Atelier WeekNotes w/c 10, 17, 24 Feb, & 2 Mar
ATELIER MANAGEMENT. From 'getting by' to 'existentially revived'. INITIATIVES. Hard investigations: responding to the risks we're in. Becoming a Venture Partner at Conduit Connect.
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
To state the obvious, if a WeekNotes has to have 4 ‘week commencing’ dates in the title, then the WeekNotes have stopped being…weekly. Apologies.
The short story is that I had spent much of the winter getting by, but am now feeling existentially revived (despite, well, gestures around). A longer story is the first main item below.
Something missing from this WeekNote is actually one of the big things I got up to in these 4 weeks: a visit to Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand for a series of events relating to the Edmund Hillary Fellowship ('innovators, entrepreneurs and investors committed to New Zealand as a basecamp for global impact'). That will get its own special issue next week.
This week covers:
ATELIER MANAGEMENT
-From 'getting by' to 'existentially revived'.
INITIATIVES
-Hard investigations: responding to the risks we're in.
-Becoming a Venture Partner at Conduit Connect.
How can the Atelier of What's Next be of service to you, and your purposes? We'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you have a challenge or idea to put in the studio. Maybe one of our existing topics appeals to you. What if you love to make new things happen by being part of the studio? Or if you have feedback or comments that would improve this deck. Either click the button below or email davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org.
ATELIER MANAGEMENT
From 'getting by' to 'existentially revived'.
At various points in the last year I have hinted at family challenges relating to my eldest, and the long after-effects of three bereavements in our immediate family in the last few years. I don't want to give the details of that (not really my story to tell).
My story to tell here, at least in part, is about how it affected me. Folks how know me will know that I can default into being pretty judgemental, a bit intensely pedantic, and something of an 'all or nothing' perfectionist.
My late-wife (a psychotherapist) and I used to joke that we both had strong superegos to pass on to our children. ("The superego plays the judgemental role via internalized experiences; and the ego is the perceiving, logically organizing agent that mediates between the id's innate desires, the demands of external reality and those of the critical superego." Wikipedia, here. Such pillow talk.)
At the start of 2024, I had set my intentions for using a method called 'Best Year Yet', which uses questions to go from what you achieved last year through to what want to achieve in the coming year. (Summary of the ten questions here.)
The feature which I hadn't come across in other ‘end of year’ methods: turning the lessons from last year into Guidelines going forward. So, not just listing the lessons learnt, but actively integrating into your approach in the world going forward.
At the start of 2024, the lessons I turned into Guidelines included:
Always take the next step immediately, often through a safe-to-fail experiment, ready to learn from the experience.
Make a habit of daily and weekly practices that accumulate skills, outputs, and insights to integrate whether 1st order (‘do things better’), 2nd order (‘do better things”) or 3rd order (‘imagine a better version of better’).
The first few months of 2024 went well. I was taking next steps immediately, and was consistent in my habits (from meditation to run training -- I set a new PB for 10km of 46m41s). 2024 going great and going to be great!
But then my eldest started to have their challenges. And I really struggled to put the 2024 Guidelines into practice. Often I treated them as just tasks (which I then felt guilty about not ticking off) rather than as a way of being (where realising I am failing is a moment to celebrate).
I kept grinding on for the rest of the year, though, as I said back in WeekNote w/c 4 Nov 2024, with reduced efforts and attention. Then in December and January I sorta slowed down to a level of just getting by. Urgent and necessary deadlines were met, but not much else. (Hence the gaps in WeekNotes.)
In January I did a new round of Best Year Yet. It was excruciatingly slow. In 2024, it took me two mornings. In 2025, it took me two months.
But I'm glad I did it, because I had a profound realisation in early Feb. The problem was not the 2024 Guidelines. The ‘problem’ was upstream. The ‘problem’ was my stance in the world, my deep psychology. As in, I was too attached to controlling things, to delivering particular outcomes.
I had an attachment to my eldest getting past their troubles and into a normal path for a young person. But, realistically, there was nothing I could have in 2024 to have made a difference on that. Also, an attachment to the Atelier being successful. Something which I could not guarantee, even if I had been able to work on it with full energy and at the top of my game.
The ‘problem’ was that I said (and understand, intellectually) that the ‘perfect is the enemy of the good’. But I acted as if my stance in the world was ‘the good is the enemy of the perfect’, as in, there is no point doing something good if that cuts off the small chance of doing something perfect.
The realisation I had was of the need to go upstream, into my deeper psyche.
I had forgotten to embody many of the commonplace book phrases that I recommended to others:
The shortest one: “To be here is immense.” (Rilke)
A longer series of quotes from Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa (also very apt in a time of Trump-Musk Presidency) [emphasis added]:
“We have a mind and a body, which are very precious to us. Because we have a mind and body, we can comprehend this world. Existence is wonderful and precious.
“In some sense, we should regard ourselves as being burdened: we have the burden of helping this world. We cannot forget this responsibility to others. But if we take our burden as a delight, we can actually liberate this world. The way to begin is with ourselves. From being open and honest with ourselves, we can also learn to be open with others. So we can work with the rest of the world, on the basis of the goodness we discover in ourselves.”
“If you search for awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except for tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. This kind of sadness doesn’t come from being mistreated. You don’t feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed.
“The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full. You would like to spill your heart’s blood, give your heart to others. For the warrior, this experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness.
“Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. Fearlessness is the closest term, but by fear we mean not “less fear” but “beyond fear.”
“You would like to extend yourself to others and communicate with them. When tenderness evolves in that direction, then you can truly appreciate the world around you.”
Put another way, all of the ‘Art of Possibility’ practices, but especially: ‘Step into a universe of possibility (out of a world of judging and comparing).’
My breakthrough -- rising slowly like a dawn -- was that I needed to inhabit the stance implied by those quotes -- to be the perspectives expressed -- and then I would have the motivation and other means to keep going with the other Guidelines.
So, the new 2025 Guidelines:
STANCE (upstream):
Keep re-connecting with my inspiration. Helping this world is a delight, which starts with myself. The inspiration provides the motivation for the rest.
Being and becoming, simultaneously. In this moment, I am all right as I am and I am exploring creatively with intentions, integrity and humility (not rigid goals, perfect-only delivery and no learning from inevitable failures).
(This phrase inspired by Tim Gallwey's Inner Game of Tennis, see here.)Living life as inquiry. Realising error is a moment of delight. That moment is a chance to learn, integrate and try again, differently.
(The phrase 'living life as inquiry' comes from a seminal action research article by Judi Marshall, who taught on my Masters, described how such research can extend to one’s whole life whereby professional and personal questions can be set within politically relevant frames. See here for a 20 year review of the impact of that article.)
OPERATIONS (downstream)
Ask for help, more than I have before and more than I’m initially comfortable with (without being extractive; and without obligation). Give help when asked (without keeping score).
Nurture flywheels. What is matters if all those component parts are creating a positive, reinforcing feedback loop, which out-competes the alternatives. (More in past WeekNotes on flywheels: here applied to investment principles; here as a test on progress in transformational change.)
These feel like significant realisations to me, the process moving me along from 'getting by' to 'existentially revived'.
I'm aware they are more in the realm of personal psyche than about technocratic Atelier Management. (And, given that Jung in particular use 'psyche' interchangeably with 'soul', I might be sailing into the waters others would call 'spiritual development.)
Even so, at the least, these are significant for my stance in managing the Atelier, and therefore in the strategic stance of the Atelier itself.
The challenge will be embodying the stance in the 2025 Guidelines. Not doing them, but being them.
Retrospectively, I also recognise that there is a strong alignment between the 2025 'Stance' Guidelines and what is known as the third-wave of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Apparently, the first two waves were concerned with challenging and disrupting the content of unhelpful thoughts. The third wave has an emphasis on how we relate to thoughts, and recommends mindfulness and acceptance. As such the third wave has parallels with Buddhism and Stoicism. (In 2024 I had picked a book on a whim: 'Build Your Resilience' by Donald Robertson, which is based on the third wave CBT. Universe moves in mysterious ways.)
Perhaps this explains why I have remained chipper despite personal reversals on the employment front and the general state of the world. But, like a garden needs ongoing weeding and watering, this approach will need ongoing attention and nudging.
The final thing to say about the Best Year Yet process is the major focus I have given myself:
“How can I embody a practice of ‘Deep Transformation’ in whatever professional roles I have?”
Where 'Deep Transformation' is taken from the Depth of Change spectrum:
Put at centre creating a world where humankind living in ways that align with nature, and where people can choose their own version of the good life.
More than 'Strong Reform', which tries to get 'the game' to work institutional reform like mission-based industrial strategy.
Uses the insights of ‘Radical Resistance’, which acknowledge that the game is rigged but is stuck with negative frames which, by directly resisting core features of the status quo, unintentionally feed their presence as frames for our lives. Example: degrowth.
But not retreating to 'Make Good Ruins', which says the game can never by made to work, and the only way forward is to hospice modernity, and give whatever will follow us the chance to emerge. Example: Deep Adaptation.
WHAT NEXT
Embody the stance Guidelines, and put the operational Guidelines into practice. With utmost self-compassion.
INITIATIVES
Hard Investigations: responding to the risks we're in.
In the middle of February, Alex Lockwood sent out this invitation to collaborate a year-long investigation into provoking emotional realisations of the risks we’re in, that still leaves people feeling equipped to act.
Since the middle of last year I have been working with Alex, Clare Farrell and others on what they've been calling 'Hard Investigations', part of Hard Art, "a cultural collective standing in solidarity in the face of climate and democratic collapse”. There are around 200 artists of various kinds involved (including Brian Eno).
My way of expressing the purpose of the Hard Investigations: to bring the creativity of the Hard Artists and others to bear on specific, deep problems, with the aim of shifting mainstream culture away from polarisation and towards profound action. (I think of this as one of my experiments within the emerging practice of 'Deep Transformation' -- see above.)
Alex had been part of the UCL Climate Policy Creative Fellowship. From that experience (and others), our conclusion is that not enough people feel the real risk we’re in, in terms of climate impacts and collapse. If people did, our hunch goes, then we collectively would be more ready to transform our social, political and economic cultures – whatever it took.
So, this invitation is to defibrillate our collective imagination. And because the problem is not about an information deficit but a great stuckness, we believe creative responses have a better chance of intervening well in policy, industry and culture.
The outcomes of this investigation are not a technical appreciation of risk, although we need to understand it well. Instead, our guiding star is for people to experience the emotional realisation of the true level of risk we’re in, while feeling equipped to act. If you have a deep interest in this area, expertise, or funds, get in touch by email Alex (alex@absurdintelligence.com).
WHAT NEXT
Get started with different lines of inquiry in March.
Becoming a Venture Partner at Conduit Connect.
I am delighted to say that I have new role (though unpaid, alas). I am now a Venture Partner at Conduit Connect, 'The Venture Impact Platform' which "backs exceptional, impact-driven, and diverse founders to create economic growth and positive systems change".
The purpose of a Venture Partner: To select the highest quality deals for the Conduit Connect Portfolio including for their direct investment platform, EIS Fund and syndicated investments.
What it involves: providing voluntary insights and expertise to the Conduit Connect team and its investor members and founders. I'm invited to nominate deal flow to the investment team, and introduce the Conduit Connect and its portfolio companies to relevant investors or partners from within their networks.
I'm looking forward to learning more about the gritty reality of impact investing at the early stages (which is where Conduit Connect operates). A very different kind of frontier to Hard Investigations, but a frontier none the less.
I'm also wondering how to bring in some of the insights of the emerging practices of systemic investment (see summaries on Transformative Investment and TransCap's Hallmarks).
If you know any for-profit and for-impact start-ups in climate, health, inclusion, or education domains, then send them my way.
WHAT NEXT
First meeting next week!