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

An ongoing relationship with a person, team or collective, usually over several months.

Strategic accompaniment is for when what you can see is not enough to explain what is happening. The strategy may be sound, but something keeps getting in the way of acting on it. A pattern repeats across different people or projects. A consequential decision exceeds the information or processes you usually rely on. Or the conditions around you are changing faster than you, your organization or community know how to metabolize.

Much of this work is what we call reading the river: learning to notice what a system is signalling before it becomes obvious or tangible. Where is there energy or resistance? What keeps repeating? What is disappearing, emerging or asking for attention? What is being communicated through conflict, the body, the informal life of an organization, or the wider ecology it is part of?

We accompany individuals, teams, boards and collectives through their most alive questions and consequential moments, and we curate cohorts around a shared inquiry. We create the conditions to shift perspective, deepen relational and strategic capacities, and become more attuned to what lives at the edges of attention. Our role is not to become the expert interpreter of your system, but to strengthen your capacity to read your own waters, make meaning together and act with greater discernment.

Our practice is itself an ecotone: living systems frameworks, somatic practice, systemic risk and signal reading, process-oriented psychology, and the many skills in our repertoire including the lived experience of building and running organizations, collectives, residencies and teams. These come into contact to create new possibilities for how you perceive, relate and act.

Notice, read, discern.

Strategic design

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

Strategic design is for when something needs to happen, but the known formats just don’t fit. You may be entering contested terrain, moving through a significant transition, or creating a strategy or experience that asks people to see, relate and act differently.

This is systems artistry in practical form. We begin with your specific inquiry and approach each intervention as a canvas rather than a blueprint. Much of the craft is in the container: enough structure early that you have solid ground to enter the unknown, and a deliberate loosening as the process matures, so that what happens becomes increasingly yours.

The design - and your practice within it - is iterative: make a mark, notice what happens, then make a new move. The process sharpens your complexity capacities, building your agility to move fluidly between paradigms and work with what you cannot know in advance.

We can hand the design over or hold and host it with you, usually over three to nine months, including preparation and the often under-invested sense-making and integration afterwards.

This might take the form of conscious closures, gatherings holding difficult material, immersions and rites of passage and/or Artefacts in commissioned form by giving that which surfaced in a process a form or shape in which to travel out into the world.

Compose, intervene, iterate.

Strategic un-learning

Courses, cohorts and immersions, from multi-day intensives to programmes unfolding across a year.

This is our pedagogic approach for when the problem is not a lack of information: 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.

Un-learning is not about discarding what you know. For us, it is learning to notice the habits of perception, certainty and action and loosening their grip enough for something else to become possible.

We don’t teach complexity as content. We create conditions in which you can practice being in complexity. Our pedagogy is ecotonic. We bring different realities, ways of knowing and forms of intelligence into contact without needing them to resolve into a single answer. In fact, difference, uncertainty, conflict, not-knowing, are not subjects; they become material you learn with and through. What happens in and between us is part of the learning, and the cohort itself becomes part of the curriculum.

This can be uncomfortable by design: becoming capable of something new often means becoming less certain of how you already know. We build containers strong enough to hold that threshold, and spacious enough for experimentation, relationship and new ways of knowing to emerge.

We work with organizations and their teams, networks and their members, and funders for the ecosystems they resource. The larger purpose is to develop people capable of meeting conditions for which we were not educated.

Practice, loosen, become.

Some of the people we have worked with together include ~

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