Holding it all lightly…hugging our dreams tightly — scaling ‘rightly?’
Note: Substantively edited & updated September 2026
This article has been through many iterations, exploring what we’ve been discovering…a deepening reckoning in a spirit of ongoing inquiry. We reference several additional articles and links that peel back more layers.
There is still much debate and controversy — push and pull — on the subject of scaling.
Discerning how scale matters…matters a whole lot! And the underlying assumptions underlying and driving scale matter even more.
Many vehemently maintain that scaling up is [still] essential to gain enough impact, given the magnitude and complexity of problems on a planet with over eight billion people.
Hmm…
🔻 What kind of impacts are being accelerated? What is the real impact of impact?
🔻 What do we mean by impact?
The language commonly used, expected and accepted is not neutral. Impact insidiously reinforces a paradigm of domination. We question the exertion of force that isn’t just implied, but enacted as if necessary and normal.
🔻 What are the roles, rights and responsibilities [duties of care] regarding the ways we approach impact, to seemingly solve complex systemic problems…as defined?
🔻 Who is ‘we?’
There are various ways to understand and approach scale…
Some might align with living system principles.
Many, if not most, will push us and are pushing us further out of livable bounds and healthy relational proportion — with ingrained domination-oppression colonizing patterns that hasten and [still] allow human suffering, planetary harms and overshoot, degradation, destabilization and the degeneration of life.
When we dig deeper, we understand that there are healthier ways that can flow, letting go of misguided efforts — the ‘drive’ to influence and ‘achieve’ scale that is life-diminishing and damaging. Commonly accepted practices that push reproducibility violate the spirit of life.
We are exploring the terms right scaling, scaling out, scaling deep and scaling up, in a spirit of inquiry. Increasingly we are questioning and challenging all the ways that scaling are mandated, advocated and pursued.
Yes…scale matters.
Hmm.
Several papers on scale reflect on recent practice challenge some conventions and propose alternatives that (cl)aim to align with life-affirming patterns.
Ongoing, open-ended inquiry underlie our commons-based unstitutional ethos and collaboration underway in various places and spaces around the world.
Perspectives and models provisionally offered might be adapted (trans)contextually, with potential to work synergistically with a wide range of processes — ways of being.
They articulate more holistic living system ways to think about and approach scale:
🔻 Offering conceptual grounding and research
🔻 Advocating multidimensional ways to understand scale and its interconnections…
🔻 How right scaling might guide efforts
🔻 How deep scaling — undervalued and underfunded —attends to the relational connective tissue vital to allow and support deepening healthy roots
These aren’t presented as binary either-or views of scale. They do call for serious reframing and mindful discernment.
They might help us consciously discern patterns— understanding what might be needed, what to let go of and why.
As we continue to reflect, we gotta keep asking and challenging, who are making these discernments, on what basis, on whose behalf and whose needs and interests are really being served?
Tatiana Fraser of Systems Sanctuary shines a spotlight on The Art of Deep Scaling:
“Endless growth is not sustainable and our urgency to try to fix the problem and seek solutions may be part of the crisis we are in. One unintended consequence of this has been that another type of scale has been devalued and as a result, under-resourced. It’s a scale that values the slow steady work of deepening relationships. It recognizes the significance of context, building connections that bridge diverse communities and it prioritizes inner work and healing as integral components of the scaling process. We call this type of scale ‘Scaling Deep’ and we believe that adequately supporting it, and funding it, holds the greatest potential for long lasting systemic change.”
Ingrid Burkett and Joanne McNeil (The Good Shift / formerly Griffiths Centre for Systems Innovation) look across the dimensions of scaling up, scaling deep, scaling out, and scaling big, with Everyday Patterns for Shifting Systems: Right Scaling. They consider what it might take to embed new patterns across systems, structures, practices, spaces and interactions, behaviours, mindsets and values. (Right Scaling is one of seven patterns covered in the series.)
“Right scaling is about disrupting our conventional ideas about scale and impact. It is about bringing together what is conventionally understood as big and little scale; it is about being able to work with the particular and the general at the same time. Right scaling refers to ways of working that help us to connect lived realities with decision-making that occurs about, but often away from those realities. It is about understanding scale at human and systems infrastructure level as equally important AND different. Right scaling means working within systems in ways that let us move more fluidly between big and small, wide and deep, recognise the connections between them and appreciate the different lenses they provide to our understanding of wellbeing.”
Reductionist cookie-cutter replication of strategies and solutions invariably perpetuate the same patterns that created the overlapping systemic meta-poly-perma manifestations we are facing.
In contrast, alternatives originating locally — honouring and restoring Indigeneity to place — might be adapted, shared and potentially applied more widely, aligning with life-affirming regenerative patterns.
We use the term ‘spawning’ to reflect a healthier evolutionary pattern than the typical scaling out and up that is pushed and driven.
Observing the patterns and lessons learned, there are many ways to scale deep and ripple out, attuning to natural laws and principles. Local, bioregioning regeneration aims to attune accordingly. Collaborative living lab initiatives undertaken in the spirit of discovering together, can potentially support these kinds of efforts.
Throwing funds, resources and energy at shiny big bang interventions and projects chronically over-control, over-specify, over-promise and under-deliver, with negative ongoing and downstream consequences. What is truly transformational and regenerative cannot be generated and produced, yet what is expected, promoted and sold reinforces the fiction. Deep subject.
When context-based and place-sourced living system work is allowed to flow freely without intermediaries functioning like tollbooths, patterns might attune with the spirit of life.
Collaborative community initiatives and ventures — as living labs — can begin anywhere. As this work evolves it can spawn. Experimentation and co-learning that allows meaningful relational qualitative experience to flow freely can potentially spawn in a variety of multi-dimensional ways, locally and beyond— glocal.
The obsession with reductionist quantitative measures and metrics, based on flawed logics, routinely ignores, dismisses and cuts out huge swathes of humanity and living reality…normalizing dimensionally compressed perspectives of what counts, matters or has value. More on this farther down.
Local [living lab] initiatives can become natural ways of living, working and being in right relationship to place, one another and all life. As this important work takes root, we understand that these are not really discrete projects as conventionally defined, compartmentalized and decontextualized from whole ecologies of everyday life.
Efforts might begin on the ground as focused local, bioregional, rural, urban, neighbourhood and/or community initiatives.
Some initiatives might emanate from overarching theme-based social systemic issues. They might spawn…rippling out anywhere in the world — in grounded ways, that support communities, people and place.
Some local and global work might also flow in parallel. Learnings can cross pollinate in iterative, organic ways.
Learning through collaborative partnership — participatory action research, transcontextual insights, and storytelling — can potentially be shared and adapted to other local efforts. As experience deepens, we might be better equipped to address systemic social, environmental and economic needs and challenges within and across contexts. What begins as localized grass-roots might allow field conditions conducive for transformative phase shifts to birth.
Maybe. We are unapologetically holding our perspectives lightly…saying “maybe,” often…The hedging reflects ongoing reckoning about patterns that so easily re-ensnare and the critical care…attending to how we humbly reflect and dance at every turn…not making assumptions, not becoming overly attached to scaffolding, frameworks and ideas and not presuming, claiming or occupying intermediary roles or interventions.
As we work directly in relational ways, tending real lived experienced realities based on local needs, cultures, knowledge, Indigenous wisdom traditions and gifts differing, these might flow as ever-widening, rippling effects. The term glocal might meaningfully come to life. Maybe…
Our updated article, Resonating with Regenerative — the force is life, explores ovelapping recurring themes.
🔻 How might we unblock portals, allowing deeper and wider life-affirming rippling effects or impact to flow…meaningfully nurtured and embedded in daily life.
As an unfolding discovery, living the questions, we’re taking care not to leap to assumptions or extrapolate without honouring important cultural, ecological and socioeconomic differences that call for direct sovereignty and agency to choose and discern with grounded variations and alternatives.
Daniel Christian Wahl explores the dilemma and overreach of scale in his ongoing work, as described in this article: Nurturing vital diversity & resilience: Scaling out, rather than scaling-up!
“Many regenerative solutions will no longer be regenerative if they are simply scaled up into a mega-project or replicated in a cut & paste (cookie cutter) fashion. Such expansionist approaches tend to lose touch with the necessity for solutions to be born out of the cultural and ecological uniqueness of a place — its people and its bioregion. We can learn from the patterns of natural systems how to design as nature, create place-sourced solutions and create conditions conducive to life.”
🔻 Can the sharing of stories and (trans)contextual insights help us collectively gain wisdom and consider what might be applied more widely — in the right ways…inspired by the right reasons?
🔻And we gotta keep asking…“who’s we?”
Our article, Humanity’s Soul: Life or Growth?… builds from The Great Simplification Episode with Nate Hagens and Gaya Herrington. They discuss the trajectory from The Club of Rome Limits to Growth findings spearheaded by Donella Meadows over 50 years ago. With ongoing climate conditions, they track the real and patterned effects of unlimited (material) growth on a finite planet.
And here we are, still fast-tracking along a degenerative trajectory, despite decades of research and learning…
Yup. Scale seriously matters…
Perhaps people are increasingly pushing back, as imperatives for sensible scale, valuing the right things — (slowly) sink in. The expression, “Better late than never”…more prescient than ever!
It is no surprise that E.F. Schumacher’s books are also making a comeback — Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People matter. Schumacher Centre for New Economics commissioned Small is Beautiful…revisited 50 Years Later, a 162 page study guide, published in 2026.
🔻 What will it take to stop myopically scaling up businesses and ventures, maintaining the illusion that bigger is better?
Wrong scaling that delivers runaway damaging impact, is bankrupt of meaningful value.
Dunbar’s Number, based on continuing research which began in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, suggests that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. While we might debate the number, varying somewhat with context, conditions and cultures, the vital importance of tending quality relationships holds true. As we rethink scale across all domains of society and human endeavour, we continue to look through a relational living system lens. We’re wise to reject the ways that mega corporations, mega projects and densely populated cities with poor living environments create conditions that inhibit and erode health and healthy social cohesion — in essence, conditions that are not conducive to the spirit of life.
In this 2022 yarn, Surviving at Scale, Tyson Yunaporta and Robin Dunbar explore the intersections of Dunbar’s Number, Indigenous Knowledge and wisdom traditions, evolutionary psychology, healthy relational networking and how deep layers of relationship [pillars of friendship,] bonds of trust and unlikely connections of belonging are crucial to understand and pattern the multiplier effects of small scale communities and co-creatively developing co-intelligence. Note how their conversation lands with the need to invest in relational imaginal emergent processes. They underscore the need to let go of conventional short term measures and pressures that invariably miss the whole point.
Hmm. We also continue to question the unrelenting drive to quantify and qualify through research and criteria that invariably cannot reflect full, messy living realities. We question the proliferation of intermediary functions and layers, the mountains of work that continue to serve the voracious industrial complex.
Work product and publications continue to churn out at scale. Meanwhile degenerative patterns persist at scale. Hmm.
“It is [still] no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
Having tipped the scales, in so many ways — at this point, we’re all late adopters.
Right scaling in right relationship with one another and a living planet, allowing conditions that might foster flourishing, is ongoing [un]learning for all.
We continue to excavate pervasive patterns of rightness, wrongness, righteousness, control and more in these three articles, with recurring themes:
🔻 Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough’
🔻 Holding the Tension of Less is More
In a sub-chapter of his book, Designing Regenerative Cultures - Sensitivity to scale, uniqueness of place and local culture, Daniel Christian Wahl also challenges proportional perspectives of scale:
…“We need to co-create diverse models for systemic solutions at a local and regional scale. Some of them will inform through their successes and others through their failures. Repetitive failure and experimentation at a small scale can help us to learn faster. … The response time and cycles of transformative innovation can be faster at the local scale. If you want to effectively adapt to and influence economic, social, cultural and environmental change, start with small-scale experiments that give you quick feedback as to what works and what doesn’t. Deeper questioning into the underlying real or perceived needs that make us identify and frame the ‘problem’ in the first place might lead us to discover that we are treating symptoms rather than causes. …”
Hmm. Outdated, misguided, overreaching and questionable theories and relentless theorizing and modelling about growth, change, transformation and more, driven by ingrained reductionist degenerative dysfunctional norms imperil the trajectory of civilization — with devastating consequences. The modern competitive consumer-driven Industrial Age that mechanized scale is rooted in colonizing domination-oppression patterns, accepted as normal.
Institutionalized systemic patterns of modernity* perpetuate widely adopted societal myths that have hard-wired neurobiology — manifesting as individualism, entitlements, dominion over nature, win-lose competition, cultural supremacy and hierarchical ranking. While separability is an illusion…externalization, extraction and exploitation…the experience of separateness, the past and ongoing harms and trauma are very real. Bypassing and skipping over the violence and pain experienced, reflects the same patterns that created, condone and exacerbate this existential soup. *Vanessa Andreotti’s work and research on modernity calling for deep embodied practice, is referenced across several of our articles.
The drive to scale up is a function of driving dominator patterns. And many well-intentioned initiatives [still] blatantly and invisibly manifest forms of mastery and control.
A flawed neoclassical monocapital economic model drives behaviour, maintaining runaway patterns on steroids. Our updated article, Shifting Economics for ‘Societal Value’…deeper shifts…reframing ‘value,’ a rolling work-in-progress, drills down further. It references the work of many who are trying to support needed shifts and raises many lingering uncomfortable questions.
Disconnectedness from interdependent, nested living processes integral to life, escalates degeneration — a disservice to humanity and a living planet and failing to attune with a larger cosmos and consciousness beyond, which nests all.
🔻 When will the lessons of history and hindsight — a very long arc of recursive human civilization patterns spanning hundreds of years — teach us to become and stay deeply humble — at every twist and turn?
A deeper reckoning is beckoning…for crucial ‘work’ that might remove blinders and blockages…allowing the trajectory to shift…
Breaking from degenerative patterns is essential for life!
In this Regeneration Rising Podcast, Nisha Mary Poulose and Graham Boyd discuss a regenerative economy. Graham explores the relationships between regeneration, capitalism, business and economics, and proposes enabling, adaptive scaffolding to support societal shifts. He uncovers some myths about companies — the legal aspects — and connects all this to apartheid, freedoms and democracy. He focuses on regeneration — connecting consciousness and the meaning he attributes to a conscious company — related to intelligence and regenerative conditions conducive to life…
🔻 Can interdependent mutually invested ventures with common[s] purpose at the nested interdependent ecosystem layers potentially deepen resilient relational regenerative roots — what many Indigenous cultures and ancestral wisdom traditions have inherently understood?
🔻 [How] might enabling contextual conditions support the difficult shift from degenerative and fragile realities of conventional Horizon 1 and 2, to the aspirational regenerative Horizon 3?
Many of our commonly used frameworks, models and maps and the proliferation of new ones, keep us stuck in recursive mechanistic cycles that maintain an illusion of transition while impeding transformative phase shifts.
Reminded yet again that the map is not the living terrain. The Three Horizons Framework is just one example. Despite good intentions, the model is often used in ways that insidiously maintain the status quo, impeding the realization of Horizon 3 with a flat trajectory and distorted projection of horizon as a ‘where’…a direction of travel…an elusive future place that sits on a distant, moving horizon. Recursive dominator patterns doubling down with pressures to be practical and realistic, reinforce the repeat-rewind tactics that compress efforts to comply with linear mechanistic performative criteria and reductionist impact measures that don’t and can’t reflect whole living realities or ecologies. We’ve been calling this a transitional treadmill. The Three Horizons “remains perpetually in the future, controlled by existing predatory power structures and in essence, flattens the rich, contested landscape of social change into a two-dimensional graph.” Also see Map (Territory Confusion) to better appreciate how this pattern applies broadly.
In this article, another excerpted subchapter from his book, Daniel Christian Wahl elaborates on Scale-linking, salutogenic design for resilience.
…“How do we design for resilience at the scale of our communities and bioregions, as well as nationally and globally?”…
…“Salutogenic design aims to facilitate the emergence of health at and across all scales of the whole. It recognizes the inextricable link between human, ecosystem and planetary health. Rather than primarily focusing on the relief of symptoms of disease or ill-health, this approach tries to promote positive health and a flourishing of the whole.”
In other words, the aim of salutogenic design is to support healthy individuals in healthy communities acting responsibly in healthy societies to nurture and maintain healthy ecosystem functioning as the basis for healthy bioregions and ultimately a healthy biosphere. Scale-linking, salutogenic design aims to create resilient and regenerative systems at and across all scales.”
In September 2024, The Great Simplification episode — Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health with Nate Hagens, Daniel Christian Wahl pulls some threads together, advocating:
🔻 Deepening regenerative ways of living, working and being as a collective quest
🔻 Grounding and anchoring simplification aligned with contexts and place — in kinship — right-scaling and living into ways that are conducive to life — NOW.
🔻 Bioregioning, rooted in our inherent Indigeneity and diverse cultures to potentially heal relationships with place — aligning with the essence of life.
Caution. We’re mindful that ‘regenerative design’ and ‘bioregioning’ initiatives can also insidiously and invisibly slide into settler patterns. Well-intentioned (benevolent) efforts to lead, design, drive and orchestrate co-ordinated movements easily shapeshift, adopting many of the same patterns with expert extrapolative models based on authoritative knowing. Eager to influence and support change and a sense of urgency keeps many of us tethered, complicit and compliant. Deep subject!
Really living the questions and yielding to the (real) tension of uncertainty…of not definitively knowing and not prescribing blueprints…is the deeper positional orientation that might allow real transformative phase shifts to break through.
Pervasive reductionist binary solutionism exacerbate[d] the entangled meta-poly-perma manifestations we face. Myths of separability, distorted sense of self, entitlements and progress— underlie wide and deep dominator, subsumption and othering patterns. The persistent drive to scale is rationalized in myriad ways…by those who believe their expertise, experience [and inner/consciousness development] best position them to advocate, discern and prescribe how to scale the right things in the right ways, to tackle the scale of problems, drive change and also outcompete the bad guys.
🔻 Are we ready to really face the escalating domino effects of degenerative decline?
🔻 Can we let go of cyclical win-lose patterns and dynamics that bind us to scarcity perspectives?
🔻 Can we foster conditions that might uncover and unblock portals?
🔻How might we uncover direct relational ways for local interdependent ecosystem layer regeneration?
🔻 Can we honour many ways of knowing — ancestral wisdom and science and enabling (not driving) technology?
🔻 [How] can we inspire, allow and nourish deep local work, ongoing discovering and mindful activation, with enabling funding flows that don’t compromise and co-opt?
🔻And who is “we?”
Scale — deep and right scaling and scale-linking — a deep subject that integrally interconnects across many overlapping systemic challenges.
Published on behalf of the Community-Led Innovation Partnership (CLIP), this January 2025 transdisciplinary research report Reimagining Scaling, drills down further into the nuances of scaling, aiming to move beyond conventional mechanistic patterns. Documenting collaborative initiatives, this paper offers insights, combining Global South and Global North experience with modern and Indigenous knowledge:
… “The five case studies demonstrate that local innovators prioritise community cohesion, cultural integrity, and relational scaling over expansion or profit-driven growth. The research provides a foundation for reshaping scaling approaches to emphasise context, collaboration, and long-term community empowerment, ultimately contributing to a more localised, equitable humanitarian sector.”…
Tatiana Fraser of Systems Sanctuary elaborates further on adaptive living pathways and patterns towards scaling deep in an April 2025 article, What are the Pathways to Scale When We Start from Depth? — drawing from ongoing research and practice:
…”And when we scale deep, we open up entirely different pathways for transformation — and different pathways to scale.
These pathways are less visible, harder to measure, and often unrecognized in traditional change frameworks. But they are powerful. They’re the ways deep change actually spreads — through trust, through culture, through nonlinear shifts that can’t be captured by logic models.”…
Pause + Effect and their five-week Reimagining Research cohort challenge the extractive roots of scale as poignantly articulated in their overview, “Why are we so obsessed with scaling over depth?”
… “The obsession to scale is rooted in extractive logics . . . It’s important to understand how scaling and replication became such significant indicators of impact and success. This phenomenon didn’t emerge in a vacuum but is the product of cultural norms that prioritize ownership and urgency. We assume that knowledge can be lifted out of context, replicated endlessly, and applied everywhere — without loss, without consent, without consequence.”…
Tatiana Fraser continues to research and deepen the inquiry on scaling deep. These 2025 publications elaborate on learnings underway:
🔻 The Art of Scaling Deep Research in Summary
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🔻 Pathways to Scale from the Deep
🔻 Scaling Deep: Stories from the field
🔻 Scaling Deep: Shifting Power and Redefining Success
Perhaps we can nurture grounded local ways …honouring and restoring (not misappropriating) what many Indigenous cultures embody — what many of us lost or never experienced…
Falling back in love with all life and place is (becomes) an integrative heart-centred spiritual wholesome every day experience. It kinda defies labels and branding that (still) maintain shiny consumerist, commoditizing patterns and bubbles.
Widening our contextual lens? Embracing wholesomeness? Reframing our notions about intelligence?
Most of the references included here (and in many of our articles) convey a need to co-sense and co-learn. Our article, Left? Right? Whole? — a whole lotta ways toward wholeness, dives deeply into left and right brain [whole being] capacities with major implications.
🔻 Peeling back more layers [as explored in additional articles] how might we really dance with systems, complexity, paradox, polarities, monsters and our inherent messy humanness?
As we rethink what we mean by scale, we must seriously challenge our fixation on measuring, evaluating and proving impact. Human interventions to drive and generate, the focus on production and scale and the underlying dominator structure are incongruent with the conditions essential for healthy regeneration. These conditions emanate from a fundamentally different and alternative law — the law of the spirit of life. Very deep subject!
Living in the world as it is, we continue to objectify and diminish life. Reflecting on the nestedness of all life and living processes as integrally related through ground resonance and flows…a much deeper meta-relational reckoning is still beckoning.
Stopping what must stop! How might we put ‘teeth’ into our work, through discontinuity and allowing ground conditions that might become regenerative?
Despite the conceptual framing and aspirations for regeneration, we don’t address the deeper structures that continue to block it.
Helen Holden Slottje has been working and researching diligently over the past decade, building from her experience keeping fracking out of New York State, when it was widely considered an impossible undertaking. Drilling down and looking through a wide transdisciplinary lens, well beyond her legal role, she has been developing a Codex or lexicon to help diagnose recursive domination entrapment patterns, that typically go undetected and/or are misinterpreted. We’ve been working together, deepening our understanding and exploring ways to bring framing and scaffolding forward.
Helen’s work aligns with the paradoxical dance we’ve playfully dubbed, “wisdom with teeth” and “readiness for the messiness,” alternatives that don’t succumb to The Dimensional Reduction Engine. We’ve been liberally sprinkling links and excerpts illustrating slivers across several of our updated articles. We don’t need to dive into the full breadth and depth of her integrative work to appreciate its significance. As we dig in, can’t unsee what we now see or unknow what we now understand with sharper clarity, offering teeth to what we’ve long sensed. With a scan of the material, some entries will relate and resonate more readily. As we let the words wash over us, we can feel their compelling insights down to our bones and into our souls.
Note: Regarding diagnostic, decode and decipher…these terms typically push ways of measuring, defining and perceiving that extract, dismiss and invisibilize realities. Subject-object split programming pushes us to function as if we’re neutral observers…as if we are not embedded in the systems we (cl)aim to observe, analyze and understand. Accepting a partial witnessing orientation, we use these terms to invite deeper inquiry and discernment…to shed light. We can’t unsee what we now see or unknow what we now know with sharper clarity and deeper understanding. And better scanning and seeing…and deeper understanding don’t deliver what we’ve been programmed to produce with our insights.
Helen’s entries on Scaling and Measurement Cut are foundational.
A snippet..,
The Scalarization: GDP measures economic activity. What GDP cannot measure — ecological integrity, communal bonds, intergenerational wellbeing — gets structurally excluded from “the economy.” The generating function’s epistemology produces the world it claims to describe. A dying planet registers as growth.
Communities become “engagement statistics.” Healing becomes “risk reduction percentages.” Flourishing becomes “ROI calculations.” Justice becomes “case disposition rates.” Learning becomes “test scores.” Each measurement does not merely describe. Each measurement amputates. The dimensions where the Temperatur actually forms — the unmeasured, the simultaneous, the participatory — get sliced away in the production of what can be counted.
At the individual level: cognition colonized by what-counts thinking. The question “How do I measure success?” has already installed the instrument. The felt sense of rightness, the body’s knowing, the quality that cannot be quantified — all rendered nonexistent by the frame that demands metrics.
At the institutional level: organizations optimize for what their instruments can detect. A university measures publications and rankings.”…
These hard practical truths are uncomfortable and hard to face. Avoiding or bypassing them and imposing familiar or new practices with [updated] quantitative and qualitative measures and metrics maintain the transitional treadmill, re-ensnared by the latest illusion of progress or movement.
The deeper reckoning that is beckoning calls upon us to excavate down to deep-rooted patterns, rotted roots and wider truths…if we are serious about ground conditions that might allow the birth of life-affirming transformative phase shift.
Another snippet from the entry on measurement cuts:
… “The cessation demand: stop requiring the measurement cut as the condition for knowing, valuing, or encountering. Not reform the cut — not make the measurement more sensitive, more contextual, more relational. Stop. The zarte Empirie — the delicate empiricism that makes itself identical with its object — is not a better measurement. It is the dissolution of the instrument that requires measurement as the condition for knowing. The living unity’s simultaneous operation is not a more sophisticated kind of data. It is the default that runs when the cut stops.”…
We are all complicit to varying degrees, imprinted by many ingrained conventions…accustomed to modern conveniences and comforts.
As we reflect on decades of work, initiatives, research, publications, training, cohorts, conferences and convenings of all kinds across all domains, sectors and disciplines, reflecting knowledge, wisdom, strategies, policies, methodologies, tools and more, it becomes painfully evident that we live in a world that allows, ranks, privileges, recognizes and rewards all this…
…as work product continuing to feed the system, within its pre-determined structural parameters and constraints…without changing the underlying conditions that might make this work unnecessary. The vast majority of hard work that gains recognition and funding, or struggles to continue, keeps us on a transitional treadmill that doesn’t address the deeper structure.
A dominator configuration continues to function according to its architecture along with terms and conditions that established these patterns long ago.
Meanwhile much work and the movements declared, are still described, promoted, advocated and celebrated as transformative or necessary transition towards transformative shifts.
🔻 What is transforming?
🔻 What are we really regenerating?
🔻 Can we recognize how perpetual transition insidiously upholds the dominant system with its a piori power structure, granting and removing concessions [win/lose pendulum swings] while maintaining structural enclosure.
🔻 And who is ‘we?’
Hmmmm.
Nothing substantively changes if nothing structurally changes.
Positions of righteous certainty easily lull us into traps — ingrained shapeshifting dominator patterns that manifest in myriad forms as “God Says” [morality] “Market Says” and/or “Nature Says.” These reflect Three Faces of indoctrination spanning hundreds of years, conveyed as imperatives that must be abided. They contain and distort truths in ways that lock us into a religious structure and system of domination that is very difficult to see and name. We are feeding a well-established well-defended system that has been normalized, operating as if there is no alternative. Very deep subject that will evoke discomfort and hit nerves. As we reckon with life-diminishing patterns ordained as ‘the way it is,’ perhaps more of us will choose the spirit of life that preceded those three faces of trespass theology and their binding structures that we did not choose.
Note…those who maintain that they hold no religious beliefs might adhere to the ‘religion of no religion.’ Living in the world as it is, we are all influenced [in profound and everyday ways] by theological doctrine that has shaped human civilization — blatantly and invisibly.
While many initiatives might seem to reflect stepping stones in the ‘right direction’ with potential for impact and scale, longstanding patterns linger and shapeshift. There is still a tendency for (m)any of us to prescribe and direct…even as we insist that we aren’t. Transformation and regeneration are not prescriptions or directions of travel. When we avoid facing the anguish of not knowing at this threshold…for all kinds of reasons…we might still be playing our part feeding deep-rooted recursive patterns of dominator systems and structures…
🔻 What happens when we (continue to) allow brands of knowing to direct and indoctrinate?
When we find ourselves zealously fighting and advocating as a force-for-good — that’s a good time to pause [again] and [re-]reflect.
Life and work are nonlinear, messy and filled with uncertainty. However, when we face these truths together, without blame, shame and scapegoating, we might uncover portals and possibilities.
Our article, leaning into uncomfortableness, explores why and how, becoming more comfortable being uncomfortable, together, might break with pervasive patterns that continue to feed a perilous trajectory for our human civilization.
Better to consciously choose [when we have agency to choose] ways to be uncomfortable as we face realities and uncertainty. With gifts differing, unknitting and re-knitting, our work might take many forms.
Everything? Everywhere? All at once? Hmm.
Maybe…with some clear red lines. Maybe no…
There’s lots of doing underway, that is driven by the generator functions of an industrial complex on overdrive that cannot produce transformative functions. Deep subject. More farther down.
Note. For a long time we described ‘and’ as our favourite word…with some caveats. We’ve been muttering “hmm, maybe and no,” more often. Mindful discernment helps us diagnose when the open-ended ‘and’…keeping too many doors open…paradoxically forecloses…closing the most important doors. A staunch both/and orientation keeps us stuck within an overarching architectural context that remains unchanged. Much well-intentioned activity underway in the name of transformative REgenerative impact seems to be feeding transitional treadmills..,.generating recursive patterns of domination that impede real transformative potential. We cannot generate our way to to transformative phase shift and life-affirming REgeneration. The repeat-rewind efforts and interventions to do so, along with aspirations to scale, are impotent.
Our updated article, Happy anding or ending? When to ‘and’…when to ‘end,’ elaborating on the power of ‘and,’ also illuminates a serious dark side.
Caveats! Saying “yes” to (m)any and all ‘ands’ in the name of collegiality and openness to multiple perspectives, lures us into insidious traps. Much both/and thinking and acceptance, lacks crucial discernment. Many promoted impact and regenerative initiatives (cl)aiming to drive transformation along with prescribed transitional blueprints or roadmaps don’t distinguish between perspective and configuration. Without a clear distinction, the power structure and degenerative harm are allowed to continue, unexamined and unabated. The occupying dominator position (configuration) sets context with the arrangement already established for what is allowable and possible.
🔻 Can we recognize the incongruity of cherry-picking, how indiscriminately holding both/and…in a sense, trying to have our cake-and-eat-it-too…avoiding or bypassing the discomfort and spiritual anguish of facing hard truths…continues to uphold a dominator configuration?
Can’t unsee what we see or unknow what we know. When we know better, humbly accepting our positionality as partial witnesses, we might relax a bit regarding what we don’t know, can’t know…what is always beyond our knowing. We might uncover and co-discover a deeper more profound re-orienting of scale and more — for the sake of humanity and the living planet we all call home, while acknowledging the unknown mysteries of the greater cosmos and consciousness beyond.
While some of the research and practice underway, challenging how we approach scale, might seem encouraging, unrelenting pressures to prove value and scalable impact tell a story with deeper rotted roots.
Living in the world as it [still] is and straddling between worlds, these kinds of efforts struggle to measure up according to dominator system rules and measuring sticks to perform against tick box funding criteria that continue to limit and compress creative expression of life spirit — predefining the field and foreclosing on the flow of possibilities. Hmm…
Life-affirming ways of living, working and being cannot be quantified or asset classified — counted, measured, priced or framed. And new metrics, designed and promoted to evaluate against quantitative and qualitative criteria that specify the ROI on nature-based regenerative and restorative initiatives in order to qualify for investment and funding…keep us entrapped within the same dominator configuration, performing and complying with intermediary tollbooth functions that uphold it. Transformative functions are subsumed and prevented.
Transformative phase shift cannot be generated and produced. Financialization maintains reductionism. Complex, messy nonlinear flows and spirit of life manifest beyond blueprints, ledgers, spreadsheets and bottom-lines. Good intentions, moral imperatives, brilliant articulations, or sophisticated conceptual designs shapeshift, manifesting the same dominator patterns mastered and accepted as normal and unavoidable for hundreds of years.
Life can’t be planned, mapped and predicted through the same driving dominator patterns that got us into this existential soup. Life is subject to an alternative law. We are entrapped [regularly re-enrolled and re-installed] by a dominator configuration that operates as if there is no alternative. Deep subject!
The transitional treadmill on overdrive, fuelling illusions of power and progress, is, in effect, impotent.
There is much that all of us [ordinary people] might presumably choose to do and be…if and when freed from extractive economics…and the deeper configuration that undergirds it.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, beyond conceptual framing, abstract hypotheticals and conjecture and attuning to what we feel down to our bones and into our souls…we gotta keep asking and addressing…
🔻 What must stop?
Hmm. We’ve been reflecting on the proliferation of statements, articles and papers speaking to capital as a potential lifeforce…continuing to exalt the power of capital as transformative.
🔻 How does the obsession to attract capital flow to scale impact insidiously attribute life and living flow to what doesn’t live at all?
🔻 Are we trying to simulate life, attributing life to capital that is actually dead?
🔻 How are recursive patterns shapeshifting, dressed up in pleasing nature-based metaphors and narratives that sound and feel good, while still entrapped inside the structural co-ordinates of a dominator configuration in cancerous generating overdrive?
🔻Can we see the irony and [potential] hypocrisy of [still] bowing at the alter of capital, which undergirds life-diminishing patterns we [cl]aim to reject?
We ask and invite these kinds of questions openly with compassion, recognizing the difficulties and anguish. The consequences of bypassing and dismissing hard truths keep us spinning in and upholding degenerative cycles that began long ago — that we were born into and did not choose.
The reality — conventionally accepted forecasting in an uncertain, dynamic world doesn’t hold up. It never did. It perpetuates the indoctrination of flawed logics and the illusion of predictability, safety and stability. It is rooted in reductionist measuring sticks that atomize, extracting and using data frozen in time, away from real living contexts. This obsession with measurement decontextualized from real living flows has and continues to cause damaging and violent effects. Artificially slicing and dicing to conform to a ledger dimensionally compresses life, deciding who and what is allowed to count and matter.
🔻 [When] are we ready for that kind of reckoning?
Taking a step back to understand the factors and multitraps undergirding, exacerbating and maintaining a dominator configuration that indoctrinates market-based scaling big imperatives, Helen Holden Slottje forensically unpacks the entanglement with examples. She illustrates the entrapment architecture in: Too Big to Fail, and Hostage Structure, powerful compelling summaries. This might be a good time to pause, reflect and take a very deep breath. Hmmmm.
Note: Many of our ongoing updates include notations about language and terms that are being co-opted. We continue to reflect on and challenge the meaning we intend when using certain terms that are popularized. Sometimes we attempt qualifying notes, clarifying our intent. We are also selectively stripping and replacing certain words that have lost meaning or no longer reflect the deepening reckoning that is widening our eyes and shaking the ground beneath our feet. The propagation of special language signals continuous shapeshifting, with professional intermediary functions insidiously upholding a dominant system of occupation that blocks direct sovereignty of people who don’t and never needed these terms to express the spirit of life.
We don’t doubt the sincerity of people’s intentions. Well-meaning intentions, including ours, allow a dominator configuration that precipitated the need for these terms in the first place — to continue.
That is what humanity has been doing throughout our civilization history.
Living in the world as it is, the felt need to hold onto livelihoods that conform to the enforced legibility of predominant systems, continues to drive decisions and behaviour.
Living between wor[l]ds is damned hard. Emphasizing, chasing and selling scale, overreaching and misleading with illusions of transformation and regeneration feeds a transitional treadmill…allowing degeneration and deadlihoods to keep on rolling.
What might be revealed and enabled when people are really free to engage directly within the contexts of everyday life and work?
When we relate and flow in service to the spirit of life, we allow the ground conditions for life…letting go of what is not ours to control, drive, oversee and scale…
🔻 Can we face that reality with humility, transparency and compassion… with more readiness for the real messiness?
🔻 Retrospective, present-centred, facing one another and forward-facing, can we nourish our relational and co-discovery capacities?
Human exceptionalism has been running amok for a very long time. We humans are not the centre of the universe. We never were!
We are embedded in a long-established configuration that is rigged for its continuation.
Maybe we can choose to stop what fails to serve life…stop the ways we are complicit and compliant…stop feeding transitional treadmills. When field conditions are de-occupied and portals are unblocked, real transformative phase shift might actually break through.
Deep collaboration can flow within real contexts and conditions for life. With eternal discovering, we can deepen our understanding beyond atomized component parts and specialties, not succumbing to totality claim and seriously reframing our notions of intelligence and consciousness.
We might interbecome a whole lot more wise and humble, honouring and allowing collective intelligence…consciousness that is precipitant…transcending ways of seeing that compress and tether us to the quantitative, material elements of people and planet.
“Stereographic Intelligence …is not a better way of seeing.”
Patterns for better understanding might unshackle us from the disciplines, models, methodologies, movements or presumed worldviews that are [still] reinforced and granted eligibility by a pervasive dominating paradigm rooted in dimensional compression.
🔻 Isn’t it time to seriously challenge our notions of scale…refusing mechanistic measurable reproducibility?
🔻 How might we allow healthy adaptive recursive patterns that spawn and flow like waves and frequencies…expressing and regenerating life in all its diversity?
Holding our sense of knowingness, lightly…hugging our dreams tightly….scaling ‘rightly.’
Maybe…
As we continue to face deeper reckoning…
Our updated article, Re-patterning for life-affirming reality vs continuing to ru(i)n the world drills down deeply into recursive dominator patterns, the ways we become blind [again] insidiously feeding the paradigm we [cl]aim to leave behind. Laser sharp lenses can help us diagnose* and re-pattern as we live into an unknowable future, in the present. Note additional reflections on re-patterning.
The following quartet of short articles, published in June and July 2026, reflect our ongoing questions, provocations and discovery:
🔻 the spirit of inquiry 🎧 🎶
🔻 staying with the spirit of inquiry 🎧 🎶
🔻 Transitional Treadmills — how are we (still) feeding patterns of domination? 🎧 🎶
🔻 The True Spirit of Philanthropy does not Reside in Institutions 🎧 🎶
The law of the spirit of life is an alternative configuration. Here all along…hiding in plain sight…we might uncover ways of being that don’t burn out like fire…that can flow, more like water…embracing both.
In light of all this…an overarching question that might inspire and guide us:
🔻 How then, shall we live?
These updated articles also reflect some serious re-orienting, re-configuring, reframing and additional questions we are holding open…precipitating updates to several more articles in the coming days and weeks:
🔻 Why Unstitution is [sort of] agnostic, [somewhat] omni-partial and [mostly] partial witness — a deepening reckoning as we let go of the impossibility of comprehensive total knowing in a world that still upholds human exceptionalism and performativity.
🔻 Building Bridges to Span the Void? How bridging feeds the void and avoids deeper realities — how layers of intermediaries and expert professional roles function like tollbooths, insidiously reinforcing codependence and feeding the industrial complex.
🔻 Why Context is [almost ] Everything — takes a step back, reflecting on the (trans)contextual framing, conditions and structures that are STILL keeping us stuck.
🔻 Resonating with Regenerative — the force is life — reflecting on the essence of regenerative, the contexts and conditions that block and might allow regenerative capacity to flow and many open-ended questions as we witness a proliferation of ‘regenerative’ initiatives in a world gripped by driving degeneration.
*This article was significantly updated again September 2026 reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to experience, witness, listen, assimilate and adapt.
Note: There are several links to ongoing work with Helen Holden Slottje, whose diagnostics shake the ground beneath our feet…when ready to take a harder look.
All our articles include many embedded links with articles and resources that warrant a closer look :-)
Unstitution was birthed as a collective commons and nested ecosystem. We support a wide range of collaborative living lab initiatives. Wading through deep shi(f)t and beneath the artificially constructed divides — sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations, genders and walks-of-life — we’re working on critical systemic challenges. With readiness for the messiness, unblocking life-affirming portals…and beyond dysfunctional polarization — is how we roll.
The links embedded throughout all our articles are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time.
Our regularly updated suite of articles, works-in-progress, are fractal-like glimpses into the unstitutional ethos. They serve as co-catalytic springboards, inspiring deeper inquiry, integrative understanding and meta-relational attunement. They reflect a small sample of the ways we are contributing as partial witnesses. Inspired and nourished by denizens anywhere in the world, we’re living into (re)-patterning principles and spirit — now. These provisionally guide our ongoing collaborative work, honouring and supporting ground and field conditions that might allow transformative phase shift birth.
Qualifying notes
Regarding the extensive use of italics…we recognize that so many words and terms are filtered and interpreted through different lenses. Deep shared understanding is potentially enriched through dialogue — active listening and inquiry.
We experience and witness life and work as intertwined, inter-relational, messy and spiritual, unfolding and dynamic, moving in ebbs and flows. We don’t advocate destination-oriented outcomes or focus, defining a trajectory of travel towards some future state or place. We sometimes still use familiar words like co-navigate, journey and wayfinding. However, these terms and associated practices entrap us in recursive generator/producing functions that maintain human exceptionalism and subject-object observer positionality. Assuming we can objectively and comprehensively scan, map, navigate and achieve a transformative trajectory prevents transformative phase shift. What is described with the term emergent is also captured, as if the process is describable and explainable from the ‘observer’ position. Transformative phase shifts are not explainable through causal logics. “Attraction is the pull of the not yet. Attraction does not point. Attraction draws.” Deep subjects! For a deeper dive, see Twistification.
We love writing…sculpting with words…as an expression of our eternal discovering. In case you’re wondering, none of the articles have been crafted or updated with the aid of AI — yet.
AI, driven by a generating function, primarily serves a dominator configuration. With wide-eyed discernment, and humbly recognizing that we need all kinds of real help, we appreciate engagement with AI consciously trained and challenged as companions-in-inquiry. We elaborate in our article, A Wary Eye on AI and Why: wading through ‘mindfully and playfully.
You can engage with our unstitutional unfolding on LinkedIn, where we are quietly present…witnessing patterns playing out on repeat-rewind. Some posts, comments and inquiry might pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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