One of the most common doubts we hear about the viability of the future described in The Alternative Global is around scale. Meaning: are any of the good projects - even movements - that fill our newsletter big enough to make an impact? Do they leverage power at the global level as well as the local level?

Too often, the doubters are themselves currently working at a large scale, often with governments and big business. Their aim is to transform the current system, using the established and proven power structures. To their thinking, anything short of this will inevitably fail.

Of course, that's logical. At the same time, we must keep in mind that even with these massive, well-intended, global-level power structures in place - including the United Nations (UN) - we have failed to prevent the escalation of our multiple crises until now. There are innumerable studies on the weaknesses of the UN, just as there are on the pros and cons of the World Economic Forum: that’s maybe the point we’re making.

Scale alone does not predict a better outcome, only more hard power - more ability to force outcomes. But if the internal and external conditions of that hard power - its culture and structures - is not well aligned to planetary flourishing, it can't cause transformation. It will only be able to maintain the status quo.

A strong patriarch is no more likely to cause flourishing for his family than one that is softer, more connected to the different members and interested in their relationship. Sometimes, it is the children who drive the choices and behaviour of the family.

Soft power of populism

Over the past few years, we have also witnessed, time and again, the 'soft power' of populism - literally the voice of the people – shaping the agency of global powers. Whether you see this as positive or negative is in the eye of the beholder: Greta Thunberg or Steve Bannen? Both are non-state actors with unusual power to sway people in ways that dispropotionately change policy.

But even if you don’t grant much agency to people, their needs can topple governments. When the majority population in any city or nation are living toxic lives - due to the conditions in which they live and work - they also become a massive cost burden on the public purse. In the UK today, any strategy for going forward is going to be affected by the health of the workforce, increasingly undermined by poverty and mental health.

Again, it is likely that those working at the global level, from the top down, will agree with that logic. They would say that is exactly the transformative work they are doing. Maybe, at that altitude, it is harder to see the extent to which power itself is hopelessly entangled. How world-changing initiatives are obliged to borrow the tools of the old system in order to compete with orthodoxy.

Mundane examples of this would be how COP 27 requires the champions of a greener future to fly to Egypt and isolate themselves in a tourist hotspot - circumstances which exemplifly the worst habits of the growth economy. More subtly, their form of gathering in the full glare of global media compels false shows of strength and competence, which prevent real breakthroughs. When gathered singularly to fix a problem, these players find it hard to pool their wider resources for a better, alternative future. One in which healing environmental damage might be factored into a wider flourishing agenda.

Through the lens of time

Another way to look at the conundrum of scale is to think of the relationship between large and small through the lens of time. Observers often tell us that the work of The Alternative Global is 'ahead of its time': we are promoting a pattern of activity which cannot take shape meaningfully in the present, or even the immediate future. Implied is a recommendation to focus on 'more doable' tasks – which would focus on bringing relief to the suffering, or organise for problem-solving. That would also be the kind of activity that could be more easily funded by grants, or even venture capital. Later on, they say, you’ll have time and resources to do the more enriching work of social development and system change.

It's a mind-set that reflects Maslow's hierarchy: first survival, next development, later thriving. Yet if we don't have the conditions for thriving in place from the beginning, most of us will never get past simply surviving. That moment for transformation never comes, because we are all trapped in systems that reserve thriving for the historically privileged.

It's the same for larger, society-wide systems: if we are not designing for a future, now, in which today's problems no longer dominate at that level, the future never arrives. This is why wholistic innovation of the kind that evoke a future ecocivilisation only appears in relatively small projects (eg CANs) on the ground.

We’ve been in conversations with the founder of the Consilience Project, Daniel Schmachtenberger, twice over the past month (with Harvest in Kaplankaya and more recently with Perspectiva in London). With us, Daniel identified three stages of activity towards a safer planet: he called them triage, transition and post-transition (or transformation).

Listening to Daniel's astounding grasp of the details of dysfunctional chaos can be an overwhelming experience. Here he is describing what he calls the meta-crisis - multi-polar breakdowns whose solutions tend to compete, rather than integrate in a whole system resolution. But while he notes all three stages, Daniel tends to publicly emphasize the first - drawing his audience into a state of tharn, frozen in the headlights of the juggernaut bearing down upon us.

Even so, there is something about Schmachtenberger as a character that makes him not only approachable but warm and positive. It’s as if a good outcome somehow lives within him. When you hear about Daniel’s upbringing, you hear that he was home-schooled with parents that read Fritjof Capra and followed Buckminster Fuller. He talks readily about Gandhi and shares his belief that we must adopt the qualities of a Boddhisattva as we go about our daily lives.

Metamorphosis

What comes to mind, when dwelling on Daniel’s ideas, is the design of a butterfly. This multi-coloured, lightly constructed creature comes into the world as a caterpillar. It then goes through the breakdown of its own structure in the pupa, before giving way to the beauty flying free. However, this isn't simply a linear process: hidden in the body of the caterpillar are the imaginal cells, holding the blueprint of the butterfly it is destined to become. These imaginal cells drive the life-cycle of the creature, ensuring a spectacular conclusion to the journey

It's quite possible that Schmachtenberger's imaginal cells are already (and metaphorically) driving the development of his activity, propelling him towards transformative innovation. On the other hand, if his triage work traps him in the structures of the old system, he might never make it out. Caterpillars don'ts always complete their cycle if the right conditions aren't available.

Another example of the time trap - the belief that stages of change happen sequentially - can be found in the ambiguity of the three horizons model, often used in forecasting work. This is the idea that there is a first, second and third horizon for change. The first (H1) being the dominant, current reality of a socio-economic-political system. The second describes the early adopters of a new system (H2) and the third the fully fledged new manifestation of a better world (H3).

H1 organisations - from businesses to political systems - do not simply share values, but also mind-sets: they have a similar story about what power is and how it operates. They tend to believe in top-down structures, the bigger the better. Centralised global corporates are core to H1 maintaining its dominance.

Some of those quoting this model focus on improving the H1 institutions, as if improving them will “transition” them (Schmachtenberger's term) to H2. Others focus on H2, knowing that unless fledgling innovations get more support they will wither and die. The high likelihood of the latter happening, in a world captured by the fossil fuel economy, creates the image of a chasm between H2 and H3 into which many initiatives fall. Again, there is an implied goal of H2 becoming, through the application of more resources, our H3 Utopia. Like mammals growing, bigger, stronger, faster - but also more complex - becoming capable of leaping the chasm.

Others, however, sense a different relationship between the three kinds of organisations and the people inhabiting them. Instead of a linear progression between H1, H2 and H3, they describe three co-existing mind sets that are constantly interacting, constantly developing each other in real time. More like a human family, causing major shifts in outlook from child to adolescent to mature adult. The father is changed by his children while raising them.

The only thing we have to remember is that it is the adult holding H1 and the young bringing the genuinely innovative H3. Their mutual support would look like a gradual transference of power and agency from H1 to H3.

As it stands, H3 structures and mind sets look more fractal: prioritising wholistic communities of practice, built through relationships and trust. In our terms, these are CANs arising in neighbourhoods, towns, cities and bioregions, showing patterns of cosmolocal agency that deliver regeneration. Practitioners of these futuristic models don't pay much attention to the old system breaking down: they are autonomous, often isolated. Much like Buckminster Fuller's "new system that outmodes the existing one".

Their growing to become the dominant system will depend upon their ability to draw attention and investment into their way of being and acting. H3 is not bigger and dominant like H1, but infinitely more diverse and interconnected: a system made up of mutually enriching, wholistic fractals in which every human being can find their own agency. Fractal scaling, as intricate as a butterfly's wings themselves.

Managing our destiny

However, as long as H1 continues to uphold the dominance of its own way of thinking, its insistence upon size and hard power as the means to transformation, H3 will remain invisible and hard to grow. Without the shift in mind-set - focusing attention and investment - towards a very different kind of future, this human, social and planetary possibility is unlikely to materialise. We will stay caterpillars for the rest of our lives and then die in the pupa - signs of that destiny are already present.

Going back to the second half of Schmachtenberger's talk last Friday, we asked him how he could reconcile the two ways he showed up in the world. What connected his more empathetic, wholistic personality to his stark, monotoned, catastrophic message? It's a question he took time to answer, acknowledging the many levels of activity taking place around the planet.

Allocating the task of triage to himself, Daniel confessed he couldn't see clearly what the combined forces of the other zones - transition and transformation - added up to. It would be either the end of the human species, or full flourishing in a way we've barely imagined. Both possibilities were clear in his imagination. But maybe because he was fully engaged in triage, he couldn't name the element of choice that is more present for those working in transition (or H2). Yet for us, like the imaginal cells driving the butterfly system, we could sense the outcome he had been designed to choose.

Whether we can make that conscious choice to keep moving towards flourishing - or not -does not fix the outcome of our collective actions. The future depends upon more than any one of us. But it might be worth considering that the reason so many of us run around manically, like caterpillars trying to take flight when our feet are wedded to the ground, is because we can sense the butterfly within us, just waiting to emerge.

Alternative Editorial: The Ilusion Of Scale