Signals from the Field: Composting What No Longer Serves - Organizational Lessons for a Time of Reckoning
Welcome to Seed & Signal—and to this next chapter in its evolution.
A Note on What’s Emerging
As Seed & Signal continues to evolve this summer, you’ll see two threads interwoven here:
Futures Conversations, where I speak with practitioners at the forefront of change—and
Signals from the Field, like this post—short essays, reflections, and provocations drawn from my practice.
Some will be polished. Others will be unfinished seeds. All are shared in the spirit of public imagination, pattern sensing, and collective regeneration.
Thank you for being here.
In a moment of cultural rupture…
…where authoritarianism is rising, polarization deepens, and public trust frays—many organizations are confronting a hard truth: our strategies, structures, and assumptions no longer serve us.
The world is changing. But the ways we work often aren’t keeping pace.
Urgency dominates. Scarcity drives decisions. Exhaustion is treated as a personal problem instead of a systemic signal.
Recently, I facilitated a strategy workshop with a group of justice-centered leaders. Rather than jumping to new solutions, we paused to ask a more essential question:
What must we let go of in order to move forward?
Using the metaphor of composting, we invited participants to name what needed releasing—old beliefs, outdated strategies, and unspoken burdens.
The point wasn’t just reflection. It was regeneration.
Composting isn’t failure; it’s the beginning of a more fertile future.
Old Beliefs: Deconditioning the System
We began with the deeply held narratives that quietly shape how organizations operate. These included:
“Change is slow and incremental.”
“If people just understood, they would care.”
“You need credentials to lead.”
“The system is broken.” (Instead of: “It was built this way.”)
These beliefs act as invisible infrastructures—what Dark Matter Labs describes as the mindsets beneath the metrics.
Drawing from popular education, we know transformation begins with conscientização—naming and challenging the logics we’ve internalized.
Until we unlearn these beliefs, we risk replicating the very systems we aim to dismantle.
Outdated Strategies: When Tactics Outlive the Moment
We also surfaced the strategies that many organizations default to—not because they work, but because they’re familiar:
Respectability politics
Extractive public engagement
Avoiding conflict
Assuming access = engagement
Professionalizing everything
Using the same strategies with different tools
Systems thinking teaches us that today’s problems are often born of yesterday’s solutions.
Facilitative leadership asks us to move from control to collaboration—to lead as gardeners, not engineers.
Unspoken Burdens: The Body of the System Speaks
Some truths never make it into a strategic plan. They live in the body of the organization: in silence, fatigue, and what remains unnamed.
Participants named:
Resource hoarding
Burnout and emotional exhaustion
Fear of being wrong
Lack of feedback culture
Hidden gatekeeping
Internal competition masked as collaboration
False urgency as a badge of commitment
These aren’t “soft” issues. They are structural signals—indicators that the system is relationally unwell.
In Warm Data terms, they show us where adaptation is being blocked by fear, performance, or perfectionism.
Composting means creating space for what’s buried to be surfaced—and making truth-telling a cultural norm, not a risk.
What Becomes Possible: Designing for Emergence
As we moved through the composting process, new possibilities began to surface. Not as a static vision—but as a living field of instruction:
Power that is shared and generative
Imagination as a public good
Story, art, and design as strategic infrastructure
Communities not as users, but as builders
Decision-making rooted in frontline wisdom
This reflects what Theory U calls the shift from downloading to presencing—from repeating the past to sensing what wants to emerge.
And it aligns with regenerative design: designing with life, not against it.
Five Composting Moves for Organizations
Whether you’re a nonprofit, agency, or movement hub—these five composting practices can support realignment and renewal:
1. Make Composting a Ritual
Treat unlearning as strategy. Regularly ask: What beliefs, strategies, or habits no longer serve our values or purpose?
2. Relinquish Control, Grow Capacity
Embrace facilitative leadership. Lead with curiosity, trust, and co-creation—less certainty, more collective sensemaking.
3. Slow Down to See the Whole
Build in time for relationship, emergence, and complexity. Reflection isn’t a luxury—it’s a feedback loop.
4. Act from Emergence, Not Inertia
Design for responsiveness. Start with light prototypes. Let culture guide structure—not the reverse.
5. Treat Imagination as Strategic Infrastructure
Storytelling, art, collective visioning—they’re not extras. They’re core practices of resilient leadership.
As one participant said: “People need wonder and surprise to keep going.”
Beyond Resilience—Toward Regeneration
Resilience asks: How do we withstand the storm?
Regeneration asks: How do we transform the conditions that made the storm inevitable?
The world doesn’t need more perfect plans.
It needs more courageous composters—individuals and institutions willing to lay down what no longer serves in order to grow something far more alive, responsive, and just.
Letting go is not an act of loss.
It’s an act of design.
And composting is where the future begins.
I’d love to hear how this resonates with you.
What are you composting in your work or community right now?
What old beliefs, strategies, or unspoken burdens are asking to be released?
Feel free to share in the comments—or reply directly. Your reflections help shape the evolution of this space, and of the futures we’re imagining together.
https://rescripted.org/2023/08/04/decomposition-instead-of-collapse-dear-theatre-be-like-soil/