This is our attempt to make sense of what surfaced from across the research. The fullest account is in two articles, Getting Deep, Part 1 and Getting Deep, Part 2; below are their main ideas in brief. Please don’t take them as definitive answers – they’re offered as provocations, and we’d love to hear where you think they fall short.
Five coordinates
From Getting Deep, Part 1: five ideas that are helping us orient ourselves in this work.
1. Deep disposition
Stories don’t arrive on neutral ground. They interact with deeper cultural orientations that are continually being formed and reinforced.
A wide range of disciplines and knowledge traditions, each in its own language, invite us to look beneath conscious beliefs and opinions when trying to understand how people make sense of and relate to the world. They aren’t all describing the same thing, but encountering them side by side kept raising the same questions about the deeper patterns that shape relationships and sense-making.
2. Out of our minds
If cognition is embodied, ecological and distributed, the wider conditions shaping our ‘cultural habits’ are vital.
Sense-making emerges, largely unconsciously, through our bodies, our relationships and the environments we inhabit. That helps explain why deep dispositions are so persistent, and why trying to shift them with communications alone doesn’t tend to work.
3. Cultivation, not conversion
An invitation to focus on growing the contexts where people can inhabit life-affirming deep dispositions, and to inquire more into the conditions of re-orientation.
There isn’t a switch inside us that flips from one deep disposition to another for good; our environments keep influencing us. Three questions have helped orient our practice:
- What ‘deep disposition/s’ might be shaping how we perceive, relate and act in our current contexts?
- What factors might be shaping our cognition – through our bodies, relationships and environments, as well as our minds?
- What other efforts might be initiated or identified to encourage different possibilities beyond those conditions?
4. This is us
None of us stand outside of culture. Stay alive to the deep dispositions we are enacting in our approaches, tools, relationships and practice.
Many of us were born into, and continue to be shaped by, harmful dispositions, so we can end up living them out even through work that seeks to stop and repair harm.
5. “Which deep disposition?”
Live the questions, holding labels lightly.
Our research, interviewees and collaborators repeatedly highlighted one reorientation: away from the deep disposition of separation, towards that of interbeing. We hold that alongside a wariness of looking for a single, silver-bullet focus.
From seeing to enabling
From Getting Deep, Part 2: what taking deep dispositions seriously could mean for practice. Rather than a theory of change, we’ve come to think of this as a theory of practice.
Seeing
How might we perceive the landscape of deep cultural formation?
Deep dispositions are shaped through enculturation – the lifelong, messy process through which people learn, embody, enact and remake their culture: through what we’re told, what we practise in our bodies, how we live together and what we build. Seen this way, teachers, town planners, technologists, architects, parents and many others all help shape the contexts in which particular deep dispositions become prevalent.
Doing
What might seeing this way mean for action?
We’ve begun to see several overlapping possibilities:
- Supporting the development of contexts where people can experience different deep dispositions.
- Bringing a deep disposition lens to existing work.
- Helping people notice deep dispositions in the world around them.
- Exploring unlearning and deconditioning.
Attending
As we act, what happens? What might it help to pay attention to?
- Can this work be of benefit here and now, alongside the deeper cultural effects it might have?
- Can it provide opportunities to embody experience or reshape relationships rather than simply communicating an idea or belief?
- Can it generate opportunities for reflection and learning which can be shared with others?
- What deep dispositions are we living as practitioners through how we’re conceiving and doing the work?
- What holds the current contexts in place, and who does that serve?
Gathering
How might different experiments be organised so patterns become visible across contexts?
No single intervention will ‘shift’ a deep disposition, but that’s no excuse for paralysis. A portfolio of real-world inquiries – one place with many practices, one practice in many places, one deep disposition across many practices, or different scales and timescales – could help show what’s particular to a place or practice and what recurs across very different contexts.
Enabling
What conditions might enable this work?
Practitioners told us again and again how vital infrastructure is: the relational infrastructure that builds support, the learning infrastructure that helps the work evolve, the physical infrastructure that makes it possible, and the way the work is financed and governed. Because deep dispositions are reinforced through relationships, institutions and economic arrangements, how this infrastructure is designed and held really matters.