Collaboration — “sweet dreams (and pipe dreams) are made of this”
Note: Substantively edited & updated September 2026
Like several of our articles, this one has been through many iterations. Facing an ever-deepening reckoning, this latest update twists the title, allowing space for the dark underbelly of collaboration. We still appreciate the imaginal of sweet dreams, but we’re ever-mindful and vigilant about pipe dreams…how collaboration is used to serve the dominant system in insidious ways. We attempt to layer in deeper unfolding diagnostics.
People talk about collaborating all the time.
Is there still more talking about it, than actually being collaborative?
There are many:
🔮 Rough starts…
🔮 False starts…
🔮 Gingerly exploring…
🔮 Getting ready…to get ready…to collaborate…
🔮 Examples of…maybe we oughta collaborate…
These are among the recurring patterns that many of us witness and experience…
Awareness of the need to collaborate has increased. Good!
More collaboration is underway. Better!
Maybe…
So is collaboration washing among many looking to out-compete through superficial pseudo collaborating. Not good, yet not surprising, given pervasive patterns that have become normalized…
What we mean by deep collaboration warrants serious and mindful attention.
🎶 Perhaps sweet dreams are made of this…borrowing from a song by Eurythmics and Annie Lennox. And ‘pipe dreams’ are made of this when we expect ‘collaboration,’ however it manifests, to be enough…as long as preordained structures and systems that set the contexts and conditions don’t substantively change. Collaboration is also susceptible to manipulation, a sophistocated instrument of domination.
Peeling back more layers…
Our current and future trajectory as a human civilization is poised and teetering at a critical juncture — facing entangled predicaments across all domains of society. Our ability to survive and potentially flourish — individually and collectively in life, work and as a human family — is kinda hinged on the quality of our interdependent relationships and our capacity for deep collaboration, within and across contexts, as part of the living planet we call home, nested within the greater cosmos beyond.
How to meaningfully collaborate — is harder and more important than ever in a competitive dysfunctionally polarizing world, paradoxically stuck and struggling with the undercurrents of deep shi(f)t…
Cultures and wisdom traditions that embody life-affirming partnering ways of being, honour diversity of perspectives and collaborative participation.
Shifting from ingrained domination-oppression, command-control and dysfunctional competition cycles is not a mechanistic flip-of-a-switch.
This goes way beyond (surface deep) good will and good intentions.
True relational partnership and authentic mutual trust run much deeper.
Hmm…digging a little deeper…
The Inuit people have about 49 different words for snow. Their language — the granular meaning of each of these 49 words, is grounded in very practical needs that guide everyday life and decisions. Their ability to survive and potentially thrive depends on their deep embodied understanding of and relationship with— snow.
…this got us thinking…
The singular English word — collaboration — is quite loaded. We somehow expect that one word to carry a huge load, to convey its meaning, manifestations and potential with clarity.
While many people talk about collaboration and embark on collaborative initiatives with well-meaning intentions, it seems there are many assumptions and varying expectations about what collaboration is — what it means to collaborate and be collaborative and what is required for collaboration to flow. Like most things…there is shadow and light.
Collaboration: “The act of working together.”
At this juncture, it’s abundantly evident that collaboration is imperative to meet practical and systemic needs, as we engage in our everyday interdependent lives and wade between worlds — paradoxically facing and experiencing destabilization, tectonic shifts and inertia…the illusion of change masked by lots of activity.
Understandably, perspectives of what collaboration looks like in action and how it is experienced — vary.
Deep collaboration might call for…
🔮 Consciousness shift…e.g. from scarcity to abundance…
🔮 Becoming fluent…collaborating through grounded experience and practice…
🔮 Embodying and living into collaborative ways of being, together…
Lived experience, perspectives and (ad)vantage points are real. They set the stage and tone for limitations and possibilities.
Enabling contexts and conditions for collaboration, matter.
🔮 What conditions nurture collaboration?
🔮 What conditions prevent or squash it?
🔮 Can we expand our collective collaborative literacy wading wisely and well through the inherently messy and difficult iterations of true collaboration?
Hmm…
We’re not suggesting that we need 49 words — however allowing deep collaborative capacity to flow, warrants real dedicated care and feeding.
The human system stuff is routinely viewed and treated as secondary. Yet the grounded relational collaborative being is at the heart — among our biggest challenges.
Deep collaboration: drilling down further…
What is it, what it isn’t and why the distinctions matter?
Humans are naturally communal social beings with innate abilities to live and work together. However, influenced and living through the Industrial Age, our interdependence and interconnectedness with one another and all life have been on a steady downward spiral — de-emphasized, compromised and downgraded.
With emphasis on breaking things down into parts, compartmentalization, disciplines, silos and individualism — those innate qualities haven’t been valued or allowed to manifest and blossom in healthy ways.
The Industrial Age ramped up and overvalued linear left-brain leaning reductionist ways of functioning and relating. Our right brain (neurobiology) is more attuned to collaboration, creativity, feelings and intuition. Paradoxically, the ability to recognize the limits of our own knowledge, whereby we can say “I don’t know” resides more in our right brain capacity. Our article, Left? Right? Whole? — a whole lotta ways towards wholeness, drills down more deeply. We often share this piece as foundational.
The need to collaborate is apparent. There’s lots of activity and networking in the name of collaboration.
Some of this takes the form of cross-pollinization— exchanging information, knowledge, ideas, resources and stories. While idealized, much of this is very limited…and moreover…feeding the illusion of collaborative-inspired change…
Collaboration washing has steadily stepped up. Many collaborative efforts are (mostly) pursued for competitive advantage, entrapped by market doctrine and pressures to measure up. Much of what sounds good and appears like collaboration is virtue signalling… transactional window-dressing with surface-deep “let’s scratch each other’s backs.” Synthetic forms easily create a holding and controlling pattern, as people might increasingly appreciate the need cognitively — in our heads — without the enabling liberating contexts and conditions…and without the lived (embodied) experience.
Co-presencing is receiving together and not collaborating with the occupier as a goal.
When we accept terms and conditions preordained by structures, systems and roles that assume occupation and legitimacy, collaboration is both constrained and contaminated.
Under the veneer, competitive win-lose patterns persist. Sometimes this is subtle, sometimes thinly disguised, kicking in with a felt need for self-preservation, as people and organizations jockey for position and market, in a noisy world.
The same old flawed neoclassical monocapital economic model continues to drive and feed wealth supremacy and inequality, hoarding and accumulation, scarcity mindsets and fear. Our updated article, Shifting economics for societal value…deeper shifts…reframing ‘value,’ a rolling work-in-progress, explores this overarching theme. Economics and our notions of economy touch almost everything, better described as overreaching with a grip and stranglehold. Calling for provocative ongoing inquiry, we’re recognizing very slippery slopes as we engage with a variety of efforts (cl)aiming to open and widen possibilities and pathways.
That life-diminishing soul-crushing dominator system is a well-oiled machine with sophisticated mechanisms, incentives and gears.
A transitional treadmill, as we’ve been describing it, has many of us busy undergirding the system we hope and (cl)aim to help transform. Despite well-meaning intentions, dominator patterns shapeshift, with a proliferation of initiatives and ventures dressed up in regenerative living system concepts and pleasing nature-inspired metaphors.
Our updated article, Resonating with Regenerative — the force is life, reflects on the essence of regenerative, the contexts and conditions that block and might allow regenerative capacity to flow in living circulation and many open-ended questions as we witness a proliferation of collaborative ‘regenerative’ initiatives in a world gripped by driving degeneration.
We continue to witness and experience many early stage collaborative efforts that fail to take root beyond the fragile preliminary goodwill and superficial layers…
The uncomfortable fuzziness as people straddle between informal networking and more formal organizing efforts is difficult. Engaging meaningfully to discern and undertake needed work is messy…
Note: Even the word ‘work’ is loaded. Work, as generally assumed, expected, accepted and experienced, carries heavy baggage. Exploitation and extraction underlie the labour through which dominator systems operate, overreach, occupy and violate. When we speak of the work, we connote a very different meaning that attunes with our ethos and ways of being….a labour of love and derived from ‘essence.’
“Essence is what makes every living system and being unique and it is THE source for ongoing and life-giving creativity in your life.” ~ Carol Sanford
Understanding differentiated needs, conditions and circumstances based on contexts, place, cultures and more — is vitally important. Deeper, inspired overarching common(s) purpose can set some context for the nature and quality of collaborative engagement.
We are challenging expectations, processes and practices. Assumptions are easily made. Discerning what is right, fair, equitable, required and reasonable is layered.
As we wade through… gotta keep asking and challenging who’s ‘we.’ Who are discerning, deciding and choosing the WHOs, WHYs, WHATs, HOWs, WHEREs and WHENs of various collaborative endeavours. Are we re-patterning with and for life…or are we feeding recursive patterns that insidiously (re-)ensnare and contain…upholding a dominator paradigm that we (cl)aim to leave behind?
And wading through, yielding to the inherent tensions is real work, largely misunderstood and downplayed, again symptomatic of a dominator system in production overdrive. Ways of living, working and being that don’t conform legibly to measurable value and impact are routinely dismissed and invisibilized. See Measurement Cut. Overreach assumptions about what constitutes healthy, fair and equitable collaboration are routinely accepted as normal.
Preliminary diagnostic groundwork, setting things up contextually in ways that might allow work to flow directly…is not easy. The flow of energy, time and enabling funds remains an overarching pre-occupation and barrier.
While more people might (seem to) reject conventional command-control structures, cultures and roles, pervasive societal dominator architecture and patterns still undergird and set context, insidiously continuing to function, like an operating system humming invisibly in the background.
Real barriers and obstacles limit what is possible. Very real challenges manifesting as double binds and triple binds, impede deep collaborative relationships from forming and flowing.
Pressures and expectations to conform manifest in various forms. Pseudo consensus-based decisions…agreement for the sake of harmony and collegiality often take over. Dysfunctional power dynamics and inequities arise and continue.
Decision processes installed to facilitate consensus, consent, majority rule or unanimous agreement are still contained within prescribed structural co-ordinates of the predominant system that privileges those who design, decide and facilitate those processes on behalf of others. Overreach, framed as strategic and practical governance prevents real sovereignty and agency. What might begin as collaborative good will — often bogs down and erodes. Informal power dynamics take over. Dysfunctional patterns easily manifest and take hold. Many initiatives fizzle out. Those initiatives that continue often uphold patterns of domination that the principal initiators claim to reject.
Working structures aligned with values and the nature and complexity of the work (required) might help to discern healthy agreement on collaboration and decision-making discretion.
Maybe…
This Sociocracy for All article, Governance: the language of collaboration, broaches the subject of governance.
…”Governance is the language of groups to connect and to get things done.”…
…“Connecting through language is deeply human so we’ve become really good at it. What we do struggle with, as a species, is cooperation beyond a handful of people. Because all of a sudden, words aren’t enough. Yelling something ‘into an organization’ or into society doesn’t do much. It’s just words. To make things happen on that larger, more complex scale, you have to speak a whole different kind of language. That language is governance.” …
Hmm…
There is also much talk about governance. Beyond the language, we’re also challenging unexamined assumptions about the deeper architecture and underpinnings…
…the belief that some people are entitled to govern others.
🔮 Who is being governed by whom and why?
🔮 How much governing, governance and government policy and practice is rooted in (assuming and maintaining forms of) domination, oppression and mechanistic control that have become normalized?
When mutual needs, purpose and interests are discerned in direct relationships with authentic reciprocity, care and a felt sense of responsibility — macro and (granular) micro layers of collaboration might flow.
🔮 Can we consider minimum critical specs without lapsing into mechanistically engineering living relationships?
🔮 Can we honour the need for fluidity with some adaptable (semi-permeable) structure, roles and responsibilities?
🔮 Can we discern freedoms — agency to act within fair and equitable limits of discretion and (role) relationship expectations?
Who is we?
Addressing key questions might allow conditions for ongoing collaboration that supports the parts and the whole.
🔮 What decisions are rightfully relinquished and distributed, whereby people have the true agency and freedom to act, attuning to local contexts, needs and opportunities, along with minimal enabling supportive infrastructure systems and tools?
Who decides who decides?
Collaborative capacity flows with real trust-enhancing conditions. In essence, trust is enhanced when we understand and have a felt sense of who we can count on to contribute directly in ways that really attune to the things we care about…individually and collectively…supporting the parts and the whole — in the present and potentially beyond.
Perhaps collaborative capacity contributes as an enabling how — supporting the why and shaping the what.
We are living in the gap — between worlds and words — wor(l)ds.
The driving economics of modern society have fragmented life so thoroughly, we have accepted deadening artefacts and patterns as normal — the way it is.
To support ways of being, living and working that nourish deep life-affirming roots calls for deep shi(f)t.
Living in the gap, through what is often described as the liminal space between, is also used as justification and rationalization to continue feeding transitional treadmills.
We keep asking, “what’s still missing?”
Life-affirming contexts and conditions (economies of care) based on healthy reciprocity, flows and circulation serve life. Even as we attempt to describe this we find ourselves still using terms that break things down and fail to express the underlying living spirit. Terms (nouns) like multicapitals, value, and exchange reflect transactional mechanics. The inherent relational nature of working in service to life isn’t conveyed through (the English) language…terms that have become commonplace, unexamined, used and accepted as normal.
🔮 What enabling contexts and conditions will allow deep collaboration to flow directly…as ways of being…without intermediation and facilitation?
🔮 (How) might commons-based ways of working allow and sustain deep healthy collaboration — as normative?
🔮 How do efforts, described as commons-based, shapeshift, (re-)entrapped by dominant structures of enclosure, disguised forms of hierarchy and tollbooth intermediary functions?
Many advocate for ongoing iterations of transdisciplinary and (trans)contextual work, with cycles of diagnosis, ideation, experimentation, adaptation and reflection. Compartmentalization, fragmentation and dropped balls between disciplines, organizations and sectors routinely cause drift, with a loss of continuity and healthy cross flow.
Whose ‘work,’ on whose behalf?
We’ve reached a tipping point whereby the complexity of entangled challenges means that deep collaboration is imperative. Cooperating and collaborating can contribute to our wellbeing — if not our ultimate survival as a species.
And yet, the subtle and not so subtle ways that ‘collaboration’ is defined, contained and enforced through preordained constraints and synthetic belonging, invariably maintain domination patterns. This doesn’t bode well.
Multitudes of initiatives promoted and celebrated as collaborative have been mushrooming for a very long time. We gotta ask, is this kind of additive collaboration enough? More of the same? Just better?
Hmm.
🔮 How does the human constructed architecture of disciplines, organizations and sectors create and maintain artificial divides?
🔮 How are accepted conventions and institutions of society designed and hard-wired to maintain and replicate domination patterns of control?
🔮 How are collaboration and learning co-opted to serve models and systems of domination? Deep subject with themes explored across several updated articles.
🔮 How have competitively-driven environments (contexts and conditions) that reinforce individual and organization performance lost touch with the flow of real needs for common(s) good?
🔮 Have our framings of success, progress, effectiveness and value become so distorted that we (many of us) have become untethered from meaningful life?
Yup, perhaps a keen grasp of the obvious, at this point!
🔮 What might happen if we competed a lot less and collaborated a whole lot more?
🔮 How might we allow collaborative ecosystems to function and flow, contributing to ongoing direct relationships — with sovereignty to shape the trajectory of daily lives, families and communities, without unnecessary intermediary functions or layers?
🔮 What prevents or truncates collaboration, in ways that that become thin, stall, break down or fail?
🔮 What blocks collaboration from flowing sustainably in the ways that we function or work?
🔮 What variable contexts and circumstances might call for differing kinds of collaborative work?
🔮 What does collaboration look like in flow, and how does it feel when we are engaged in deep collaboration?
🔮 How do efforts to define collaboration replicate reductionist atomization patterns?
🔮 What might become possible when longstanding Indigenous wisdom and cultural wisdom traditions rooted in interdependent collaborative ways of being…are truly honoured and not mechanistically explained and misappropriated?
We’ve long recognized how educational institutions and programs of all kinds have been captive, in service to the dominant system.
Like many, we have viewed collaboration and learning as intertwined. We believed that deep collaboration allows mutual learning to flow. We suspected that collaboration fails to develop deep roots in the absence of ongoing mutual learning. We’ve often described learning as catalytic when embodied — uncovering and co-discovering alternatives that address complex challenges. We thought co-learning might enable the unblocking of portals, de-occupying and allowing field conditions for real workable relational ways of being, living and working.
A more recent uncomfortable dawning: how even learning is being co-opted.
We are bombarded with messages that tell us we are deficient…that we must acquire learning (endless knowledge and skill proficiency.)
Learning, with an endless stream of instruction, programming, and guided facilitation is promoted as the means to rank…gain mastery, relate effectively and acceptably, deal with conflict, self-regulate, compensate, qualify and become credentialed and entitled. The relentless pressure to absorb and measure up, feeds imposter phenomena. The push to acquire prescribed education credentials compensates for never-ending deficits and reinforces competitive ranking and meritocracy.
While we’ve used the terms unlearning, learning and co-learning extensively throughout our writing, we’ve been reaching for something that expresses a soulful lifelong experience. We often speak of being enrolled in the school of life, with an ever-present curiosity.
🔮 What if the unrelenting pressure to learn…expected and projected…is continuously compensating for presumed deficiency, as if we must qualify, negotiating our way under terms we never decided?
🔮 What if the pressure to keep creating, generating and absorbing new learning material is a symptom?
🔮 What if we were never deficient? What if we are enough?
🔮 What if this is less about what we must (un)learn and more about allowing field conditions (here all along) that are blocked — under occupation and entitlement long ordained and assumed as normal?
Eternal discovering through receiving and allowing the flow of what is already there and the pull of the not yet…expresses what we intend and mean. Eternal discovery is not continuous goal-directed learning to gain mastery or overcome deficiencies. While “eternal discovering” was apparently coined by Jakob Böehme (c.1575–1624,) it might express what has always been, experienced and described in various ways through the ages.
Our deep inquiry continues, drawing from the patterns we’re witnessing in a world with preordained contexts that contain and box us in.
Expressed in various ways, we playfully describe this as a paradoxical ’unstitutional’ dance. Mostly partial-witnessing from the commons space between, with some clear red lines, we support living lab work as an open-ended unfolding.
Alternative forms of work systems warrant a harder look and a deeper dive.
🔮 (How) might healthy forms of collaboration and eternal discovering manifest through life-affirming organizations, networks, communities and ecosystems?
🔮 What new/alternative forms of work systems might ground and uphold the commons space, transcending conventionally configured sectors, organizations and loose networks?
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🔮 What will nurture and sustain healthy well-functioning interdependent (nested) ecosystems with regenerative capacity for future generations and all life?
Referenced here are three regularly updated articles with many open-ended questions:
🔮 We excavate the need for new forms of work systems — shaping enabling contexts for the ‘commons’ to ‘work for life.’ Building from longstanding and ongoing research, this article explores ways we might live into alternative workable forms — now.
🔮 Our article, Dance to the tune of life: attuning governing-as-care…not ‘control, explores complementary, synergistic ways for living lab initiatives and start-up ventures to align with healthy interdependent commons-based ecosystems. We consider contexts and conditions that might support systemic trust and resilience, while facing ongoing uncertainty and complexity.
🔮 Our way of being — starting with unstitutional governing-as-care patterns, shares the FairShares Commons (FSC), a pattern language and legal form of commons-based incorporation that is not owned by anyone. It offers adaptable options for others.
None of these are approached as grand solutions or end-point destinations.
Our ongoing experiences and stories shed light on collaboration. We consider contexts, history, the people and all living beings. We explore ways to meaningfully engage, with direct sovereignty to shape lives, work and communities. Nonlinear and messy, we begin from fragile readiness, facing one another in relationship. We allow relational flow and exchange, accepting our positionality as partial witnesses. This work involves re-orienting, re-configuring, reframing and recalibrating so many things.
We see all of this as open-ended, expressing our sense of eternal discovering.
Over the years, many practitioners have been sharing their theories, proposed models, processes and toolkits for collaboration. In light of what hasn’t substantively changed, we are challenging our theories and notions.
In this video, Radical Collaboration to Transform Social Systems, Adam Kahane discusses three human drives, love, power and justice, as essential to create and sustain the conditions for collaboration. Here are some excerpts:
“To overcome apart-ness/separation is to be driven by love. Love arises from the reality of interconnection and interdependence, that we are part of larger wholes. To avoid working with love is to ignore the reality of interdependence. Collaboration that does not harness love will not transform social systems. But love is not enough…
“Dialoguing cannot mean giving up ‘power.’ Collaboration that does not harness power will not transform social systems. Power is the drive that enables us to move up and down and from side-to-side. Radical collaboration employs power when stakeholders are each enabled to assert their wholeness: their purpose, perspective and position. Building collective power means working together with other stakeholders to find and enact ways to transform the system. The opposite is forcing, just trying to get everybody to do what you want them to do. Working with love and power are also not enough to be able to transform social systems.”
“Justice transforms structures so that more people can employ more of their power and more of their love. Different people have incommensurately different ideas of how to assess fairness and who is being treated unfairly and it is difficult to transform social systems when the people who benefit from the status quo fight to maintain their power positions and privileges. We need to work with justice but it is not easy. Pretending that one of these drives doesn’t exist is like trying to move through physical space while pretending that gravity doesn’t exist.”
Martin Luther King’s words are also referenced:
“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It’s the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change and one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with the denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right. What we need to realize is that power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time”
Hmm…
Excavating further, in light of deep-rooted pervasive dominator patterns spanning human civilization history, we have lingering questions and deeper provocations:
🔮 What is blocking those human drives from functioning in ways that allow life-affirming patterns to flow?
🔮 What if the construct of justice is not a drive at all? What if it is based on a rotted root system that is rigged to uphold domination, judgment, supremacy, inequity and notions of meritocracy used to justify the instruments of justice? What if it has been imposed and functions like a boot on our neck?
🔮 What if the seat at the table remains entrapped within the structural co-ordinates of the dominator configuration, inviting people to negotiate within preordained constraints, where concessions are granted or removed?
🔮 What if people are routinely denied jurisdiction and sovereignty legitimized by the trespass of those assuming rank and ownership and the subject-object split programming that sanctifies entitlement and occupation?
Love, power and (especially) justice as constructed are entrapped within the established architecture and systems of domination that routinely assume jurisdiction. The real liberating contexts and conditions for love and power to flow — expressed through the spirit of life — are not addressed.
This is a very deep subject easily bypassed:
🔮 By those who continue to assume (some level of) privilege and power, including those functioning as (well-meaning) intermediaries, still serving and benefiting from a predominant system that has been operating throughout much of human civilization history
🔮 By many who believe that no alternative configuration is possible…that the way it is…is natural, inevitable and ordained. (Note: that is most of us… born into a well-established dominator configuration invested in its continuation.)
Through the years, we described some of our collaborative work as bridge building. A deeper dawning has been gnawing, which has implications for work often maintained in the name of essential collaboration. While we haven’t entirely scrapped the metaphor, much past and ongoing intermediator, consulting and facilitation work undertaken in the name of building bridges feeds the voracious industrial complex that maintains the life-diminishing paradigm we (cl)aim to help shift. Our revised re-titled article, “Building Bridges to Span the Void? How bridging feeds the void and avoids deeper realities…” excavates. Warning. This might feel very uncomfortable. Pay attention to what rises up, with a strong urge to defend professional expert positionality and the longstanding efforts of many.
Here’s a sliver:
… “this (work) is not about building bridges. Most bridge building supports feel good incrementalism that maintains the illusion of movement. It presumes the need to bridge what was never separate. It buffers and bypasses what must be faced. It sells false hope. It co-depends on the dominator system to grant improvements, legitimacy (and funds) inside the pervading system that maintains it. It works as designed — propagating premature coherence and false coherence, drawing us into synthetic belonging and normalizing symbiotic, extractive, parasitic and dysfunctional patterns.”…
A vast industrial complex of intermediary functions working at all scales…global, international, regional, local, sectoral and more…(cl)aiming to advance peace-building and collaborative initiatives and ventures of all kinds, insidiously operate like tollbooths serving the dominator paradigm, while legitimized and recognized.
Nothing substantively changes, if nothing structurally changes.
So, what about co-creation?
Much co-creation, redesign and advocated learning that proliferate have become intermediary tollbooth functions and tools of domination, feeding a transitional treadmill…
Another uncomfortable reckoning…
Creation and co-creation have also been co-opted to serve a driving generator function that has subsumed the transformative function…as if transformative phase shift is created and produced by us humans.
Truly empowered engagement is free from occupation, with freedom to act. De-occupied, field conditions allow the expression of life spirit to dance and flow in simultaneity with regenerative functions.
There’s no single lens or integrative perspective, formula, program, pathway, protocol, conceptual approach, toolkit or intelligence that will address the entangled dilemmas we face.
🔮 Can we let go of the unrelenting drive to create, predetermine and prescribe grand all-encompassing solutions?
🔮 Can we yield, accepting that Being Right is almost Never Enough…especially when our ideas and views prescribe, drive and enforce, foreclosing on what might become possible — the pull of the not yet?
Our updated article, Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough,’ peels back more layers. We explore many recurring patterns and pitfalls as we push to make progress.
Right. Perhaps our biggest sobering realization accumulating over many years is that in spite of good intentions, deep-rooted systemic barriers persist — overlooked, justified and condoned for lots of reasons.
Any of us can be ensnared by pervasive societal norms, boxed-in structures and a driving economic model that impedes healthy interdependent ways of being, living and working. The words sound good, but the context, behaviour and practices are not congruent.
Yup. More monsters and messy humanness! Systemic barriers drive and perpetuate the dysfunctional counterproductive human stuff and mechanistic linear left brain leaning emphasis.
Shaped by competitive win-lose patterns and cultures spanning decades and much longer — sometimes described as Game A — this isn’t an instant flip-of-the-switch shift. Younger generations who are inheriting the many complex challenges we face, are perhaps intuitively better poised for needed shifts.
Walking-the-talk-and-listening-while-we-walk means we gotta get out of our conceptual bubbles and echo chambers. We’ve also gotta get out of our heads and into more wholesome interconnected, embodied ways of being.
“Traveler, there is no path, The path is made by walking…By walking, we make the path.” ~ Antonio Machado, Spanish poet
Hmm. Yes and stop the doing that is just adding or generating more of the same…
These shifts might include:
🔮 Readiness for the messiness that cannot be mandated, taught or facilitated
🔮 Conscious values based choice…and that too is not enough
🔮 Laser sharp diagnostic lenses to recognize recursive patterns…recognition and understanding are important, but are not enough
🔮 Conditions that are trust-enhancing…that warrant trust
🔮 Remembering what we’ve lost…allowing what we’ve never experienced…to be expressed
🔮 More than we realize…getting out of our own way and getting the hell out of the way — layers of sh*t that occlude what’s been here all along, submerged
What are sometimes described as soft skills are relational ways of being that are blocked by structural constraints
At some point or in hindsight, we might recognize that the ‘aha’ moments are nonlinear layerings of many ideas and iterations, contributed, influenced, shaped and refined by many people.
When we humbly accept the messiness of life, the diversity of gifts differing, the value of deep and wide lived experience and experimentation and the nestedness and unknowability of all the variables that might allow little and big breakthroughs — perhaps that is when the spirit of life can be freely expressed and allowed to shine. That might also allow collaboration to be genuinely experienced as fun, intense and joyful — finding our cadence, rhythm and flow.
Kinda like a musical ensemble…knowledge, skills, intuitive creativity and improvisation kick in. Challenging, lots of passion, often painful and maddening and yet almost magical.
While we cannot know what might become possible…predetermined lock step linear reductionist ways will certainly block what might otherwise break through.
When we engage through the messiness of collaboration, we might co-sense, making choices based on mutual interests, common(s) purpose and common(s) sense…
Note: Much of the sense-making advocated also overreaches, upholding subject-object split positionality. See Sense-Making.
In the midst of it all, there are ample opportunities for individual essence to be expressed, to shine and to recognize those contributions. Individually and collectively, we might experience the deep(er) fulfillment that accompanies a felt sense of meaningfulness.
For a long time, ‘and’ was our favourite word. While we still appreciate the relevance of a both/and orientation in many contexts, we have become mindful of its dark side as well. Both/and often lacks discernment. It props up pseudo collaboration, synthetic belonging and superficial harmony. It makes it easy to be complicit and compliant, to continue feeding a transitional treadmill, as if we can have our cake and eat it too, avoiding the discomfort, disruption and discontinuity of stopping, of saying“no.” We’ve been (m)uttering “hmm, maybe and no,” often. Our article, Happy anding — when to ‘and’…when to ‘end,’ elaborates with some serious caveats and hard red lines.
We (still) imagine what might be unimpossible when liberated from boxed-in constraints.
The plot thickens…
Deep collaboration allows thoughts and ideas to collide. Relationships flow. Individual egos take a back seat. The need to be front-and-centre dissolves. Ideas and alternatives are uncovered and co-discovered.
Through collaborative commons work we can diagnose patterns and unblock portals, potentially allowing alternatives. Facing and addressing realities calls for deep and radical collaboration — breaking from patterns that don’t serve life. When this way of being becomes the norm, perhaps we won’t think of it as radical!
What if we shared our perspectives as invitations for interplay? Imagine if we offered, received and accepted views as input — fractals of a larger whole.
Imagine a world where the exchange of knowledge, ideas and stories was generally experienced as gifts, unpolished, imperfect gems that contribute to life worth living and work worth doing.
Imagine, if eternal discovering was allowed to flow? Would that begin to look and feel like deeper collaboration, as we increasingly befriend our mutual vulnerability, yielding to humility, reciprocity and grace?
As we live the questions, sharing our various perspectives and lived experience as partial witnesses, we can uncover life-affirming out-of-the-box alternatives. We can address some burning questions — transcontextually and within contexts, places and spaces — meaningfully making more sense.
Ways of being and ways of knowing can embrace our rich diversity, bringing more light and joy to this existentially anguished bumpy experience.
Being unstitutional, as we describe it, is simply an ethos and an alchemical invitation. We welcome diverse perspectives, ideas and capabilities through collaborative living lab initiatives, working across any and all of the (artificial) divides — business, government, civil society, communities, cultures, generations, genders. As we allow our spirited energy to be expressed, we might uncover common(s) ground.
Working from the space between, living labs are a way to experiment with new or alternative ways of collaborating. Honouring decades of knowledge, experience and longstanding wisdom, we might uncover, unblock, and allow the conditions and contexts for healthy interdependence.
What’s described here is really not new. Many of us have experienced collaboration, however, it’s generally fleeting and not sustained or culturally normative. It can’t be forced. However there are contexts and conditions that might help us rekindle our innate inter-relational capacities.
How to spawn healthy collaboration points to an overarching human system challenge.
Can we support contexts and conditions for eternal discovering, through:
🔮 Context-based and place-sourced living labs?
🔮 Collaborative partnership ecosystem ventures and initiatives?
🔮 Working outside conventionally bounded organizations and spaces and beyond narrow vested interests — with shared, inspired common(s) purpose?
The refrain, “we can all be unstitutional,” invites us to work in everyday ways to inspire and seed life-affirming conditions for people and planet.
Too often, collaboration fails to get the focus that this kind of work requires. Deepening commitment to deep collaboration might help more of us:
🔮 Live into an unknowable future, facing one another in the present
🔮 Widen our lens somewhat, diagnosing, understanding and addressing deep-rooted social, environmental and economic patterns and realities
🔮 Adopt a partial witnessing orientation, in a spirit of deep inquiry
🔮 Honouring the best of science, enabling technology and longstanding Indigenous wisdom — ways of knowing —partnering for the common good
🔮 Work through difficult issues, conflict and thorny dilemmas, taking multiple perspectives, while accepting we can never see and know the whole
🔮 Face the harms of past and ongoing trespass and trauma, with the free expression of grief, honouring necessary conditions (cessation) that might allow deep-rooted reconciliation and healing
🔮 Uncover the common ground for authentic and sustained commitment with real agency and jurisdiction for people to directly shape the trajectory of lives, families and communities without unnecessary intermediary functions
🔮 Support an integrative approach, considering potential risks, opportunities and downstream consequences, while acknowledging and accepting what’s unknowable and unseeable
🔮 Nurture relationships that allow conditions for free expression and trust: vulnerability, transparency and eternal discovery
🔮 With eyes wide, recognize how needs to belong and relationships are easily manipulated and weaponized to serve domination systems…and the ways we are complicit and co-opted
🔮 Break from degenerative patterns, right scaling in ways that can spawn naturally— de-occupying field conditions, thereby enabling life-affirming ways
🔮 Collectively yield…allowing transformative phase shifts to birth, that might address the complex, escalating meta-poly-perma consequences on our collective doorsteps
🔮 Allow deep-rooted collaboration to become a norm — the way we do and stop doing things and the way meaningful interdependent lives are meaningfully and responsibly embraced
Healthy collaboration provides some enabling relational connective tissue. While important, it is not a magic elixir. Collaboration and the ways it is pursued are not enough to face and address the entanglement of challenges and predicaments that have been mounting for so long.
This 2024 article reflects some of the themes echoed by those trying to cultivate collaboration with futures aspirations: Collaboratively imagining the future can bring people closer together in the present. It speaks to the individual, relational and collective effects of co-imagining the future:
“Your potential futures are not yours alone to imagine. Rather, the future and its possibilities are something that you actively co-create with others. In doing so, you become closer and more connected to them in the present. Collaboratively imagining a shared future together, it seems, may be an important first step toward creating it.”
Hmm.
Field conditions already exist…everywhere. They are occupied …blocked by trespass theology and its domination architecture and the operating systems, gatekeeping and tollbooth functions and forces that uphold conquest theology as THE pre-ordaining law.
What if that is not the only law and choice? What if the domination architecture is so well-defended, that it prevents us from seeing beyond. What if it keeps dimensionally compressing, hijacking our consciousness at every turn, entrapping us in a wheel of anguish that cannot complete the rotation? What if repeating the same impotent patterns of domination prevents the messy birth of transformative phase shift — true creation.
Imagine this: Accepted, unexamined assumptions driving much of human civilization history keep us entrapped in a life diminishing law as if it is the only law. There is another law. The second law. The Law of the Spirit of Life.
While we might imagine futures, we are living in the present. Collaboration can support the ways we choose to relate, living into an unknowable future, now. We can collaborate in ways that continue to uphold dominating patterns. We can collaborate in ways that attune with the spirit of life. Living in the world as it is, with our inherent needs to belong, it is easy to co-opt and be co-opted with synthetic forms.
Facing the forge, the uncomfortableness, the uncertainty and the unknowability is hard. So many aspects of life that we’ve accepted as, the way it is…become open to question, shaking the ground beneath our feet.
It is easier to keep on doing variations of what we’ve always done, what we’ve mastered so well.
Becoming more comfortable being uncomfortable together — every day is a test of our humanity, humility, reciprocity and grace. Our article, leaning into uncomfortableness, builds on these themes.
No amount of human co-creation can produce, subsume or substitute the kind of transformative creation that is greater than us. We cannot generate our way to life-affirming REgenerative ways, while blocking the spirit of life.
We can potentially:
🔮 De-occupy field conditions that assumed and subsumed jurisdiction, allowing and supporting a variety of collaborative efforts, directly engaging and working on the things that light us up and spread some joy
🔮 Uncover and unblock portals, whereby transformative phase shifts might birth, allowing vibrant places for people to live, work, play and regenerate in simultaneity with the spirit of life
🔮 Experience wider and deeper meta-relational ways that might support life: health, shelter, food security, nourishment, sense of community and belonging and biodiversity…all the issues concerning climate risks and mitigation and much more…
🔮 Become more authentically caring about one another, the living biodiverse planet we all call home and the larger cosmos and consciousness beyond that nests and sets overarching context for all
With eyes wide, we’re especially mindful of the proliferation of exclusive collaborative gatherings and initiatives that (still]) privilege elites, and maintain echo chambers, silos and bubbles. Many of these, promoted with ‘good intentions,’ in the name of systemic economic change, are insidiously complicit, fuelling an economic engine, upholding the status quo and replicating familiar patterns of leadership and expert mastery.
We are not masters of the universe. We never were. We cannot generate our way to transformative phase shift, with the expectation of producing a REgenerative future. The ongoing driving push to do so dressed up in co-creative collaborative efforts and pleasing nature-based metaphors insidiously shapeshift, replicating variations of the same dominator patterns that created this existential soup.
🎶 Sweet dreams AND pipe dreams are made of this 🎶
🔮 Can we talk openly, facing and addressing these uncomfortable issues, not as polarizing positioning
🔮 Can we acknowledge the underlying dilemmas and binds that persist?
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 the predominant structure and systems that precipitated the need for these terms in the first place — to continue. That is what humanity has been doing throughout our civilization history.
The following quintet of short articles, published in June, July and September 2026, reflect a deepening reckoning with 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 🎧 🎶
These updated articles also reflect some serious re-orienting, re-configuring, reframing and clarification…precipitating a cascade of updates to several more articles in the coming days and weeks:
🔮 Why Unstitution is (sort of) agnostic, (somewhat) omni-partial and (mostly) partial witness. In a world that still upholds human exceptionalism and performativity, we re-orient our positionality, attuning with what’s been seeping down to our bones and into our souls for a very long time. As we reflect on various ways and means to support deep collaboration…a partial witnessing orientation aligns with a deeper reckoning, letting go of the comprehensive integrative knowing that will always extend beyond our perceptual fields.
🔮 Eternal discovering…enrolled in the school of life, elaborates on how this cuts across everything, integral to the spirit of life and open-ended inquiry. We also explore ways we might reconfigure and integrate education, learning, arts and culture into everyday life.
🔮 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 understand, exploring ways we might re-pattern as we live into an unknowable future, in the present. We draw heavily from the ongoing work of Vanessa Andreotti and Helen Holden Slottje.
Some day, future generations might look back and recount the collaboration stories — ways that their ancestors stopped the tyranny of recursive domination, allowing the birth of a life-affirming pluriverse, nourished by an enduring love of life in all its forms.
This article was substantively updated again September 2026, reflecting additional perspectives, links and ongoing action research, as we continue to witness, listen, experience, assimilate and explore — humbling eternal discovering for us all. Several of the links referenced most likely open unfamiliar avenues. There are many people who continue to nourish and challenge our work in differentiated, overlapping and intertwined ways. As we wade through deep shi(f)t, diagnosing and understanding patterns that continue to impede, with readiness for the inherent messiness, wisdom with teeth, diving gear and eyes wide…our deepening inquiry continues.
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 Navigation and Emergence.
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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