What challenges need this lens right now?

My obsession started when I was very small: trying to figure out the leverage points that could flip humanity into living more like other animals do.

Why did we put them in circuses and scrape their homes bare for freeways and parking lots? I didn't see the coyotes or rabbits ruining other animals' futures.

And yet they were clearly our relatives, as Jane Goodall showed. We were animals like any other.

I spent many sleepless nights over it. Where did we go off track? How could we find our way again?

What could I do? For that matter, what could anyone do?

Nothing I thought of would work. Everything was connected to everything else. It would just make matters worse.

But my father was an architect.

He pointed out the geodesic domes sprouting along the 1970s California coastline. A set of simple rules of connection adding up to a strong, flexible structure. Like Tinkertoy.

He also told me how the same kinds of simple rules, if properly aligned with human nature, could guide people to do what the architect intended.

That idea stayed with me, and I set out to find the simple rules by which other organisms live—how they “create conditions conducive to life” without thinking so hard.

In retrospect, possibly an overly ambitious career goal!

But someone had to do something.

Well I've broadened my passions over time, but my interest in life's deep patterns stuck around. They've been honed by four billion years of challenge, after all.

From Hawaiian island plant biogeography to whale distributions in the Bering Sea to baboon hybridization and speciation in Ethiopia.

How does life grow itself?

How does it organize intelligence?

How does it create conditions conducive to life for its descendants?

At every scale, the same patterns: the simple rules of growing possibility despite uncertainty, change, and challenge.

The same patterns organize our own lives—the many ways we live and think, design, and lead– as I've noticed in groups from Indigenous communities, to teams in companies,, nonprofits, and other institutions.

So for the last fifteen years, I've been synthesizing these patterns and contrasts and helping leaders of teams and organizations use them as they work to grow, organize, and innovate. But I needed a system. More than principles or biological metaphors, I wanted an instrument that people could use.

So I spent the last few years turning those patterns into a way of seeing and navigating complex challenges: a deep pattern language that works at every scale. A practical system for growing, adapting, and renewing possibility, the way life always has. A multiscale lens synthesized from four billion years of evolutionary intelligence.

I'm afraid they don't give you the answers! But they do help you see in a whole new way, and ask very different questions—ones that reveal the connections, possibilities, and leverage points that have been invisible until now.

What would have to change for your Sisyphean initiative to turn, like water flowing downhill?

Well I'm very eager to take some folks through this “Teeming Transformation” with their own complex challenges, so I'm going to open a few spots to work directly with me!

But first, I want to learn more about what people are trying to accomplish right now—and where they're frustrated. What kinds of challenges do people need these lenses for right now?

I would so greatly appreciate your own perspective on this! Even just a sentence or two would be very helpful. I'd love to hear what you're working on, and I'm always happy to jump on a call.

What are you trying to bring to life right now?

What's in the way?

How can I help?

Hugs to you, and huge thanks!

Tamsin

1 comment

What challenges need this lens right now?