Atelier WeekNotes w/c 27 Jan & 3 Feb 2025
Looking for roles. CUSP bulletin. Using Time Well. New podcast episode. Sector change dynamics. Recovering technocrat. Avoiding overwhelm (while swimming in bullshit).
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.
A bumper two week edition covers:
ATELIER
Looking for in-house roles or initiatives that pay.
INITIATIVES
CUSP bulletin: exploring hopefully.
Using Time Well: ending gracefully.
Innovation for Sustainability: Hans Unkles and UK's first electric fishing boat
0/DETECT
Revealed insights from interview on how a small group changing a sector.
-Creating a flywheel as diagnostic test of good enough progress.
-Extractive ethics of insiders relying on outsiders.
Reflections of a recovering technocrat: exploring a more creative stance.
Avoiding overwhelm (while swimming in bullshit).
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
Looking for in-house roles or initiatives that pay
Tough times for the Atelier
In the WeekNote after Trump's victory I argued that his election would make getting paid work tougher for the Atelier. This was on top of some bad luck on individual projects, plus my energies going into my family challenges and not into nurturing a funding ecosystem (as I had as an objective for 2024).
In November, I decided to pursue Parallel Tracks of business development for Atelier work (initiatives at the frontier), and for consulting work (stuff not at the frontier).
It is fair to say this hasn't really worked. Partly, I remained engaged with family things. Partly, there was the usual December slow down indecision-making, waiting on what Trump would do, and now general log-jam astonishment at what he is doing. (For coping with this intended overwhelm, see the last item in 0/DETECT section below.)
I'm not short of initiatives for the Atelier (see below). The challenge is getting paid ones. If you have an initiative which is at the frontier of generating a better future, is stuck in some way, and has a budget to pay for help, then please do get in touch (davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org).
Could you connect me with this kind of in-house role?
Since the start of the year I have been looking for in-house roles and had a series of interviews for some. (Sidebar: I've already had a series of absurd / hilarious / insightful experiences associated with this job search. I will find a way to share my insights (mostly about me, but also about the sustainability ecosystem) in the coming weeks which retains confidentiality and the relationships.)
The roles I am aiming for: where I can be creating and connecting at the frontier of generating a better future.
What kinds of roles? Perhaps:
Programme director in a philanthropic organisation.
Programme director in a for-change organisation (ie a charity or campaign group).
Chief Impact Officers of an ambitious organisation.
Venture builder or accelerator with mission-orientation.
Research into, and teaching of, the emerging practice of deep transformations.
Challenger think tank.
Startup advisor or Non Executive Director.
Influencing investment using futures and systems thinking.
Please do suggest kinds of roles which I have not mentioned but you think are in the same terrain!
Other factors:
Great if can be 90% FTE (so that the Atelier could keep ticking over)
and/or
Can be an interim role (so I can be doing good work while the first phase of Trump II plays out).
Salary above £60k (which is where my freelance consulting has been, or better, over the last few years). Well above is even better.
I am staying in London for the next few years, but can travel within the UK or internationally.
WHAT NEXT
Let me know any ideas or suggestions you have!
Keep stirring the pot, pursuing the ones I have already applied for, and applying for new ones that come up.
INITIATIVES
At the same time, there are initiatives in the Atelier.
CUSP bulletin: exploring hopefully
The Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) is "a cutting-edge research organisation core-funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and the Laudes Foundation". One of the key people is the leading post-growth academic Prof Tim Jackson (you can hear his Powerful Times interview here).
Since 2016, Iain Christie (Associate Professor in Social Science and Ethics of Sustainable Development, Surrey) has produced a weekly bulletin which is the knowledge exchange of CUSP. The material comes from the research team, partners and external thinkers, projects and organisations relating to CUSP concerns. It covers books, papers, reports, blogs, websites and events relevant to CUSP themes, MAPSS:
Moral Challenges and Ethics of Sustainability.
Arts and Culture
Politics, Institutions and Enterprise
Society and Wellbeing
System Dynamics Modelling / Sustainable Prosperity: An Economy That Works
I've been an avid reader of the bulletin for many years.
Not surprisingly, nine years on, Iain would like to gracefully step back. Last year he put a call out for who might be interested in taking it forward. I put my hand up and, it turns out, I'm the only one.
My starting thoughts:
We would need to co-create what happens next with the existing community in some way.
It would be great to explore if there could be other allies, rather than it just being the CUSP bulletin (and this might unlock other resource).
Wonder what we can learn from other scanning efforts.
My starting (and very draft) concept: an experiment in what was called collective intelligence. People submit suggestions, with a bit of tagging, and there is a part-human, part-automated process of curation, which is always available, and also summarised on a regular basis. One can imagine a rotating group who lead, to share the burden, or provide changing topic focus over time.
We’d need to sort out the resourcing model, and whether there needs to be regular revenue (eg could there be a freemium model, like a Paul Krugman’s SubStack, and Volts). Also, what the university can help with (while knowing the news from the university sector in general is of financial crisis).
My guess is we will have an explore/test phase. At the end of that we may find it is not viable. Or, that we have stirred up enough engagement and got to an approach which can be enduring and people realise is giving them value (rather than, for instance, taking for granted).
WHAT NEXT
If you would have feedback, ideas or would like to be involved, please get in touch.
Using Time Well: ending gracefully.
Using Time Well was an initiative in the Atelier which tried to build on the research of my late wife, and creating a legacy in her memory.
She was an NHS child and adolescent psychotherapist, before she died in April 2021 of cancer at the age of 46. She had been studying towards a doctorate on the theme of ‘how much time do we need?’, a question she had been asked by a parent of one of the children she was working with.
My shorthand for the deep tension she was researching (and experiencing) within the NHS is: efficiency vs effectiveness.
Roughly, the incentives and pressures and expectations are about maximising throughput. But her sense of caring (plus training) caring wanted to focus on improving outcomes. Although this is acutely felt in health and other explicitly 'caring' professions, I believe many people will have experienced this tension in their life and work.
I had been hoping to develop a programme that answered the question (more here):
How can we ensure the experience of clinicians on 'using time well' is used to help the whole discipline to improve -- and so improve the outcomes for children and adolescents?
I had been quietly raising money to support that, which reached £3,000 earlier this year.
But, we are approaching the 4th anniversary of her death. My original plans on what to do in her memory have run aground, partly because I am busy, and partly because I have no connections or momentum within the profession.
So, I have decided to stop trying to do something I can’t do.
Instead, I have donated the money to Bexley Moorings Project, a registered charity working in the London Borough of Bexley to provide effective support for vulnerable young people, with the help of volunteers. (They had been suggested to me several years ago by my wife's colleagues. You can read about my first donation to them in Jo's memory here.)
Of course, giving up on this way of growing Jo's legacy is rather sad. but I hope this is ending this particular idea gracefully -- accepting the limits of my time and reach, but still growing tomorrow's possibilities by making sure the money goes to good use.
Thank you to everyone who had donated.
WHAT NEXT
Jo wrote of her own approach (as an NHS child and adolescent psychotherapist):
“I find it helpful to keep in mind the three Ancient Greek 'gods' of time: exercising some control through the boundaries of chronological time (or ‘Chronos’), in order to allow opportune moments to arise (or ‘Kairos’) and for communication with the timeless unconscious (or ‘Aion’).”
I think this is still deeply insightful. I still have a hypothesis that the 'efficiency vs effectiveness' tension is a meta-feature of modern life. So, I'm planning to use Jo's approach more explicitly myself, and also a 'Someday, Maybe' initiative is to put bring this approach to a wider audience over time.
Innovation for Sustainability: Hans Unkles and UK's first electric fishing boat
The latest Innovation for Sustainability interview (explanation here) is with Hans Unkles.
Hans is a boat builder and fisherman. He is responsible for the first (and so far only) fully electric fishing vessel in the UK, based out of Tayvallich on Scotland’s West Coast.He converted a standard 2-person diesel ‘workhorse’ into the Lorna Jane, now powered by solar and grid electricity only.
You can read the story here and I recommend the hour-long documentary here.
Hans went from school to a boat-building apprenticeship. Over the next 40 years he continued building and refitting boats, alongside various kinds of fishing. He decided to electrify a boat because of: fear of climate change; he wants to make a navigable way for others to act; he wants fishing to be around for long-term; and, also he saw the potential of the emerging technology.
0/DETECT
Revealed insights from interview on how a small group changing a sector
During the week I was interviewed by Diana George, a doctoral student at Surrey (and Iain Christie is one of her supervisors). She was asking me about how a small, committed group of insiders can drive transformative change across an entire industry from within (as part of a studying into changing the finance system).
Her findings are her own, and will be public over time. I found that I said two things that I had not really articulated to myself before.
Creating a flywheel as diagnostic test of good enough progress.
Last week, as part of coming up with investment principles for the next ten years, I argued that we need to create a ‘flywheel’ for on-going industrial reovlutions. The parts of the finance system that serves our planet and its people are consistently out-performing the rest, and resources ‘defect’ from old to new finance system. (The flywheel metaphor comes from Jim Collin's Good to Great study; more here.)
One of Diana's questions was about the state of sustainable finance in the UK. Before I really thought about it, I started to frame my answer in terms of whether a flywheel was being created and then turning ever faster.
In this frame, it is not enough to have more examples, or initiatives, or people or frameworks, or investments, or whatever. What matters if all those component parts are creating a positive, reinforcing feedback loop, which out-competes the alternatives.
Extractive ethics of insiders relying on outsiders.
One of the features of our current unsustainable economies is that they are 'extractive'. The wikipedia entry on Why Nations Fail (written by economists who one last year's Nobel Prize) explains the term thus:
"Extractive economic institutions exclude large segments of the population from the distribution of income from their own activities. They prevent everyone, except the elite, from benefiting from participation in economic relations, who, on the contrary, are allowed to even alienate the property of those who do not belong to the elite."
Our current economy is extractive of the future -- they will have far fewer choices, and far more burdensome circumstances, than we inherited. Historically, it was extractive of poorer nations (for example, the British deindustrialisation of India, which cleared a path of Lancashire mills); and arguably is so still.
My realisation was that there can be an extractive dynamic in a sectoral change process. Often, there are insiders, being well-paid for working in incumbent companies, trying to create change. They rely on the noise, difficulties and sheer cussedness of many outsiders, who make things tough for the company. The insiders secretly have cries of joy when their company is attacked by outsiders; it gives them more traction.
But the outsiders are rarely well paid, and often not funded at all. They rely on second jobs and supportive partners or families.
My experience is that insiders do not realise how much effort goes into being an external campaigner, how much danger they are exposed to, how much emotional labour is involved in swimming against the tide and risking legal responses, how much opportunity cost on someone's career.
While speaking to Diana, I realised that this is in microcosm the macro situation of an extractive economy.
The ethical challenge to insiders: given you rely on outsider campaigners, how are you making sure that you are not being extractive of their efforts?
WHAT NEXT
More on flywheel as diagnostic, and design heuristic.
Reflections of a recovering technocrat: exploring a more creative stance.
Background
In December I had two moments to reflect on the last, um, 30 years (basically the time since I started my degree in 1994). One was at the Christmas Party for the Absurd Intelligence crew (a 'think and create' tank that wants to defibrillate the collective imagination, founded by people who were at the core of Extinction Rebellion). The second was over New Year, which I spent with a group of university friends. We had come together in the late 1990s around what was then called Third World First (now People and Planet, a student campaign group) and around issues of environment, development, human rights and so on (what now gets squashed into 'sustainability').
At university, we ran campaigns, had educational events (I remember New Economics Foundation co-founder James Robertson speaking once) and also ran the first ever alternative careers fair.
I left uni in 1998, just as elites in The West thought that they had permanent success and triumph. New Labour was in its first blush.
Virtually all my close friends in the One World Group (as we still call ourselves) pursued for-purpose careers in the technocratic mode, like civil service. (I had an interregnum as an accountant which I described as mortgaging, not selling, my soul to the devil.)
The atmosphere of the time, at least for my friends, was very much: technocratic expertise can get this done. (Doubly so for me as a physicist, soaked in positivist rationality.) Yes, the Kyoto Protocol was weak, but the history of international treaties was they strengthened over time. A rising economic tide could carry us all to better world. Of course.
Fast forward a quarter of a century, that’s not how things have turned out. My close ‘One World Group’ friends are still pursuing for-purpose careers (in government departments, in development, in social change foundations). But the technocratic mode has been far from enough. Our understand and diagnosis of the world was blinkered and incomplete.
In the meantime, my career took different turns. In 2003, I did an Action Research Masters, which in medium and message was about alternative ways of knowing. (A stand out experience doing the Council of All Beings, where I was an extinct volcano on the Uganda-Rwanda border, one of many more-than-human beings telling humans what to do.) After leaving Forum, my work remained more technocratic than not, though flavoured with experiences like Findhorn retreats.
Towards 'Deep Transformation'
Part of forming the Atelier of What’s Next ('a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future’), was a hypothesis. Let’s imagine you can place change efforts on a spectrum.
Even 'Strong Reform' (the ‘best’ technocratic efforts) is failing. 'Radical Resistance' has insights, but just being de-X or post-X or anti-X means you are still defining things in terms of X ( where X=growth, or colonialism, or whatever). Still unintentionally reinforcing that frame. Even further away from the status quo there is 'Make Good Ruins' (a la Dougald Hine) but that feels defeatist.
My hypothesis: there is a zone between resistance and ruins, let’s call it Deep Transformation, which integrate the insights of Radical Resistance and yet still aiming to nurture something different, something which cannot be well-described in terms of the past.
The practice on the frontier
In March of 2024 I bumped into Clare Farrell at Brockley station in March. She told me of her portfolio of work after XR, including: an artistic collective acting in solidarity on climate and democratic collapse (Hard Art); a bringing together of environmental, anti-racism and cost of living activists to create local democracy (The Humanity Project), and more (eg Absurd Intelligence). (Yes, it is an amazing and confusing constellation.)
I asked if I could help in a voluntary capacity. And so I began working with them.
Only afterwards did I realise that they were practicing in that Deep Transformation zone, and that getting involved would be a chance to experiment.
One thing is that others in the crew come from an art, design or creative background. It is sort of orthogonal to technocratic (riffing on the Cyenfin Framework to express this quickly).
A technocrat, for the most part, assumes that things are complicated, and so serious, rational study can reveal the answers. Conversely, a creative assumes things are complex, and that we need to proceed through probing and seeing what happens.
So, being involved with the Absurd Intelligence constellation of activities has been a chance to experience the creative process (rather than the technocratic one that is my familiar terrain). Which has been the messy (and frustrating) fun that you might expect.
WHAT NEXT
Keeping what is good about being a technocrat, but not being restricted to that alone.
More experiments with applying creative practices on the frontier.
More serious play within the constellation.
Subscribe the Absurd Intelligence newsletter here (scroll to the bottom, to where it says 'sign up').
(For fun, do leave feedback on their website about the picture at the top of the page, behind the title ('Welcome to the Multifaceted Intersecting Shitshow. And what we might all do about it.').)
A prompt card from the International Futures Forum. You can receive these by subscribing here. I received this one on Tuesday.
Avoiding overwhelm (while swimming in bullshit)
In the last WeekNotes I argued that, in my view, for at least next four years, we'll be swimming in even more bullshit ('speech is intended to persuade without regard for the truth'). (Little did I realise how quickly there would also be breaking institutions and people.)
An ex-colleague, Geraldine Gilbert, shared on the Forum staff alumni WhatsApp group this advice from Swiss sociologist Jennifer Walter about what is happening in USA right now and what to do about it (originally on Threads here).
Since then I've been sent it no fewer than 4 times. It resonated with me, and others. Just in case you haven't seen it, here it is:
Overwhelm is the goal.
1/ The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump's first days exemplifies Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" - using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn't just politics as usual - it's a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits.
2/ Media theorist McLuhan predicted this: When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged. The rapid-fire executive orders create a cognitive bottleneck, making it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyze any single policy.
3/ Agenda-setting theory explains the strategy: When multiple major policies compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse. Traditional media can't keep up with the pace, leading to superficial coverage.
The result?
Weakened democratic oversight and reduced public engagement.
What now?
1/ Set boundaries: Pick 2-3 key issues you deeply care about and focus your attention there. You can't track everything - that's by design. Impact comes from sustained focus, not scattered awareness.
2/ Use aggregators & experts: Find trusted analysts who do the heavy lifting of synthesis. Look for those explaining patterns, not just events.
3/ Remember: Feeling overwhelmed is the point. When you recognize this, you regain some power. Take breaks. Process. This is a marathon.
4/ Practice going slow: Wait 48hrs before reacting to new policies. The urgent clouds the important. Initial reporting often misses context
5/ Build community: Share the cognitive load. Different people track different issues. Network intelligence beats individual overload.
Remember: They want you scattered. Your focus is resistance.
WHAT NEXT
Put this into practice!