About Us

The Repatterning Collective explores two connected "What if" questions:

• What if - our approach to the (poly)crisis is part of the crisis?
• What if - we can actively repattern and rewire in the direction of radically different (imagined) regenerative futures?

As the climate crisis and other major crises increasingly spiral out of control, we find ourselves at a critical rupture point. Patterns help shape our (in)ability to effectively address our global crises.

Using the Iceberg analogy, underneath visible events and disruptions sit invisible (fractal) patterns. How these patterns are arranged and expressed informs our structures, constructs, and designs. They equally show up as thought patterns, informing our mindsets and worldviews.

Patterns and their interactions therefore play a crucial role in informing and driving each system and its outcomes - they're the hidden wiring underneath the system. We call this hidden wiring the ‘pattern web’, and it’s underlying our current state of play.

What this tells us is that to transform a system, we have to understand repatterning – how to change multiple interconnected patterns and their interactions (with the system’s infrastructure, constructs, designs, mindsets and worldviews) in order to change the system itself.

Moreover, patterns are often sticky and the existing pattern web is likely to resist, which can result in our efforts being slowed down or even undermined. We therefore have to equally be acutely aware of how the current pattern web may respond. And build this into our repatterning response.

There are no single answers or outcomes here. We have to be willing to work with emergence, whereby the path is part of the answer. Thereby engaging in an iterative process of untangling, reimagining, rewiring, and repatterning this web - and our responses to it.

Many of us already do this and some of us are very good at it. Even more of us lack sufficient skill and insight to be truly effective pattern web spotters and re-patterners. At different levels in our economies and organisations, we see ample examples (whether policy or practice) where our collective responses keep repeating or perpetuating the very patterns we intend or at least ought to disrupt. Either through replicating unhelpful patterns of the past, or by patterning the dominant system in the approaches and solutions aimed at addressing its fallout.

This is why The Repatterning Collective is creating a pipeline of exploratory and applied learning on repatterning. To hone our ability for and deepen our understanding of repatterning, as a critical component of transformation in the increasingly complex and daunting world we’re facing today.

Vision

The Repatterning Collective is inspired by the idea of incubating a 'Bell Labs for a new world’.

An experimental container and "idea lab" for actors to jointly discover and engage in the practice of repatterning, as a critical component of systems redesign and the pluriverse of innovation taking place in the Horizon 2 of paradigm shift.

In doing so, it also aims to support a move away from the pervasive pattern of fighting our global crises as individuals and instead help us forge a deeply collective response.

The old world is dying, and the new world
struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.
— Antonio Gramsci

What we do

The Repatterning Collective is currently exploring  the following strands of inquiry into repatterning:

• A part-time fellowship for a small set of diverse actors, allowing them to move beyond the salary/fee earning paradigm of constantly taking action, instead jointly engaging in the art of repatterning.
• An ongoing series of concise interviews with cross-sections of practitioners in the “change” field, bringing out insights and learnings on how repatterning is perceived and applied.
  
• A repatterning workshop format, combining elements of backcasting, design thinking, 2D/3D mapping and rapid prototyping, to make the explicit and implicit patterns in a current state of play visible; and with participants subsequently hands-on exploring multiple repatterning pathways towards a desired future state of play.
  
  The latter can be imagined as entering a maze and trying to find the way out, as in the act of repatterning, patterns will come to the fore that may block, undermine, accelerate, be incompatible or synergistic with what we're trying to achieve.
• The application of a repatterning lens to specific inquiries, such as in leadership or towards critical challenges playing out as part of the unfolding polycrisis. 
• The potential of AI and machine learning, as an exemplar of pattern recognition, to support practitioners with bespoke guidance on repatterning for their challenges at hand.

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