The journey - a methodology for transition and transformation
I have written before about the beginnings of New Constellations. We are now in the process of putting New Constellations into a chrysalis to enable its further evolution, which provides an inflection point to share some reflections from our first five year cycle of work.
Throughout our work at New Constellations we have switched between working in poetry and prose. A lot of our work in person is poetic, run as an immersive journey of discovery, which works in situ but is hard to explain without experiencing it directly. People have described it as a cross between a Punchdrunk theatre experience, leadership training for a new world and a spiritual retreat. This is an attempt at some prose to break down the thinking that underpins the journey. We hold these theoretical foundations lightly during the process itself so that the emphasis is on experiential learning rather than didactic dissection and analysis.
The Journey
New Constellations was created to help people imagine and create better, more beautiful futures in which humankind and the planet flourish together. The main technology and methodology we have developed in order to do this is called The Journey, which we have previously described in detail here.
The process is designed around the metaphor of a nautical voyage out to sea, to find a new set of stars to guide us towards more beautiful futures. Unlike the colonial journey, with its fallacy of discovering ‘new lands’, this journey returns you to your own shore.
For millennia, across cultures and continents, we have looked to the stars to navigate when we are lost. In this era of transformation, in which everything is in flux, we are locked onto old stars that are pulling us in a perilous direction. We need to discover new possibilities, and a new set of stars we can orient towards to reset our course.
Within the journey, we define the stars as the principles that guide our ways of being and doing, that we navigate by. The new stars we are searching for are the principles that could underpin futures of human and planetary flourishing. They can be used as a) design principles or code to follow when creating and building things; b) as a filter through which to run choices and decisions; c) as a code of being. We should be able to live by the stars to create the futures we yearn for.
Zones of transformation
The journey takes people through three zones of transformation:
The zone of understanding and analysis.
This is the zone in which people develop a deeper understanding of the larger historical moment that we’re living through and how it differs from what has come before. We examine the present moment as one of profound transition, between a paradigm in decline and a new one emerging. We explore what is variously known as the poly/perma/meta crisis - the interlocking challenges such as climate and biodiversity breakdown, structural inequality, and the civilisational impact of exponential technologies - their roots in our history and the mindsets they’ve arisen from. And we consider how radical uncertainty does and will continue to characterise our lifetimes.
In terms of the individual stages of the journey, the zone of understanding and analysis encompasses:
The Shore: This is our starting point. We begin by asking, where are we now? What is the moment we are living through? How did we get here? From this, we identify the stars or principles that currently underpin the systems in which we live and work, those guiding our society at the present moment. In the spirit of navigation, we identify the stars that we want to keep in our sights as points of orientation and those we need to consciously turn away from in order to set a new course.
Rigging is the process of preparing to journey. We take people through a series of exercises to prepare emotionally and psychologically to do this work, and to summon courage and strength to head out into the unknown. It is also the moment to clarify the purpose of our journey. We ask people to dedicate their journey so that it is in service of something greater than themselves.
Departure is the moment of leaving solid ground and acknowledging that, at this moment in history, we are all at sea.
At Sea is part of the journey in which we explore and acknowledge our shared experience of radical uncertainty, and reflect on how it characterises this period in history. The poly/perma/meta crisis - with its set of interlinking challenges and threats - creates cascades of feedback loops and tipping points. It means that we cannot extrapolate from what has happened in the past in order to predict the future - something much of our financial and risk modelling assumes we can do. Indeed, many of the more linear models and tools we have inherited are of limited use, necessitating the adoption of different methods. The new ones we need are those that enable us to sense-make, bringing together different parts and possibilities into an iterative understanding of an ever shifting whole.
The zone of ideation and imagination
We can only begin to create or orient towards more desirable futures if we can first see and feel them.This is the zone in which we support people to envision different alternatives: futures in which people, their communities, the places they love and the natural world around them are all truly flourishing. We help people identify what has shifted and what has had to happen for this to be so. We ask which stars or principles these alternate futures are rooted in, in contrast to our present. And we chart these stars.
In terms of the individual stages of the journey, the zone of ideation and imagination encompasses:
The Fertile Void: a concept used first in Gestalt therapy to describe a state of not yet knowing, a precursor to discovering something new and generative. This is a space to explore, enquire, dream and get inspired without needing to make sense yet. Within the void we tune into our InnSæi, the Icelandic word for intuition which directly translated means ‘the sea within’, ‘to see within’ and ‘to see from the inside out’.
Within the fertile void, we start to see glimpses of beautiful futures emerge through the fog. We call these Glimmers, things that feel like examples of the future we want to reach towards; ways of being and doing that express a different set of stars or principles, ones that are manifesting a new system or paradigm. This tool summarises how we think about glimmers, and this case study is one example of a project we used to help people think about how things look different if they are created according to a different set of stars or principles. Cassie Robinson and Graham Leicester, who we worked in partnership with on this, will soon share more about this, we will update links here when they do.
The Crow’s Nest is where our senses become attuned and we sharpen our night vision so we can start to see individual stars. Each person looks at the glimmers of the future and asks what stars or principles have been used to create those projects or examples. They then add other stars they have discerned from the process of envisioning beautiful futures.
Astronomy is the process of the group sharing the stars they have spotted with each other. They name, cluster and map the new stars into a beautiful, physical constellation of hope and possibility. This symbolises their stories of possible futures and physically constellates the stars or principles that can guide us towards them. Each person also creates their own star chart as a navigational tool. Each chart is unique: depicting the aspects of the constellation that each individual feels most drawn to and wants to orient their personal leadership towards.
The zone of application, agency and action
The third and final zone, in which people apply what they have discovered to the realities of the present day and real-life challenges. They choose projects or initiatives they are working on in their daily lives to see how they would do and build things differently using the new tools of navigation they have discovered and created in the journey. We help people find agency to act well despite high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability. This is a process of wayfinding that is not linear, but instead a process of continuous sense-making, toggling and orientation.
In terms of the individual stages of the journey, the zone of application, agency and action encompasses:
Orienting: the process of applying the stars to specific projects in the real world. It is the stage of learning how to create new things or redesign existing things from these new principles, using them like a design code.
Wayfinding is when people prepare to return to shore with a new constellation to orient towards and to practise what they have discovered out at sea. The crew help each other identify practices each person can use to stop being pulled back into old patterns of behaviour. Each individual makes a set of concrete commitments they will undertake to start to act according to these new principles and stars.
Landing is the moment of returning to shore, to begin the work of transformation.
The development of the journeys
Over the last five years, we have run journeys in three areas: place-based work, leadership work and work within specific systems.
We ran three journeys in place in Barrow-in-Furness (2020), Sheffield (2021) and York (2023). Each of these journeys took place over several months during which the ground was painstakingly laid through research, relationship-building, partnerships and recruitment of the crews. The purpose of these journeys was to enable a cross-section of people from all walks of life to co-create a sober assessment of the set of interlocking challenges they were facing and, looking at what must change, a narrative of possibility for their town or city’s future and the stars that they can use to orient towards it.
We also ran three leadership journeys: Bold Dreams in four parts over 2022, Wayfinding in Times of Uncertainty in 2022, and our second Wayfinding journey for a group of international leaders in 2023.
Within our third area of work around systems, we ran a shorter process, ‘Reimagining Care’ in 2022, to prototype possible work around futures of care and repair. We also undertook a scoping into a possible journey around the financial system in 2023. Most recently we ran Our Future is Open with a group of 18-25 year olds, in service of young people and future generations – our final journey of this cycle in January 2024. This journey was designed to feed into Kinship Discovery as part of a major new funding initiative Paul Hamlyn Foundation is undertaking for young people in the UK. While this work around systems was our least developed area among the journeys, we think it has great potential.
For each project, we created a unique and bespoke journey.
The Crews
We have most frequently run the journeys as residential, offline, immersive retreats somewhere beautiful in nature. At its shortest, this happened over a few days and at its longest we split the journey into four sections and ran them in harmony with the seasons over the course of a year. Our place-based work happened within those places and communities and was not residential to allow for easier access and participation.
In line with our nautical storytelling, we call each cohort a ‘crew’. Each brings together 15-18 people from across different sectors and walks of life. People have joined our crews from all four countries of the UK and, in our international work, from every continent around the globe. From big urban cities to remote rural communities, from coastal towns to affluent suburbs. From ages 18 to 75.
Each crew is a constellation of wonderful human beings, all of whom sign up knowing that they will be asked to be unguarded, honest and completely authentic in their participation. We build crews of people not teams of titles.
We spend weeks mapping and selecting our crews very carefully. This entails an application and nominations process in which people can apply directly or nominate others - see an example here - as well as our team mapping and proactively recruiting potential participants to create the diversity of group and perspective we are looking for.
We ask applicants to take this quiz, designed by More In Common, so that we can assemble a crew that is both diverse in the conventional demographic aspects (race, class, age, geography, gender, disability, class) and also in terms of peoples’ deep-rooted political and moral values.
We create groups in which there is also a spectrum of conventional influence and power, so that a typical group would contain heads of powerful institutions (city administrations, private sector companies, universities, heritage, etc) as well as community members, grassroots activists, parents and so forth. One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we receive from participants is that they have never been in a group like it, and that the experience of going so deep with people so different from themselves is one of the most transformative elements of the experience.
Within the world of academic literature, this could be described as an example of intergroup contact theory: a process of sufficient intensity with a group of people who are different from each other in which they have equal status, are asked to pursue common goals and need to work together. Successful intergroup contact of this kind lessens prejudice and increases group empathy and understanding. Our views of ourselves, others and ‘difference’ shifts and the degree of ‘othering’ lessens.
Research shows that these kinds of intense, transformational experiences can result in pronounced increases of pro-social behaviour, a reduction in ego and orientation towards the collective. For example, a research paper by Daniel Yudkin and others suggests pro-social behaviour and ‘moral expansion’ can last up to six months after these experiences take place. It is a regret that we did not have the resources to open New Constellations up to this kind of research.
Designing for the whole
Each of us have backgrounds in social and environmental transformation ranging across the fields of conflict and crisis, climate change and the environment, technology and social policy. We have helped set-up non-profits that are now at the cutting edge of their fields, worked for governments and leading technology companies and in the private and public sectors. We have several decades of collective, hands-on experience of what works and what doesn’t. We decided to put all of this to use to try something new.
One of the big departures for us was to combine elements that are usually separated in peoples’ lives: the professional and the spiritual. Iris has led this work and describes her journey and how her own thinking and practice has informed New Constellations’ approach in her must-read blog The power of the whole.
People have described the journey as part leadership programme, part spiritual retreat. By spiritual we simply mean a connection to that which is greater than us, whatever that means for each individual. For example, personally, I find this in my connection to nature. In order to do this we have developed ways of working that engage the head, the heart, the gut and the body. The head for intellectual stimulus and analysis. The heart as the seat of connection and love. The gut as the wellspring of intuition and sense-making. And the body as a form of embodied intelligence that sends signals from our subconscious being to the conscious mind.
Alongside the strategic models we deploy and the analytical work we ask people to do, we connect people through the use of audio recordings and sound as one of our core technologies. We ask people to record throughout the journey as a practice of reflection and in order to help us weave their collective story. Jo, New Constellation’s audio magician, has led this work and describes it here.
We create analogue experiences - no screens, no slides - and instead use hand-crafted materials, lovingly created and unique to each group. We work with the natural world, with beauty, with reflective and somatic practice, breath and body work, meditation and visualisations, sensing and sense-making, synthesis, artistic and creative practice.
We have been told time and time again that this level of care and this personal touch signals the quality of attention we will devote to each person and is an invitation to participants to engage with the group with this level of care and attention too. We have been told that it helps people relax and trust us and each other to be fully themselves much more readily and quickly, despite the high degree of diversity in each cohort. It also enables us to demonstrate the values of love and care, which we believe will be key to our futures. Lily, who has led this side of our work, explains this further in her blog.
These elements of our approach and methodology are designed to shift people from the sympathetic nervous system, fight and flight mode, into the parasympathetic nervous system, in which we can be generative, expansive and creative. Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir’s research on intuition shows us that our highest possible intelligence as human beings is attained when we combine our rational minds with our deep intuitive powers. It’s not an easy thing to do unaided and so we support people to get into an optimised state intellectually, emotionally and physiologically. This helps lower ego and expands pro-social outlooks and behaviours, enabling the emergence of a hive mind - a form of collective intelligence.
As many participants remark, they come as an individual and leave as a collective. They feel connected to themselves, to each other, to the natural world, to our past, our present, our future. In this more connected state, they are better able to think and act in service to the whole.
A new set of strategic tools
As well as the rich experience together, the journey generates a set of strategic tools. They don’t look like your typical or traditional strategic tools (and aren’t designed to) but they have equal value. The main strategic tools are:
The overall narrative and story
Each exercise and discussion creates fragments that, over the course of the journey, are pieced together to create a narrative of transformation. This describes the existing paradigm or status quo and its effect on how we live, the principles or stars that we want to turn away from, what we want to remember from our pasts and keep in our sights from our present, and then the new stars or principles we want to turn towards. The story captures a future paradigm that has transcended the constraints of the old systems and speaks to how we made the transition. This story is created from a series of audio recordings made over the course of the journey, and through a unique story that we create for each crew made up entirely of their own words.
A set of stars
The stars are the principles that could underpin futures of human and planetary flourishing. They can be used as a) design principles or code to apply to creating and building things; b) as a filter through which to run choices and decisions; c) as a code of being. Each crew member maps their stars onto beautiful cards that are then clustered and patterned into the overall constellation.
A symbolic new constellation that inspires us to head in a new direction
Constellations create visual symbols and myths that are handed down across the generations. Invoking the power of this symbolism, each crew creates their own constellation. For our first journeys, these were made visually - see Barrow’s cards - and over time this has evolved into our crews creating beautiful, physical symbolic constellations. The experience of seeing this constellation being unveiled for the first time is often a visceral, emotional, transcendent experience for people. People sit in silence for a long time absorbing what it would feel like for a society to be guided by this set of principles, how it would change how we could be and what we could do and how different it is to what we have today. It is meta, macro, epic, aspirational and inspiring. It’s the beacon to head towards.
Star charts - a physical navigational tool to reference in day to day life
Each crew member creates their own star chart. These are completely individual and have stunned us with their beauty. Each one expresses the individual stars from within the larger constellation that are most magnetic to that individual, the ones they choose to be guided by.
The crew
Each crew has developed exceptionally strong bonds of trust and understanding, catalysing individual and shared leadership and commitment. The crews are guardians of the constellation and wayfinders of the new path. They hold the embodied knowledge and, through them, ripples of change are created over time and space. It runs deeply, often slowly. Looking back, many people tell us how they have taken a dramatically different course since coming on the journey, one guided by the stars they discovered. We are deeply honoured that many people have now told us that it has changed their lives and now informs everything they do.
Times of Transformation
There is a strong layer of systems theory underpinning the journey. In researching and designing the methodology, we spent time drawing on bodies of work about complexity, how systems change, how the challenges we face are rooted in long-standing patterns of organisation and behaviour and what specific approaches are effective in times of radical uncertainty.
The journey methodology rests on some foundational observations:
We are living through a shift or transitions between paradigms.
We are experiencing a set of interlinking crises, variously referred to as the poly/perma/meta crisis, which some of our existing systems are incapable of responding to effectively.
The roots of these crises lie in behaviours that are rooted deep within our pasts as well as our present.
We need to undertake a process of catharsis and healing in order to come to terms with our own entanglement in the current situation.
The transition is, and will increasingly be characterised by, radical uncertainty.
We need a new set of methods and skills to figure out where we want to end up.
Our visions of the future cannot be divorced from where we are now - the past, present and future are functions of and must be in conversation with each other.
There is no viable future for us all that is envisioned by one tribe for its tribe. This is a collective process, and one that must bridge across differences and one that will benefit from diversity.
Finding our way towards more beautiful futures is a process of learning how to live differently. It is a behavioural shift as much as a strategic one. It is to learn, to see and be differently at the levels of self, group and system.
The process of transition takes place in loops and spirals and not in straight lines. Instead of creating plans that involve a linear causal chain - we can do X to make Y happen - times of radical uncertainty require forms of iterative storytelling and navigation to figure out where you are headed and to choose points of orientation to navigate by.
We must take a course that will wind and twist as we continuously course correct so that we keep tracking towards the futures we desire.
Inspired by Donella Meadows’ “Leverage Points: places to intervene in a system”, New Constellations’ journey methodology is designed to:
Enable the crew to co-create an analysis of the existing paradigm, and the stars or principles according to which it has been designed.
Create an experience that has the power to transcend that existing paradigm, giving people a visceral experience of a different way of being and of doing things together.
Imagine future possibilities that are rooted in a different set of principles or stars and express a new paradigm.
Enable the crew to adopt different fresh mindsets and use new methods and tools
This first cycle has been focused on strategic and process innovation. We have resisted the pressure and temptation to try and box what has come out of the journeys into neat and conventional KPIs. With hindsight, we wish we could have had an academic researcher by our side from the beginning to collect baseline information on many things, such as: the emotional and psychological impact of the polycrisis; levels of agency and trust; the ability to have honest and collaborative relationships with people who are different and think differently from ourselves; levels of comfort and ability to act in the context of radical uncertainty; the leadership skills and practical tools to navigate towards positive futures; the risk of passivity in the face of dystopian narratives; the ability to make brave, courageous and urgent choices; the ability to withstand the pressures to conform; and much, much more. We would love to have been able to measure how our crews have changed with respect to these benchmarks by the end of the journey and many months afterwards. But sadly we did not have the resources to do this with an academic partner this time.
However, we were able to conduct debrief and learning interviews at the end of each journey with every member of the crew. And from this qualitative data, we found strong patterns of feedback suggesting that the journey leads to dramatic shifts across many of the areas above.
We have concluded that participating in the journey can, but does not always, lead to transformative shifts. The biggest shifts appear to have been around people attaining a deeper understanding of what we are facing, what we need to do and how. People believe they can make a positive difference and decide to make changes in their life in order to do so. Some people have told us about going for big jobs they would not otherwise have applied for. Others have had the courage to take bold, unpopular decisions to do the right thing. Still more have bitten the bullet and reprioritised their lives. Within groups and organisations, people have designed and adopted radically different strategies for change and put their organisations on markedly different trajectories.
Change happens when individuals who have committed to the work of the self interact with and catalyse change within systems that are in transition. We have loved seeing how the ripples of this work happen through people - such as members of the Barrow crew taking their stars into Barrow’s levelling up strategy and Poverty Truth Commission, various members of the Sheffield crew being active partners and contributors to the Sheffield City Goals, or the leader of a major cultural institution committing it to a new vision centring stewardship, sustainability and generosity inspired by her stars. Just as constellations connect many different stars, we see the constellation we have connected shining among the many points of light in a gigantic and growing constellation of change.
Acknowledgements and thanks
The journey methodology has evolved greatly over the past five years. We would like to recognise and express particular thanks to Hilary Cottam, Hrund Gunnsteindóttir and Yasmin El Dabi who, in working with us to design and run a number of journeys, have helped inform and shape crucial parts of it. And to Cassie Robinson for her thought-partnership from the start and without whom several opportunities to run the journey would never have materialised.
Many people have reflected on how interdisciplinary and holistic the journey methodology is and we are profoundly grateful to so many people who have nourished and inspired our thinking.
Among many others, we are indebted to those who have written on the phase of historic transition we are in - from Joanna Macy’s Great Turning to Margaret Levi’s cycles of moral and political economies to Johan Schot’s Deep Transitions, to Bruno Latour’s analysis of civilisational displacement to Amitav Ghosh’s powerful writings on the awakening of Gaia.
From our early research conversations, the seminal work on systems theory of Donella Meadows and, through their brilliant explanations and models, Bill Sharpe, Graham Leicester and Margaret Wheatley and the Berkana Institute became early guiding lights. Kate Raworth and, through her, Janine Benyus have taught us about new economic and ecological thinking. Hilary Cottam introduced us to Sapiens Integra - her wonderful recast of Homo Economicus - and through her current work to futures of mutualism and care. Yancey Strickler’s work on how our current socio-economic-political systems are rooted in and designed according to ‘values-stacks’ also inspired us in the early days.
adrienne maree brown’s work on emergent strategy and facilitation and practising ‘yes visions’ under pressure has been deeply influential on New Constellations, while Rob Hopkins schooled us on ‘what if’ visions and tales of the possible. We have been guided by the field of work on deep time by Tyson Yunkaporta, Ella Saltmarshe, and Roman Krznaric among many. We have been grateful for the academic rigour and the generosity of thought-partnership from David Tuckett on his work on leading in times of uncertainty and, through him, Mervyn King’s call from experience for new methods and tools. Hrund Gunnsteindóttir and Iain McGilchrist have been our reference points and tutors on the nature of consciousness and intelligence. More in Common, especially Mathieu Lefevre and Tim Dixon, have transformed how we think about working with others by understanding how the bedrock of our moral values shapes our view of the world.
Sophia Parker connected us with brilliant people, ideas and models that were pivotal for us and Vidhya Alakeson introduced us to incredible work across the UK that became case studies for some of the glimmers we referenced in the journey. We learned more about colonial histories and saw the interlinkages with extraction, including through one of our very first audio encounters with Lonnie G. Bunch III, through the work of Jayne Engle and Panthea Lee. We are grateful to Lakshnie Hettihewa, Martha Awojobi and Nathan Geering for expertly and sensitively grounding us in antiracist practice.
Sophy Banks’ multidisciplinary body of work on processing societal grief and trauma in order to build healthy human cultures was transformational for us early on, as was Dr Angel Acosta’s. We have also drawn upon the work of Stephen Porges and Deb Dana on polyvagal theory and practice and are grateful to Yasmin El Dabi and Farzana Khan for beautiful demonstrations of embodiment and somatic tools, including those of Staci Haines. We owe a debt of thanks to ancient wisdom traditions that have taught us about embodiment and entanglement in the more-than-human, and to the wisdom and inspiration of the natural world: her rhythms and cycles, beauty, ingenuity and power, which have been a constant guide and inspiration.