaging’ and creating an ‘engagement posture’.”

“We found a way: through meso-narratives – narratives at the community level. We’re all fixated in the meta-narratives: e.g. democracy, human rights that we root our activism in. But then you’re only intervening at media/institutional layer. Our research dictates that these societal meta-narratives are very different to community level ones.”

“Build the scaffolding to focus on shifting micro-narratives to generate micro-nudges at scale with visibility to government.”

“We need to be like a Jazz Band – learning how to riff off each other, we can all show up in our best light. With fluid leadership, learning how to read the room, finding harmony.”

“Funders usually just want someone to tell them there is a solution to the problems they can see which is not class struggle and revolution.”

“We keep telling funders that it’s not strat comms, but there aren’t any examples.”

“Making the case to philanthropy is part of the sick system unfortunately - we should be able to say it’s not going to look like what you think it’s going to look like; you have a picture in your head about what relational infrastructure is and you’re going to have to change the picture.”

Found in research

This is a huge question, for which there are many answers. But there is emerging clarity about what is possible, and a settling recognition that we have to go beyond seeking to influence rational cognition with top-down policy and communication – as our interviewees above suggest.

The recognition that words alone do not shape our world is growing, but it is a struggle for WEIRD cultures who typically favour rationalist, literal, linear, simplistic – ‘informational’ – interpretations of reality.

For a long time, Western cultures have prioritised advocacy and mobilisation, and therefore campaigning, messaging and state-sanctioned forms of protest as change levers. But these levers are being weakened in a time of:

• media capture by corporate and elite interests
• the loss of trust in media, information and public institutions
• growing inequality and social divisions
• the rise of fascist authoritarianism (see the banning the word ‘advocacy’ in the US)
• the criminalising of even the tamest forms of protest – such as reminding Juries of their rights – even in ‘liberal-democratic’ societies.

Indigenous and leading-edge sciences would argue that even if these weren’t the conditions we are in, any attempt to influence people that depends on words alone would be insufficient, given what we understand about how humans sense-make, meaning-make and collaborate – in relationship, in real-life – and the broader relational, entangled nature of complex reality, which resists rational attempts at prediction or control.

Principles and process over outcomes

So, if we cannot control complex adaptive systems, or be certain of any definite outputs as a result of any intervention, what can we do?

Many suggest that we should embrace an emphasis on process over outcomes, and seek agreement around a few guiding principles, e.g.:

1. Focus on the conditions: story emerges through interaction between people and their environments, unless the conditions and interactions change, the story can’t
2. Healing social division is best achieved through building something or navigating a challenge together
3. Understand dominant power: where it lives, what it blocks, where its weak spots are, what it takes to get beyond it.
4. Power will not concede, but small powers are latent in groups who feel it has been taken from them
5. Prepare for events and opportunities by developing ‘anticipatory capacity’ through shared intelligence and strategy.

With this in mind, we can see why operating hyperlocally (ideally cosmolocally) is so often being explored or recommended:

1. It offers the chance to bring people together IRL, offering a way through corrupted media influence and witness their power to build a world that works, a zone that is full of love rather than ‘flooded with shit’.
2. It creates opportunity for healing division, through forging relationships, the facing of shared challenges, and building of different ways together.
3. It offers space for direct experience, over which organisers have some measure of influence, to for example curate conditions that expose or challenge underlying colonial-modern logics and assumptions.
4. That experience – especially when paired with opportunity for awe and experience of the rest of nature – creates cognitive dissonance/stress with the perverse ideologies of individualistic separation that justify and saturate our current systems, incentives and behaviours, providing a ‘crack where the light can get in’.
5. It offers the opportunity for prefigurative ‘rehearsal’ and ‘practicing’ of different ways that offer routes beyond the dominant systems and cultures.

For us then, fostering relationship between organising and media, arts and culture and strategic comms or campaigning work, is key to our route through these times. Weaving the ‘narrative game’ with the ‘ground game’ in a mutually liberatory coordination of strategy and deployment.

What next?

There are multiple frameworks and models that can help us as we go about this. Which we choose will most likely depend on the context and circumstances, remembering that “all models are wrong, but some are useful”.

It will help for us to acknowledge what complex adaptive systems theory shows us about causality, and how other cultures have contended with this.

We might use the living systems framework to plan coordination between efforts, based in analysis using an iceberg model or spheres of systems change to identify the relationships between what is going on, and perhaps also referencing the three system shift levels or organisational culture levels, socio-technical transition theory, or the social change grid.

We might be seeking to wield the power of social impact entertainment, to bring about a just transition, perhaps seeking positive tipping points.

We might look to the petal model to identify where there are opportunities for intervention or system leverage, perhaps thinking of them as third horizon, a third attractor, or in the second of the berkana loops.

A modern scientist might call what we’re trying to do radical deterritorialisation, hoping to seed ante narratives, perhaps using an autonomous design ethos and employing cognitive policy to establish a prefigurative politics; an Indigenous scientist might call it metabolising decay.

All of this will be experimental – and constantly evolving. How we talk about it will be important, to bring people in as collaborators, funders and participants.

Crucially, a lot of it is already happening – we are not talking about reinventing the wheel here – and the things that are happening need more resource, connection and energy. Next we’ll take a quick look at some of those things.

3. What’s already happening?

This next section is a very brief, necessarily incomplete snapshot of some of the activity happening around what we have been calling ‘deep disposition’. See a fuller list – which is still growing – of examples in the Work database.

Separation

There is growing agreement between different fields and cultures that a fundamental ontological reckoning is underway, as a Western-originating but now international belief in reality as based in ‘separability’ is revealed to be mistaken.

Currently this ‘separability’ is explained in a few different ways. In the West, pure individualism is increasingly identified as a major problem, and efforts are being made to replace its propaganda vehicle, the monomyth, with more collectivist formulations. But this individualism is (appropriately) often discussed in isolation, not acknowledging its relationship with e.g. human exceptionalism, or euro-centric patriarchal colonialism. Nor are the relationships between all of these different ideological positions, mythologies, or indeed ‘narratives’, always addressed.

Those from more collectivist Eastern or Southern cultures have a more complex and relational understanding of reality, through concepts like Kapwa in the Philippines, which centres shared humanity and care as core cultural values. These cultures often regard Western individualists as WEIRD – either Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic, or more sharply, as Western Entitled Individualistic Reductive Deluded (Vanessa Andreotti’s articulation).

The latter interpretation is an Indigenous perspective – i.e. from a people who retain a strong relationship with the land. Indigenous perspectives often describe the West, aka ‘the dominant culture’, as diseased, under the power of ‘the hungry ghost’ Wetiko (a ‘malignant egophrenia’), and in denial not just about our entanglement with the wider cosmos, but about the scale and complexity of what we face in confronting and letting go of our delusions.

Relational concepts like Kapwa are living traditions rather than survivals, and they carry their own internal arguments about how colonial history has shaped them — arguments that belong to the people having them, not to us. Wahkohtowin, as Dwayne Donald sets it out, is one articulation of relationship extending beyond the human; it is a Cree concept with its own scholarship and its own context, and we cite it here as that rather than as evidence for a general claim about who has retained what.

(An earlier version of this paragraph characterised connection in the Philippines as “held in a servile interpretation as a result of colonialism”, and stated that more-than-human relationality is “seemingly only” fully retained within Indigenous communities. Both were unsourced characterisations made from outside the traditions described, on a site that names a Filipino collaborator among its interviewees, and the second reproduces a well-worn trope about Indigenous peoples as uniquely close to nature. Removed 2026-07-20. If you were quoted or named in this process and something here misrepresents you, see Rights and corrections.)

This remembering of ‘interbeing’ is aided by Western scholars and scientists, like Iain McGilchrist, and those working in quantum, complexity and new materialist sciences, who are catching up to this understanding to recognise reality as fundamentally complex and relational.

Beyond the monomyth

In the Western cultures, various attempts have been made to influence or get beyond the monomyth, for example using the restoration story framework, evolving it to be more non-linear, communitarian or feminist, as in ring composition or the heroine’s journey.

A lot has been said about the need ‘for a new story’, under the assumption that society runs on a single story that can be changed by reformulating it in media, politics, messaging and arts/culture – it doesn’t.

Beyond this, around the world, other people have been working to resist Wetiko-infected imperialist/colonial powers and the systems they serve for thousands of years. Much of this work is defence and resistance, but also collective healing and forgiveness.

As the terminal design of dominant systems is revealed, and the middle classes suffer the same oppressions as other colonised peoples, there are moves towards bringing this ‘unlearning’ and ‘forgetting’ into the West. GTDF for example see such healing as a necessary step to avoid replicating the harms of the current systems – metabolizing decay to create healthier soil for viable new systems.

There are also a wide range of ‘inner work’ and ‘wayfinding’ efforts in Western countries – although people we spoke to are wary of these being examples of ‘Lotus eating’ or ‘spiritual bypassing’ – i.e. being shallowly appropriative, ignoring the full reality of the situation, the power dynamics, and the harms being caused.

Coming together

There are increasing efforts to develop an ecology of change – with and by people in community either to build alternatives, challenge ruling class narratives by embodying different ones, or resist the violent incursions and control of increasingly-authoritarian powers, using tools like The Movement Ecology Framework, and focusing on building Narrative Power to bring together the ‘ground game’ and ‘narrative game’.

Orgs like NEON, PIRC, Ella Baker Organising and Movement Ecology in the UK are examples of how this is developing, with the Narrative Power Summit in New Orleans gathering US and global practitioners to explore a strategy for solidarity and collective grief.

There are also organisations around the world – such as Dakila in the Philippines, Pop Culture Collab in the US, or Hard Art in the UK, who have been fostering coordination between community organisers, arts and culture, strat comms and political education efforts to either challenge dominant narratives or promote alternatives, acknowledging deeper mindsets (like Frameworks) or cultural values (like Common Cause Foundation). Efforts to provide connective tissue between movements, for example the Nonviolent Global Liberation Community, are also growing.

Degrowth, Solidarity, Wellbeing and Decolonial economics, Energy Democracy/sovereignty, New Democracy and communing movements are oriented towards building significantly different systems and ways, in many cases rooted in a reorientation towards relationality, and are increasingly seeking out cross-discipline coordination.

Culture Hack Labs (Costa Rica), Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (Brazil/Canada) and more locally the Cynefin Institute (Wales) and Dark Matter Labs (London) exemplify organisations who have created tools to scaffold analysis, along with praxes of intervention to support other efforts seeking to respond with adequate acknowledgement of complexity and relationality. Frameworks like The House of Modernity and the accompanying Beyond-reform Space, the Three Faces of Power and The Cynefin Framework are examples of this.

A lot of this might be explained by the growing interest in encouraging ‘paradigm’ or ‘ontological shift’, or at least the recognition that such a trajectory is necessary to secure a liveable world. This is accompanied by the recognition that strategically, the best defence against systems of power that thrive on separation and division, is fostering diverse collaboration and spreading mutual empowerment.

There are no definitive answers on how to do this – because there can’t be – but as the above offers a mere indication of, there are various suggestions, prefigurative experiments, and in some cases desperate retaliations already underway.

Questions we asked

• What ways of knowing do we need to consider?
• What are the ‘knowns’, ‘unknowns’, and ‘unknown unknowns’?
• How do we know if we’ve found the ‘right’ ones? Is there a single proto ‘deep disposition’ that sits under everything?
• What can we learn from people who have/are trying something aligned/similar?
• What else are people calling ‘deep disposition’, and presenting this work as?
• How is this theory / practice showing up across the narrative spectrum?
• How do we hold the tension between immediate efficacy and long-term harm/transformation?
• What will help us identify if research is useful to this project or not?
• How do we navigate differing estimations of our current predicament? (particularly the tension between ‘tweaking’ and ‘transforming’ current systems)
• Is it possible to separate out individual deep dispositions? Is that useful? Does this replicate a tendency to collapse complexity? But can you meaningfully work on deep disposition without creating some kind of boundary?
• How do we identify ‘deep dispositions’? What is the role for polling?

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* Different people use different terms for this: Western, North-Atlantic, Minority World, Colonial-Modern – we’ll use ‘Western’ for the sake of simplicity, acknowledging that our meaning acknowledges and encompasses these others.