January 2022
With the aim of making our research process open and accessible, we are posting notes of some of our meetings and events. These summarise the discussion and/or background readings. These are presented as provisional interpretations which will be refined in later writings.
The original research proposal which we submitted for funding made multiple references to the use of scenarios as a method of projecting and imagining new futures. Readings done since the start of the project have led a more nuanced understanding of scenarios, and their use in futuring; this will be captured in a forthcoming pamphlet. The purpose of this workshop was to develop a method of future thinking based on these readings.
Collectively we discussed how people and organizations have thought about the future, working within different contexts and for different purposes. We mapped these on the diagram that accompanies this set of notes. This discussion and diagramming activity helped us position our aims, and our methodology for achieving them.
We articulated how our aims for social and environmental justice aligned with and differed from other future-oriented projects by identifying other futures thinking projects’ drivers—some such as Shell Oil aimed at profit growth, while others such as Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics, aimed for non-financialised planetary and social wellbeing.
Over the past months we have looked at biological growth mechanisms including mould and fermentation because such models help us think about how a spatial practice that currently exists (timber construction, say, or community shared ownership schemes) could ‘grow’ and ‘mutate’ into other contexts and help cultivate futures in which people and the planet thrive.
Thinking about mould has encouraged us to think about existent and possible conditions—that is, what contexts characterize the world as we know it and which of these might help cultivate better futures, or hamper them? A condition might be a current legal framework that inhibits co-ownership, or another that provides loans for just this kind of scheme. Identifying such conditions and articulating which should be encouraged is one of our aims.
We discussed the fact that moulds can ‘over-eat’ and exhaust themselves on material. Knowing this encouraged us to think about moderation and balance. For example, celebrating the use of timber in the construction industry might distract us from also questioning whether new construction is necessary in the first place, or whether timber sources derive from sustainable forests.
We realised that our preferred means of using organic, biological growth to represent transitions towards more just futures, contrasts other methods for imagining and implementing change that are geared towards single goals and use more linear representations such as horizons.
Mould as a representation of a kind of growth excited us because it wrests the word ‘growth’ from associations with GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and a business-as-usual mindset fixated on financial profit-making. We are interested in the growth of viable, ethical futures for humans, habitats, and the planet.
Despite its organic nature, our ‘mouldy’ way of thinking about the future seemed to sit nearer a political and economic position occupied by economists like Raworth than an artistic one of more unbounded futurism. While we invite imagination and contingency, we also want our approach to have an intentionality guided by social and environmental ethics. An important aspect of our future work will be getting the balance right between imaginative openness (which finds as yet unfound futures) and intentional direction (which sets clear ethical and environmental contexts)
The way mould grows and adapts itself to its new host surfaces chimed with how we want to imagine forms of spatial practice that are both intentional and adaptive. We want to retain a core ingredient of ethical and political integrity but remain open to contingency and possibility to imaginatively adapt in different contexts and in the face of different challenges. Knowing how to build or repair or live with others in one region of the world might not look the same as it does in another. Mould growth helps us think about this because mould does not replicate itself fully, it adapts and responds its potency in a manner that will thrive in a different context.
Using mould as a model encourages us to view spatial practices in a non-dualistic way because the growth of mould can lead to a wide range of results. Mould that infests someone’s home might simultaneously be a nuisance to humans and a habitat for some animals. Or mould that grows rapidly at one time might become dormant, or change its direction, or consistency, or become poisonous to a plant, or help leaf-litter become compost… Spatial practices might sometimes simultaneously be helpful and problematic for transitioning to more just futures. We are interested in teasing out this complexity to understand it better. A seemingly or initially progressive practice might loop backwards into a form of green washing. Or a practice intended to enhance business-as-usual might loop forward when people reclaim it for another purpose. And just as some moulds might lie dormant for a while and grow again later, when conditions are different, so might spatial practices be. The spores of a future method for sharing land more equitably lie dormant right now in proposals for legislation that might one day grow into tax reforms that discourage unfair forms of land speculation.
As a methodology—if we even want to use such a rigid academic word—our model of mould growth has an ethics embedded within it in because mould depends on all sorts of external conditions and substances. Mould cannot grow alone, it requires a surface, a host of ingredients. We like the model of mould because it suggests a form of collective intelligence and helps us get away from ideas of individual authorship and ownership that we associate with the modern project. Spatial practices geared toward socially and environmentally just futures will depend on a range of material, political, economic, and social conditions to grow successfully.
With all this discussion of mould, we wanted to generate a coherent list of characteristics to describe the kinds of growth and future we want to bring about. What kind of mould are we proposing? If we were to define our principles for social and environmental justice, what would they be? New forms of localism, alternative ways of thinking about professionalism, different economic models…? Describing these characteristics will help give our mould a sense of its own principles and what conditions mould needs to grow. We can define these principles if we study what, within a business-as-usual world of spatial practice, we want to cultivate and deter. We could use economic and political thinkers like J. K. Gibson Graham, Ann Pettifor, Tim Jackson, or Kate Raworth, to help flesh out what we mean by social and environmental justice and build from some of their ideas to think more specifically about principles to apply to spatial practice and architecture. Creating a set of principles that we define ourselves in relation to, will clarify how we approach existing practices and their potential ‘mould’ growth for the future. We do not want to be prescriptive in this, but we do want to be intentional and define our ethical and political core. We might do well to draft a set of questions to ask ourselves when analysing practices—what kind of future does this practice make possible? What conditions does it require to flourish? What conditions would hamper its growth?
We were previously thinking about examples of spatial practices as forming a repository or database from which we could draw. Now this repository feels more like a laboratory where we are testing what futures can grow from existing presents.
Part of our approach will involve moving between what we identify, celebrate or critique, in our present, and what we envision for the future. This ‘back and forth’ will allow us to ground ourselves, while also inviting more imaginative ways of thinking about futures. The more imaginative approach might include both written and entirely non-linguistic material—there are many ways of thinking about the future. Working in sensory registers will be important.
Collaborating with interlocutors based in different regional contexts could help us with this imaginative back-and-forth approach. Some of what we produce will resemble storytelling that draws from the past and takes it towards imaginative ‘what if?’ directions? We should remember to move beyond solely human implications here and ask, ‘what if?’ in terms of animals, landscapes, and atmospheres.
Imagination will help us map steps from critiquing problems in the present towards transitioning into more just futures. We take “the word critical in the early Frankfurt School sense, as something that starts out with an unravelling of the social reality of the given condition so as to be able to understand how to transform it into something better.” [link] We concluded that imagination is therefore essential as an additional ingredient to our critical readings of the past and present, and our projective thinking about the future.
Becca Voelcker for Mould
To get us started in this workshop, we gathered a range of different quotations and texts exemplifying ways in which the future has been theorized. When reading them, we asked ourselves, what species of speculation is this text presenting? What future does this bring into being?
“What should we do with our brain? is a question for everyone, that it seeks to give birth in everyone to the feeling of a new responsibility.” Malabou reminds us of the double movement at work in the idea of responsiveness and responsibility: the brain is responsive to (formed by) and responsible for (gives form to) ethical, aesthetic, and political forces. What kinds of world do we want our thoughts and actions to be supple to? “Which culture is the culture of neuronal liberation? Which world? Which society?” Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. by Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 14, 30.
“The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 9.
“When Marx characterized capitalism, the big question was “who produces wealth?” hence the preponderance of the figure of the Exploiter, this bloodsucker who parasitizes the living power of human labor. Evidently this question has lost nothing of its currency, but another figure might be added, without any rivalry, to this first, corresponding to the injunction not to pay attention, including even when barbarism threatens. This figure is the Entrepreneur, he for whom everything is an opportunity, or rather, he who demands the freedom to be able to transform everything into an opportunity – for new profits, including what calls the common future into question.” Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. by Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 65.
“Thinking is always thinking with and in the midst of experience.” James, William. The Principles of Psychology: Vol 1 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1957 [1890]), 401.
Haraway is impatient with what she sees as the two dominant responses to this calamitous future: a “comic faith in technofixes […whereby] technology will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but very clever children” and a belief that “the game is over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything better.” It is against these two views that she proposes we attempt to “stay with the trouble,” that is, to face the situation with the recognition that “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations […because] we become-with each other or not at all” Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 3-4.
“The unspoken presumption is that either one can think or one can act, and given that it is absolutely mandatory that an action be performed, thinking must fall away.” Scarry, Elaine. Thinking in an Emergency (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 7.
“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. […] To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.” Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Haymarket Books, [2004] 2016), 4.
Utopia’s “deepest vocation is to bring home […] our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself: and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as a result of the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners” Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso Books, 2005) 289.
“A posthuman landscape is composed of exhausted worlds, though not necessarily the absence of the ‘human’ per se. Instead, the posthuman is a speculative gesture, a figure that must radically adjust its position, be wary of assuming its place of privilege and exception, and instead understand that it is bound up and entangled with all manner of things, material and immaterial, corporeal and incorporeal worldly forces. Importantly, the ‘posthuman’ cannot be extricated from its location. It can claim no special vantage point or privilege. It must undertake its work from within a situation, which presents the problem of how to undertake an adequate survey from where you are. Who surveys what, and with what purpose in mind? No site can be entirely exhausted, because surveying opens up future possibilities and potentialities that must be considered with a sense of responsibility and responsiveness amidst our ecologies of creative practice.” Frichot, Hélène. Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 5.
Architecture produces and reproduces “material and spatial relations of power in designed environments. […] Architecture has fully participated in the processes leading to this crisis [of global warming, care deficiencies, and the hollowing out of political power. Architecture must face] the urgent project of shifting the values and habits that produce our near exhausted existential territories.” Frichot, Hélène, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting, eds. Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies (London; New York: Routledge, 2017), 1.
“How can we understand the entanglement of alienation, hierarchy and domination in terms that are simultaneously social, economic, ecological and political? And how can this understanding be used to leverage stronger and more joyful alliances for climate justice, reflecting insights, and commitments that are simultaneously feminist, queer, anticolonial, and trans-species?” Gaard, Greta. Critical Ecofeminism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), xxii.
“The most recognizable tool of strategic foresight is scenario planning. It involves several stages: identifying forces that will shape future market and operating conditions; exploring how those drivers may interact; imagining a variety of plausible futures; revising mental models of the present on the basis of those futures; and then using those new models to devise strategies that prepare organizations for whatever the future actually brings. […] Humans tend to conceive of time as linear and unidirectional, as moving from past to present to future, with each time frame discrete. We remember yesterday; we experience today; we anticipate tomorrow. But the best scenario planning embraces a decidedly nonlinear conception of time. That’s what Long View and Evergreen [US marine project conducted by the Coast Guard for anticipating security threats, developed after 9/11] did: They took stock of trends in the present, jumped many years into the future, described plausible worlds created by those drivers, worked backward to develop stories about how those worlds had come to pass, and then worked forward again to develop robust strategies. In this model, time circles around on itself, in a constantly evolving feedback cycle between present and future. In a word, it is a loop. Once participants began to view time as a loop, they understood thinking about the future as an essential component of taking action in the present. The scenarios gave them a structure that strengthened their ability to be strategic, despite tremendous uncertainty. It became clear that in making decisions, Coast Guard personnel should learn not only from past experience but also from imagined futures.” Scoblic, J. Peter. ‘Learning from the Future,’ Harvard Business Review (July 2020) https://hbr.org/2020/07/learning-from-the-future
“Marx […] may have taught us to expect— if not to accept— that the production of goods in capitalist societies would be organized around monetized trade and the pursuit of profit, but what should we make of the fact that even our promises are now being made only to be “sold” or otherwise exchanged, as if the mere buying and selling of financial assets were sufficient to turn an uncertain future into a source of security in the present? It seems clear that the very frailty of our social relations— the possibility, say, that we might falter in our commitments to one another— can now be measured and speculated on, but what does it mean to live in a world where risk itself can be treated as something to be bought or sold, and is this not to some extent comparable to the ways that labor was once thought of in the European nineteenth century? [The form of our society] is no longer the ‘commodity-form of the product of labour,’ as in Marx’s formulation, but the security form of capital itself.” Ascher, Ivan. Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction (New York: Zone Books, 2016), 14-15.
“The primary purpose of using scenarios is to prepare for strategic change. By strategic change we mean initiatives that bring new relationships, value chains and constellations into existence. […] Mental model is a key concept for scenario planning and refers to the way a person sees the world. […] An individual’s worldview is the composite of experiences, values, knowledge and dispositions that formulate the content and co-construct the reality map.” Sharpe, Bill, and Kees Van der Heijden, eds. Scenarios for Success: Turning Insights in to Action (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), xiix, 34.
If we are to innovate, we need to “think in terms of long-term transitions: what brought today’s challenges into being, and how might things develop in the future? The […] task is to be hospice workers for the dying culture and midwives for the new. [There are 5 challenges for transformative innovation, which are] Knowing: the first challenge is to shift our ways of making sense of the operating environment so that we become comfortable with its complexity rather than overwhelmed by it. […] Imagining involves asking the question: “What are the processes that will help guide us towards a ‘wise initiative’ – one with the best chance of success in the real world whilst also carrying the hopes and aspirations of the initiating group? […Being involves management of people and teams] “to bring a group of people together to take this step, to move outside the comfort of simply improving what is in place and to make a stand for something radically different. The group needs to be organised, led and managed to succeed” […] Doing involves testing over time and reflective learning throughout the process. […And enabling: what are the conditions that enable an innovation to succeed? We need to ask] “how policy, strategy and, in particular, finance can enable more transformative innovation. [Leicester adds a sixth challenge: Supporting:] investing in intentionally designed systems and structures to support a culture of renewal in our public, civic and social systems in just the way that market-based systems and structures have evolved to support commercial innovation. […Transformative innovation] intentionally shifts existing systems towards a new pattern of activity suited to the changed environment. Anyone can disrupt a system. But you need a third horizon to disrupt it with a purpose. [Characteristics of successful transformative innovation include being neither too critical of the old nor to rashly novel, but being] Balanced: paying skilful attention to the twin requirements to be hospice workers for the dying culture and midwives for the new, consciously operating in both worlds at the same time. […Other characteristics include starting small and being grounded, then expanding visions once early steps succeed, and selling innovation through a rhetoric of abundance not scarcity,] revealing hidden resources – by freeing up resources locked into the existing system and by configuring new sources of abundance. It is scarcity that is undermining the effectiveness of our present systems. [Last but not least, successful transformative innovation resists appropriation by] Maintaining a pioneering spirit even in the face of success, preferring to be followed by, rather than swallowed by, the mainstream system. It can be very difficult to resist siren calls to ‘mainstream’ any innovation that does well. The overwhelming instinct of a system in decline is to search around for innovations that will save it. But propping up the old system will not hasten the arrival of the new – and may make its eventual appearance all the more costly and painful. […] Innovation requires scaling (increasing the numbers of people involved), embedding (making this approach ‘the way things are done around here’) and spreading (introducing the approach in other areas).” Leicester, Graham. Transformative Innovation: A Guide to Practice and Policy (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2016), 10, 14, 18-20, 28.
“If we take imaginative potential seriously, we can properly articulate a politics committed to the expulsion of misery, a politics that is not ‘politics,’ a schema that refuses persuasion, compromise, sacrifice, the trap of practicality… The structural limits of this world restrict our ability to articulate all that the imagination is capable of conceiving. Do not forget this. […] The way we talk about life and living, the language we use, builds a kind of structure… When we say ‘housing for all’ and the government responds with ‘the homeless are being temporarily housed in hotels to avoid the spread of the virus,’ they are building a linguistic structure that defines the realm of the possible, that implicitly tells us to want less, to expect that total reconfiguration is out of the question. Like a poorly designed building, linguistic structures affect how we think, breathe, move and act. […] We are familiar with a particular kind of linguistic structure: the preservation of a system of organisation that places capital before all else. This system ties our hands and feet together.” Olufemi, Lola. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (London: Hajar Press, 2021), 34, 43.
“We have no alternative but to question growth. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the 1 billion people who still attempt to live on half the price of a cup of coffee each day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival. It has failed, spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods… In these circumstances, a return to business as usual is not an option. Prosperity for the few founded on ecological destruction and persistent social injustice is no foundation for a civilized society. Economic recovery is vital. Protecting people’s jobs – and creating new ones – is absolutely essential. But we also stand in urgent need of a renewed sense of shared prosperity. A deeper commitment to justice in a finite world… The role of government has been framed so narrowly by material aims and hollowed out by a misguided vision of unbounded consumer freedoms. The concept of governance itself stands in urgent need of renewal… prosperity goes beyond material pleasures. It transcends material concerns. It resides in the quality of our lives and in the health and happiness of our families. It is present in the strength of our relationships and our trust in the community. It is evidenced by our satisfaction at work and our sense of shared meaning and purpose. It hangs on our potential to participate fully in the life of society. Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to create the conditions under which this is possible. […] Technology will save us. Capitalism is good at technology. So let’s just keep the show on the road and hope for the best. This delusional strategy has reached its limits. Simplistic assumptions that capitalism’s propensity for efficiency will stabilize the climate and solve the problem of resource scarcity are almost literally bankrupt. We now stand in urgent need of a clearer vision, braver policy-making, something more robust in the way of a strategy with which to confront the dilemma of growth.” Jackson, Tim. Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London: Routledge, 2009), 15, 188.
We must turn “today’s divisive and degenerative economies into ones that are distributive and regenerative by design. […] When it comes to new economic thinking, draw the change you want to see in the world…It’s easy to get started. Just pick up a pencil and draw.” Raworth, Kate. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin, 2017), 287, 293.
“Hypnopolis 2: Humanity is cleaning up the planet – thanks to the use of sustainable new technologies. Just in time to save it. Efforts are tireless. Any hesitation would mean complete failure. When murderous eco-terrorists free their imprisoned leader, though, the future of humanity is threatened. […] Although much of the podcast’s six episodes sounds like science fiction, some of the visionary themes and futuristic transportation options depicted in Hypnopolis 2 draw their inspiration from what BMW is already putting in place or using in today’s vehicles. […] You, the listener, can influence the course of the story through your decisions, which you simply express through short voice commands. Ask Alexa. Just remember… the future is in your hands.” Hypnopolis 2 podcast description, BMW https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/hypnopolis2-podcast.html
“In designing tools (objects, structures, policies, expert systems, discourses, even narratives) we are creating ways of being […] we design our world, and our world designs us back. [Our challenge for the future is to ensure that design is] extricated from its embeddedness in modernist unsustainable and defuturing practices and redirected toward other ontological commitments, practices, narratives, and performances. [… We need design practices that are] participatory, socially oriented, situated, and open ended and that challenge the business-as-usual mode of being, producing and consuming.” Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018) 4, 15, 27.
“We rarely develop scenarios that suggest how things should be because it becomes too didactic and even moralistic. [… We want to design in a way that] strives to keep alive other possibilities by providing a counterpoint to the world around us and encouraging us to see that everyday life could be different.” Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 3, 44.
“Futures Intelligence is about anticipating change, retaining market relevance, and imagining the possible and plausible scenarios that could play out in the near and long term future of the organization. […] Futures Intelligence and foresight are essential to an organization’s growth, profit, and longevity in an ever-shifting world. Preparing for the future now, however uncertain, puts those organizations and leaders in a position to not only be part of the future but shape it too.” Hackl, Cathy. ‘The Business Case for Futures Intelligence,’ Forbes (8 November 2020) https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhackl/2020/11/08/the-business-case-for-futures-intelligence/
“The extraordinary speed of change and disruption hurtling towards every industry is causing business and government sectors to question and rethink their entire strategic planning approach. Unlike traditional models focused on a predicted or forecasted future with accompanying hard-wired strategies and systems, companies need to remain agile and prepare today for multiple plausible futures, each with its own specific threats and opportunities. […] Developing Alternate Futures® scenarios long has been a mainstay of the Toffler Associates approach to enabling Future Proof® organizations. The methodology identifies drivers of change that, in turn, create a range of possible futures. […] Toffler Associates is a future-focused strategic advisory firm. Our Future Proof® business consulting approach helps global leaders understand how future shifts impact current decisions so they can take advantage of opportunity, manage risk, and create future value.” ‘Futures & Foresight’ webpage, Toffler Associates https://tofflerassociates.com/services/futures-foresight/
“The Community Economies Collective adopts an anti-essentialist thinking approach. Instead of reducing the world to a few key determinants, we understand the world as shaped by multiple and interacting processes, only some of which we can apprehend. This approach helps us recognize the power and efficacy of things that might seem small and insignificant. It also means that we are open to the unexpected and the unknown… [there are] multiple pathways towards more sustainable and equitable worlds. [… The Collective] is involved in ongoing processes of learning and ‘becoming ethical subjects’ through negotiation with human and ‘earth others’ (species, ecologies, landscapes and seascapes). We aim for ongoing, courageous, and honest ethical relationships and transformation rather than a utopia. We recognize that there is probably no final or most desirable state of ethical being. […The Collective] identifies a cluster of ethical concerns or ‘coordinates’ around which community economies are being (and might be) built. [They are:] survival (what do we need to survive?); surplus (what do we do with the stuff left over after our survival is taken care of?); transactions (how do we ethically source the things we cannot produce ourselves?); consumption (what do we really need to consume?); commons (how can we grow and maintain a shared material and cultural environment with other humans and non-humans?); investment (what do we do with stored wealth to ensure the wellbeing of future generations?) Gibson-Graham, J. K., ‘Cultivating Community Economies’, in The New Systems Reader, ed. by James Gustave Speth and Kathleen Courrier (New York: Routledge, 2021), 412, 414.
“The refusal to integrate [the history of slavery] into our views of modern economics prevents us from telling the truth about the current destruction of the environment, or to acknowledge—really acknowledge—the misery of workers today who provide us our goods. Facing this history, and thus reconnecting with the real providers of wealth, is the only way out of the property-based economics of capitalism and into a civic economy of different systems of provision that could save the future for our children and grandchildren.” Brown, Marvin T. ‘A Civic Economy of Provisions,’ in James Gustave Speth, ed., The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy (New York London: Routledge, 2021), 58.
“We have to ideate—imagine and conceive—together. We must imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms, so that no one sees Black people as murderers, or Brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as potential cultural and economic innovators. This is a time-travel exercise for the heart. This is collaborative ideation— what are the ideas that will liberate all of us? The more people that collaborate on that ideation, the more that people will be served by the resulting world(s). Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. […] Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for. [brown offers metaphors/ models from nature as a political guide for emergent strategies, for example:] Mycelium is the part of the fungus that grows underground in thread-like formations. It connects roots to one another and breaks down plant material to create healthier ecosystems. Mycelium is the largest organism on earth. Interconnectedness. Remediation. Detoxification. […] How can we pivot toward practicing transformative justice? How do we shift from individual, interpersonal, and inter-organizational anger toward viable, generative, sustainable systemic change? In my facilitation and mediation work, I’ve seen three questions that can help us grow. […] 1) Why? Listen with “Why?” as a framework. 2) Ask yourself/selves: What can I/we learn from this? 3) How can my real-time actions contribute to transforming this situation (versus making it worse)?” brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017)