Atelier WeekNotes w/c 17 & 24 Mar 2025

'CATALYST & ENABLER' MANAGEMENT -2025 Roles and Intentions. -Job search feedback. INITIATIVES -Venture Partner at Conduit Connect. 0/DETECTING -Derailment risk. -Rise of new religious practices.

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.

This two-week-er covers:

'CATALYST & ENABLER' MANAGEMENT
-2025 Roles and Intentions
-Job search feedback

INITIATIVES
-Venture Partner at Conduit Connect

0/DETECTING
-Derailment risk: not from natural disasters but from Trump's actions.
-Rise of new religious practices and/or new religions?

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.

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CATALYST & ENABLER MANAGEMENT

2025 Roles and Intentions

In the last WeekNotes I gave the 2024 Atelier results (which meant admitting to myself and you, dear reader, that I had missed lots of the targets I had set myself, though with understandable reasons). I said I would put my intentions for (the rest of) 2025 in the next WeekNote.

I've found it difficult to land the specifics, especially the process indicators. So, I will share instead where I have got to. Again, this comes out of the 'Your Best Year Yet' process (see this previous WeekNote). Some of the questions are: 'What roles do I play in my life? What are my goals for each role?'.

Techie point: in my self-created Stance Guidelines (or, my espoused life philosophy), I am trying to move away from 'the good-enough is the enemy of the perfect' (that is, a focus on definitely hitting the goal ends up actually ends up with me doing nothing, for fear of doing something wrong, and therefore missing the goal through drift). Instead, the emphasis on 'being and becoming, simultaneously. More of a sports psychology: concentrate on the process, and the results will follow. So, I think of myself as having intentions for each role, not goals per se.

Anyway, this year, I consolidated the professional side into 3 roles (in CAPITALS below), each with some intentions.

1/ CATALYST & ENABLER.

Overarching: Embody a practice of ‘Deep Transformation’. This is my professional priority for the year. Where 'Deep Transformation' puts at its 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', uses the insights of ‘Radical Resistance’, but not retreating to 'Make Good Ruins'. More explanation here.

• Job search: where that can be true.

• Atelier of What’s Next: learning-by-trying. (Much more detail on this to follow.)

• Be a ’wise guru who enables others’ through Powerful Times, ISR module & podcast, writing. (More on this phrase in the Application feedback below).

2/ CONNECTOR.

• Be active in finding and contributing to the professional networks I need: for operations, business development for the long-term

• Edmund Hillary Foundation (EHF): help Aotearoa New Zealand pilot a better world, engage with other EHFs, & benefit from that experimentation.

3/ PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCHER.

• Practice learning cycle: ensure learning-by-doing is an ongoing, successful habit (doing things better, doing better things, re-imagining better). Appreciative Inquiry. WeekNotes.

• Learn by course & reading for specific skills and domains to keep me at frontiers. Executive Functions ; AI; Sprint / Agile; Design thinking & Ontological design; Resilience; Commercial / entrepreneurial streak; Fundraising.

A few things to pull out:

• These are written so that they can be true whether I get a job or have a renewed burst of success with the Atelier. (Partly this is because I believe I any job I get that I want will have some combination of these roles, and embody a practice of ‘Deep Transformation’, just likely with a tighter focus and/or an existing reputation and funding ecosystem).

• There are presumed flywheels across the three:

  • Being a connector with the useful networks is what allows me to have a sense of what is happening at the frontier and to attract the work I want to do.

  • Being a practice-based research should mean I have fast and effective learning loops, where lessons are learnt and then put into practice. The weekly(-ish) WeekNotes is one of the routines to support that.

• The notion of 'Deep Transformation' is having to carry a lot of weight here for a term I have made up and for which I have an intuition, rather than lots of evidence. Such is the nature of trying to work at frontiers. But also, risks becoming a concept worshipped for its supposed magical powers (much like 'sustainability', 'strategy', 'freedom' or 'democracy' -- discuss).

WHAT NEXT

• Pursue the intentions!

• Come up with trackable process and output indicators which prompt action (rather than induce paralysis or trying to game the indicators).

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Job search feedback

So, I've had a number of second interviews with organisations (hurray!) but not been offered a job (booo!).

I won't be putting up the detail of every experience, but a few things:

• One double-edged humblebrag: "we think you are too senior for this role'.

• Some organisations believe they are at the frontier of their domain, but I worry they are being co-opted into a 'thin' version of their approach, which risks optimising the status quo. I've kept pushing a bit for a ‘thick’ version, which transforms the status quo into something better. So far, folks are uncomfortable with that. (So, I've probably dodged a few bullets.)

• There is different emphasis in selling yourself:

  • As consultant: look at this difference I bring, which isn’t part of what you do now.

  • As a future colleague: look at how I can contribute to what you do now, plus there is this extra difference too.

• "You’re obviously a natural storyteller, which is a real asset." I think people who meet me as a teenager or in my 20s would be surprised at this. (I confess, I was, even now.)

• "You don’t enjoy the challenge of being pithy [in interview answers, presentation and CV]". This I recognise, as would many of my colleagues.

• Confirmation that I bring "structured thinking and capacity to challenge assumptions", which is nice. For instance:

  • "Visionary in your approach and proposed solution, which was exciting to the panel."

  • "a clear demonstration of how you engage with complexity and hold a multi-layered view of transformation."

  • "[Your] relational intelligence and systems awareness would be an asset in any founding team environment."

A shout out to noted systems change agent Indy Johar and the team at Dark Matter Labs. I had a very positive experience, where we agreed the particular role didn't suit me. We were discussing what I could bring when Indy paused the conversation, and tested with me whether really I was "naturally inclined toward advisory and sense-making roles—offering wisdom, guidance, and strategic insight".

The answer, of course, is yes. They were looking for more of COO. I contain multitudes, but not a lot of COO. So, we agreed to stop. Unfortunate, as what they have planned is deeply interesting, but still the right decision. But congrats to Indy and team for listening so well, and saying know with such wisdom and generosity.

Intriguingly, in 2010 I had conducted a career exercise which involved identifying the two (max) archetypes that I wanted to convey in my 'personal brand'. Those two were:

• Magician – "transform the situation".

• Sage – "help people understand their world (not = tell people what their understanding should be)".

(Yes, I know, such bold statements are icky and prone to hubris. As a relatively introverted Brit, I don't like it. And yet, there is something necessary about thinking in those terms if I am going to 'play the game' of selling my professional services, whether as an employee or an advisor. Or, at least, to choose to be able to play that game.)

It seems that personal brand messaging is coming across. All I need now is for those to be qualities someone wants to regualrly pay to have access to.

WHAT NEXT

• More applications!

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INITIATIVES

Venture Partner at Conduit Connect

On Mon 17 Mar, I had my first event as a Venture Partner at Conduit Connect, an impact investor for early stage start-ups. (More on Conduit Connect and this unpaid role in a past WeekNote here.)

It was an evening of talking about The Conduit EIS Impact fund, which invests in scalable impact ventures that benefit from EIS tax relief, plus showcasing some of the companies in their portfolio. (Nothing in this post constitutes investment advice, and so on.) Those comapnies:

• Zen Educate: leading the wave of intervention needed to improve supply teaching recruitment.

• Perci Health: a digital Cancer Clinic supporting cancer survivors to help them manage and recover from symptoms and side effects of the disease and its treatments – helping people get well faster, return to their daily lives and back to work.

• The mOm Incubator: an affordable, lightweight, easy to use neonatal incubator, offering a safe thermoregulated environment for newborns to thrive in.

• Sojo: making fashion circular by connecting registered tailors with customers who need alterations and repairs via its app.

A few reflections:

• Health-related products or services are easier to create people-centred stories. The mOm incubator in particular can wow with ease.

• No single investment will lead to systems change. It is about the overall approach.

To that end, I find myself re-reading the RSA’s Impact Accelerator (Conway, Leadbetter and Winhall, 2019).

• A traditional VC starts with a large portfolio and narrows down to a few big bets.

• Instead, this approach argues for:

  • Start with mission, a narrative for big change and small group of committed people, acting as ambassadors.

  • Deliberately invite and attract different types of collaborators which fulfil different needs and components of the future system you are discovering you need. There needs to be a positive incentive for collaborators; joining in is scratching an important, unresolved itch.

  • Build a wider field, by sharing experiences, especially small wins and small failures.

  • Have many safe-to-fail experiments within the wider approach.

Rowan Conway has taken that work further with a Mission Approach which is the basis of her doctoral thesis (Prof Mazzucato, the mission-orientation economy pioneer, is her supervisor).

WHAT NEXT

• Catch up with Rowan on where her methods ahve got to.

• Speaking with Conduit Connect on keeping on improving their systems approach.

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0/DETECTING

Derailment risk: not from natural disasters, but from Trump's actions.

‘Derailment risk’ has been defined by Laybourn et al as "the risk that the path to re-stabilisation of the Earth system is derailed by interacting biophysical and socioeconomic factors."

Their paper uses a case study of a climate tipping element – the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – to illustrate what they mean. (I wrote a little about AMOC in July of last year here.)

Even in the scoping discussions of Hard Investigation on responding to the risks we're in, we presumed that the triggering events, which caused resources to be moved from building the future to coping with the crisis, would be natural disasters.

But. It occurred to me earlier in the week that we are living right now through a derailment event.

The Trump Administration has taken a chainsaw to the established order, both within the US and globally. On the international stage, many countries have concluded they cannot rely on the US being a reliable ally.

For instance, Germany has taken a historic decision to release its 'debt brake' in order to finance, amongst other things, more spending on defence. The UK Prime Minister has announced that the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget will be cut from 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent of GNI by 2027, in order to fund an increase to the defence budget.

Many observers believe the German decision is a good one. (The debt brake was already having lots of perverse effects.) I think cutting aid spending at the exact moment that USAID ha disappeared, and when the UK is claiming to be a global player and wants to use its historic Commonwealth connections, is breathtakingly stupid and immoral. but what do I know?

Even without these decisions, senior politician's time is now going into dealing with Trump, and also building the alternatives.

That is time not spent on other challenges, including, but not limited to, climate mitigation. Also, the new, extra spending on defence (which I agree is needed) has consequences. Either increase your debt (like Germany) or divert existing spending (like the UK). But those resources will not be available for other uses (borrowing to adapt, or providing aid).

That's outside of the US. Inside the US, a huge amount of state capacity is has been either cut or is threatened. There must be quite a lot of chaos inside various government organisations. Huge opportunity cost right there, plus a far smaller capacity when the dust settles.

Perhaps philanthropy will step in some global public goods (like collecting climate data), but then those resources are not available for other uses too.

All of which is to say, a derailment event is here.

In 2016 I wrote a piece of speculative fiction which said we would call the coming decade The Shocking Twenties (in contrast to last century's Roaring Twenties). Wish I had been wrong.

WHAT NEXT

• More sense-making on Trump, the motivating intention (not so much of Trump, who is all id, but of the people who wrote the Project 2025 plan) and working through what my responses can be.

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Rise of new religious practices and/or new religions?

Three times in the last week someone has said to me something along the lines of:

'I know people are making up new religious practices and/or new religions'.

They said that unprompted. So, as coincidences it is quite a coincidence.

My first degree was Master of Physics, and I am a very declared atheist. So, I am deeply reluctant to turn to spiritual beings as explanations.

(Though, I do need to say that science cannot explain everything, there are aspects of the universe that we don't know, and also don't know what we don't know. So it is important to accept that, even as human knowledge expands and demonstrates usefulness in new domains, there is now, and always will be, some mystery to reality.)

In Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, James Hollis claims "perhaps the most important paragraph of the twentieth century" was written by Jung:

“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no long rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.”

Put another way, in the past religious practices, while imperfect, mediated the relationship between us and our psychologies, individual and collective.

In the West, those religious practices have fallen away. But we still have psychologies, individual and collective. And our psychological features have attached to other phenomena, like celebrities or consumerism.

What has been lost are the practices which try to deliberately mediate those attachments. And so, many of us, individually and collectively, are driven by our unconscious, with limited ways of interrupting the automatic, and instead having a mindful choice. This leads to pathologies, at the collective and individual levels.

So, if Jung is broadly right, then I am not surprised that people start to invent new practices, or turn to other religions, which help them to mediate the relationships between our selves on the one hand, and, on the other, our individual and collective psychologies.

No need for a supernatural or superstitious explanation that describes why we are open to supernatural or superstitious explanations.

WHAT NEXT

• Not sure what to do exactly on this insight. Watching brief!