We all know the dreamers. Those who love nothing more than to pause everything to ponder how the world could be different. They stretch our imaginations as they paint vivid descriptions of a renewed street, or city, or country, or even the whole world. They use words like wholeness, regeneration, care economy, interconnected, interdependent, love, connection. When we feel rested and empowered, these words inspire us, fill our cups and drive us to be the best we can be. But when we are exhausted and cynical, they deflate us further, proving once more that the gap between the world as it is and how it should be is an unbridgeable chasm. We label them “visionaries”, “creative”, “idealistic” and “naive”. Amongst friends and family they are the ones with “lots of ideas”. Life continues around them like a stream flowing around a rock.
We also know the conservatives: not of the political variety. They are those who don’t hesitate to explain why something won’t work. Why it is best to conserve things the way that they are. Why it’s not worth taking a risk or seizing an opportunity because, actually, things are ok. Life is good. Don’t you know how hard our grandparents had it? If we’re feeling rested and empowered, we rise to the challenge. Sure, it might be ok for you, but what about those left behind, what about the collapse of our natural world? Surely with all our privilege we have a responsibility to improve things? When we feel exhausted and cynical, we are comforted by conservatives. Comforted in our own passivity; our belief that it’s not worth changing everything in pursuit of a better world. Things are ok. In many ways they’ve never been better.
And we know the entrepreneurs: those who live to disrupt. They jump from project to project, each one with the same unshakeable confidence, gathering large followings of inspired teams who work around the clock to create something new. For entrepreneurs, everything can be framed as a problem to solve: often with a deceptively simple, marketable solution that will upend a system, creating prosperity and growth for all. If we’re feeling rested and empowered we love spending time with entrepreneurs. They’re not just talking about things, they’re making them happen! We live vicariously through them. We love hearing about the risks, the sacrifices, the blood, sweat and tears. But when we’re feeling exhausted and cynical we see clearly that although some things change, the important things actually don’t. They stay the same. Or get worse. Inequality grows, extinctions accelerate and our climate catastrophe is here. Despite a flurry of activity, projects and stories, the fundamentals of our system stay the same.
As much as archetypes can help us make sense of the complex world around us, they are perhaps more useful or interesting when used as a mirror for ourselves. We all have moments of deep imagination, when we envisage how the world could be radically different. We imagine how it would feel to wake up in a world where need came before greed and nature was thriving. At other times we feel fiercely protective of what we have and how things are. We use the system to get ahead. We lean on rules and norms to build safe and secure lives. We defend the status quo to protect our family or friends. And sometimes we’ve simply had enough of how things are and we roll up our sleeves to drive change: shifting careers, ending relationships, starting a community project, founding a business.
Leaning into the head, heart and hands for a regenerative future
We are all conservatives, entrepreneurs and dreamers. We can rethink these archetypes as three parts of ourselves: our head, heart and hands. Our heart as a dreamer, our head as the conservative or protector, and our hands as the entrepreneur or the creator. All three parts can be beautiful, nourishing and positively impactful on ourselves and the world around us. However, in the wrong balance, our well-intentioned work can be ineffective, or worse, harmful. We might protect harmful aspects of the current system, or we dream without connection to the current world, or we chase disruption without care for how the world does or doesn’t change as a result.
So how can we move between these three aspects of ourselves in a way that supports the transformation that the world desperately needs, towards regeneration and a hopeful future? Which attributes should we nurture or bring forward in which context?
The answer begins in two parts. The first is self-awareness, or the ability to recognise and understand the emotional landscape and behaviours that make us who we are. Put simply, it is the ability to see ourselves clearly. If we are able to reflect on how we protect, disrupt and dream in various contexts, we can adjust our behaviours to be more positively impactful in each interaction or project.
However, self-awareness is only one part of this equation as it doesn’t move us beyond individual actions and direct relationships. In order to calibrate our protecting, disruptive and dreaming selves, we require an understanding of how our actions affect not only those immediately around us, but how they ripple out into a broader system of aligned and non-aligned actors. This requires not just self-awareness, but also systems-awareness.
Systems-awareness has always been important, but in our current context of environmental and social crisis, it becomes essential. Many understand the existential nature of our environmental crisis, but fewer understand what Daniel Schmachtenberger (issue 70) describes as the “metacrisis”. Schmachtenberger’s organisation The Consilience Project writes “our civilisation has never been more vast, complicated, and fragile. This systemic fragility is exacerbated by new technologies, geopolitical instability, an ecological crisis and a reliance on global economic supply chains. These interlocking, interrelated problems are known collectively as the metacrisis.”
Impact leaders who are passionate about single-issues like climate, wealth inequality, health, housing, gender equality, the energy transition, and democratic renewal, must recognise the interconnectedness of these challenges, and therefore the interconnected nature of any effective “solution”. Not recognising this interconnectedness, and the social and economic system that enables it, leads many well intentioned actors to being ineffective: we may protect institutions that should transform, develop disruptive “solutions” that cause unintended negative consequences, or deploy radical imagination and fail to connect to the current reality to the world we’d like to see.
In the context of the metacrisis, systems-awareness is the ability to recognise and reflect on the interconnected elements of the system that we are affecting, and how our work may or may not be contributing to the broader impact that we are seeking in the world. Our “system” could be our school, community or city, or it could be a thematic system like energy, water or health. These systems of course intersect and interrelate. Importantly, systems awareness doesn’t lead to an ability to control them or manage them like a complex machine. As renowned systems pioneer Donella Meadows reminds us, “Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned… we can dance with them!”
Systems awareness is closely linked to the discipline of systems-thinking, a mindset and approach that emphasises the relationships, interdependence and connections in our complex world. This mindset moves us beyond the simple and reductive thinking that dominates our society; the mindset that distills big problems into “solvable” chunks. While simplicity can be seductive, it can also stop meaningful transformation and can reinforce the existing ways that a system operates. This leads to a lot of activity and very little real change.
One model that can help us navigate this strange and wonderful world of systems-awareness is the Three Horizons framework developed by Bill Sharpe, a systems thinker and futures practitioner, and adapted by many others. The model is a tool for thinking about how our world changes and what actually drives these changes. It describes aspects of the future that are already visible in the present. Sharpe describes these aspects as “horizons” and they can be drawn on a graph where on the y axis we have prevalence and on the x axis we have the passage of time.
Three Horizon Framework Towards a Regenerative Future
Horizon One: preserving the status quo
The first horizon (H1) is the current, dominant paradigm that is all around us. This is the domain of the conservative, preserving the status quo, protecting business as usual. We rely entirely on these systems today, but as our context shifts it is clear that many are no longer fit-for-purpose and lead us to a degenerative, divisive and destructive outcome. Our conservative selves play a vital role in sustaining the critical elements of our current system, while discerning what elements we need to let go of, to transition to a more regenerative world.
Horizon Two: where change happens
The second horizon (H2) is where change happens. In the context of increasing upheaval all around us, from climate change to social movements to pandemics, there are increasing opportunities for our disruptive and entrepreneurial selves to create new projects. How effective these initiatives are will depend on the self and systems-awareness of each actor, and their ability to dance effectively between the world we have and the world we want to see. In the same way that we can't be lulled by the simplicity of problem solving in the metacrisis, we must recognise that the entrepreneurial spirit is not an end state: it can be unleashed to create space for deeper transformative change.
Horizon Three: the next economy
The third horizon (H3) is the world that we are working towards: a just and inclusive one that supports human flourishing while living in harmony with the natural world. This is the domain of the dreamer. Although this horizon is the least prevalent today, it is already here, in small ways, all around us. Think of the hundreds and hundreds of stories in the pages of Dumbo Feather over the years. As Arundhati Roy notes, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Conscious and effective leadership is required on all three horizons if we are to move from a degenerative to a regenerative world. And each horizon requires us to calibrate our conservative, disrupting and dreaming selves differently. Our systemic instability also means we’ll increasingly find ourselves on unexpected horizons. It may feel uncomfortable to dream when we’re used to protecting, or to disrupt when we’re used to dreaming. This is the work of our times: dancing across horizons, recalibrating ourselves as we go.
So, where do you operate on the first horizon, conserving elements of the status quo? Which aspects do you actively conserve and who benefits? How do you discern which elements are conserved and which are relinquished or transformed? If you work in a large workplace, which hierarchical structures ensure critical accountability and which simply preserve status quo power arrangements, shutting off potential for creativity or evolution?
Where are you dancing on the second horizon to create new projects and initiatives? How do you engage with the current system (H1), and how do you bridge to the world you want to see (H3)? Is your disruption supporting the emergence of a more regenerative world, or has it been captured by the first horizon, reinforcing all the things you sought out to change? If you work in a new start-up, consider where your financial resourcing comes from and whether this shifts the transformative potential towards H3 or back towards H1?
And where do you operate on the third horizon, imagining entirely new ways of perceiving and being in the world? How do you create the conditions for radical reimagining, inviting others in, while ensuring you create connections to the way the world is and how it is changing? In your local community, how can you ensure that individuals with less free time or resources are included in developing a collective vision so that it is connected to diverse real-world experiences?
Just as we are all conservatives, disruptors and dreamers, the three horizons are always present in our system. It is the balance between them that adds up to our current reality. Systems-awareness can help us to appreciate the importance of conserving the aspects of our system which create stability and preserve life, the critical value of a dream or vision to give us a goal for our transition, and the power of entrepreneurial endeavour to get us there.
Combining self-awareness and systems-awareness can allow us to move beyond the comfort and simplicity of our conservative, dreamer or entrepreneurial mindsets. We can integrate the attributes of these archetypes as the ingredients required for truly transformational leadership. This is hard work. It’s harder than staying in the lanes of traditional management, entrepreneurship or creative endeavour. But perhaps that is exactly what this radical moment and our precarious world requires of us.
Kaj Löfgren is the CEO of Regen Melbourne, a platform for ambitious collaboration in service of Greater Melbourne, and the Entrepreneur in Residence at the Small Giants Academy.
Regen Melbourne is powered by an alliance of approximately 150 diverse organisations and hosts a portfolio of collaborative projects. This portfolio includes Swimmable Birrarung (making the Birrarung / Yarra River swimmable again), Participatory Melbourne (rejuvenating democracy across the city) and Village Zero (transitioning neighbourhoods to holistic net zero).
In each of these initiatives Regen Melbourne dances across the three horizons.
