midwifing change
we’re caught in a liminal space that’s colored more by the war of the worlds than the transition between them. what might it mean to consider the space of the threshold — hospicing the old and midwifing the new?
midwifing change
we’re caught in a liminal space that’s colored more by the war of the worlds than the transition between them. what might it mean to consider the space of the threshold — hospicing the old and midwifing the new?
“ The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. ”
— Antonio Gramsci, philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer and politician, in Prison Notebooks
In these times of transitions, of systems shifts, of collapse and erosion, of unravelling - of so much no longer making sense, or seeming to work - we think that the shape of tomorrow will be in part determined by the richness and health of the compost from which seeds of the future grow. This means paying as much attention to endings as we do to
... See moreThe problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an uncertain future are in opposition to each other. Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory.
Old attitudes and ideas simply aren’t adequate to help us navigate what lies ahead. And pervasive gloom about the future risks being self-fulfilling.
“This is structural, if things ended well, civil society would be healthier overall.”