What we work with.

The capacities that got us here are not the capacities that will carry us forward.

Here are five faculties modernity has exiled and we are inviting them home. Home into our bodies and our dinner tables. Call them practices, thresholds, apprenticeships, ways of seeing and ways of becoming. We are less interested in ‘solving’ the future than in becoming people capable of meeting it with rigour and reverence.

  • A recipe for the sorrow in our chest: Place a small handful of Cidrón leaves in a cup and pour water just taken off the boil. Cover the cup for eight minutes. Let the smell reach you first and drink warm. 

    Grief is both a skill and a metabolic labour.

    What we have learned is that grief precedes vision. There is a necessary undoing that makes imagination possible. Within loss, within endings, within dying, lies fertile ground. Composting is the slow structural work of breaking down the certainties, the entitlements, the identities, the assumed futures we didn't know we were still carrying. What comes next has rich soil in which to take root

    The heat is part of it. The process takes as long as it takes.

  • A quiver, a tightening, a numbness in the legs, a shimmering at the far edge of the garden. 

    We practice attuning to multiple ways of knowing as both discipline and devotion. Intuition, somatic sensing, ancestral memory, imagination, pattern recognition, are not alternatives to reason but forms of intelligence in their own right. We learn to hear what a system is signalling before it becomes measurable. This is attunement, weak-signal sensing as living data.

    We call it sober foresight. Some futures announce themselves loudly, others arrive as:

    Tree. Wind. Sparrow. Thunder.

    We read the river until, slowly, we remember ourselves river.

  • Cut something from paper without drawing it first. Keep the offcuts. Every culture decides what belongs and every culture leaves something outside.

    Every paradigm produces its exiles: the intuitive, the mystical, the animist, the anomalous, the contradictory, the strange. We are drawn toward what has been dismissed as irrational, impossible, inconvenient because living systems so often reveal their next pattern at the edges.

    What lives at the edges of our systems has insight for re-storying the whole.

  • and Systems Agency

    We call it systems artistry: epistemic dexterity held with epistemic humility, the capacity to move between paradigms and states of consciousness not to arrive at the truest one, but because the space between them is where life, maturation, and the intimacy of real conflict actually happen. We treat intervention as a canvas, not a blueprint. We go to the margins first — the anomaly, the exiled, the shimmer at the edge — because that is where the navigational intelligence for this moment has always lived, discounted by rooms too fused to their own certainty to look there.

    A mark made from this place is a different kind of mark. Made with enough care, it doesn't just land on a system from outside it.

    It sings back.

  • We tend the conditions through which new culture rises.

    We work in the guts and the root systems, and give what surfaces there a shape to hold: song, article, embodied practice, video essay, artifacts crafting sober foresight into form. 

Work With Us.

Strategic Accompaniment

Ongoing relationship with a person, a team, or a collective, over months.

This is the approach for when something keeps reappearing in different forms. For example, when the strategy is clear and nothing moves or the group can name the symptom and not the thing underneath it. Someone is carrying a decision they cannot discuss inside their own organization.

Much of this is reading the river. Attending to what a system is signalling before it becomes measurable, and helping a group learn to read their own water rather than depending on us to read it for them. Sometimes with one person, a leadership team or a board. Sometimes with a cohort we curate, made up of people holding comparable weight in different places.

We bring process-oriented psychology and conflict work, somatic practice, systemic risk reading, and direct experience of running collectives, organizations, residencies and teams.

Strategic design

Designing a specific process, gathering, or transition, with a beginning and an end.

This orientation of our work is for when something needs to happen and the known formats cannot hold it. This is systems artistry in practical form: We design from the specific inquiry as the soil and we relate to each intervention as a canvas rather than a blueprint: make a mark, listen for what answers, move again.

Most of the craft is in the container. Enough structure early that people have solid ground while they do the harder part, and a deliberate loosening of that structure as the process matures, so that what happens becomes increasingly theirs. 

We can either hand the design over or hold it in the room with you. Work usually runs across three to nine months including preparation and the tail afterwards, which is the part most processes underinvest in.

Some of the forms this takes includes conscious closure, gatherings and convenings using process architecture for rooms holding difficult material, Experiential learning design including rites of passage and immersions, and/or Artefacts in commissioned form, which means giving whatever surfaced in a process a shape that can travel beyond the people who were in the room.

Strategic un-learning

This runs as courses, cohorts, and immersions, from a multi-day intensive to a programme staged across a year. We work with organizations and their teams, networks and their members, and funders for the ecosystems they resource.

This is our pedagogic approach for when the problem is not informational: Many can articulate the polycrisis and still work as though better project management would handle it. What this moment asks for is a different relationship with uncertainty, conflict, grief, and complicity. Those capacities are close to the opposite of what most of us were educated into. 

We were rewarded for arriving at the single correct answer and for reaching agreement, and what is required now is holding several layers of a situation at once without collapsing them. Almost nothing in our institutions rewards that, so almost nobody arrives already carrying it. It has to be built deliberately, and it is built with other people.

Which makes these programmes uncomfortable by design. Growing a capacity you do not have involves a period of not having it, and that period feels like something going wrong when it is the only evidence that anything is happening. We say so at the start, and we build containers strong enough to hold people there long enough for it to work.

Some of the people we have worked with together include ~

TerraDentro, Arising Quo, Partners for a New Economy, Coralus, Joseph Rowntree Foundation.