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Organizations
as Wayfinders
Context
We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls that irretrievably shut off the past. — Hannah Arendt
As we stand in the liminal space between stories, we are entering a Change of Era. Whether we like it or not, chaos is going to come knocking at our door. The origins of the word ‘chaos’ is illuminating. it is derived from the Greek khaos, referring to the void which was said to exist before the cosmos was created. Chaos, then, is the womb which waits patiently for new life: the potential out of which an entirely new world might be born.
Chaos and its steadfast companions—ambiguity and uncertainty—can be wild spaces, bewildering and bewitching. They are also fields of potentials and possibilities, fertile cracks from which emerge new shoots and novel orders of greater complexity, elegance, and resilience.
However, this requires stepping into the liminal space without trying to control, manage, plan, and predict. One cannot traverse liminal spaces—map-less territories—with project plans and a deadlines. These are journeys of transformation to be undertaken with curiosity, spaciousness, fearlessness, and empathy for self and others.
Our organizations are hamstrung when it comes to traversing liminal spaces of uncertainty. Their industrial era norms, predilections for control, and undying devotion to ceaseless profit and shareholder values render them ineffectual at best and harmful at worst in the face of radically shifting paradigms and world orders.
By organizations, I refer to all institutions and corporations—from multinationals to educational institutions, from healthcare to childcare—driven the by the hegemonic monomyth of endless profit for a handful. Today, financialization of the system have rendered organizations devoid of meaning and purpose. Organizations have become devouring machines—soulless, ruthless, and rapacious. Without conscience or consciousness.
The diagram below is a brief illustration of how organizations ended up as machines of production and profit rather than intentional communities of possibilities. With all the uber-tech at their disposal, today’s organizations have become cogs in the hegemonic machine of neoliberal colonialism.
Click on the links below to explore the other sections on this page.
Reimagining Organizations
Organizations have always existed within larger ecosystems and geopolitical environments. But cloaked under a semblance of apparent stability of the Holocene, they had functioned in a certain way—striving for efficiency and predictability in a world they could largely control. Now, as the planet tilts over towards a series of interconnected and exacerbating polycrisis, it becomes morally imperative for organizations to step off the treadmill of ‘necro-capitalism’.
No amount of privilege can save one on a burning planet; no power can hide the broken, war-torn bodies; and no profit can account for the devastating rise in hunger across the globe. GDP, once an indicator of progress, has long ceased to hold any meaning on a burning planet; degrowth will be enforced by Nature, and the Earth will reclaim what is hers. GDP is already falling in many nations, especially the developed ones. Once deemed to be the sole indicator of development, it’s inability to capture any semblance of meaning is abundantly clear. Yet, nation-states and organizations are stuck to an outdated and irrelevant matrix because it serves those in power.
Industrial era norms are still driving the underlying narratives of organizations. Hooked to profit, power, and privilege, most organizations have become planet-devouring machines. By externalizing the costs, and privatizing the commons including sources of water, corporations have become almost pathological entities scouring the globe for profit. An extractive economy is draining our planet of life. Life has been put in service of business; this has been fallaciously termed ‘competitive strategy’. Leaders have become power brokers. Perverse reward systems have created a vicious race to the bottom that threatens to take the planet with it.
As Leonard Cohen wrote in The Future
Things are going to slide (slide) in all directions
Won't be nothing (won't be)
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it's overturned
The order of the soul
Things are definitely sliding in all directions. What is being measured doesn’t matter. What truly matters is immeasurable. Organizations have lost their purpose in pursuit of profit. However, the Earth doesn’t give up. Her messages are becoming loud and clear coming in the shape of melting Arctic ice, acidifying oceans, frightening rise in global temperature, multiple bread-basket failures, raging and unstoppable fires, ubiquitous floods and droughts. And much much more. For the longest time, organizations have tried to ignore their dependency on the environment; it is coming back to haunt them. Nature is literally watching every breath we take, every move we make, and especially every bond we break to paraphrase Police.
Our organizations have broken too many bonds, and have untethered themselves from the anchors of safety and resilience. Today, what we have are machines of production serving a handful of hegemonic powers in service to 1% of humankind. The profits are an illusion extracted from broken bodies and a ravaged earth.
Given below is a diagram that briefly illustrates the Coltan extraction cycle for which Congo is being decimated in the name of green energy.
The organizations today—from corporations to educational institutions, from healthcare to childcare, from military to politics—are all interconnected via a hegemonic narrative of limitless profit for a handful of powerholders. A plutocratic cabal has taken over our institutions. And necro-capitalism has become their mantra.
However, in spite of their apparent infallibility, this system is falling apart. We have already entered a post-growth world whether organizations accept it or not. Resource wars will sweep across the planet as unhinged corporations scour the globe for that last drop of oil. Even as geopolitics become mired in conflict and intense polarization, I believe organizations have a role to play in healing the planet.
Seen through the hegemonic lens of power, profit, and privilege, this will appear utopian and foolish. However, the current organizational forms are less than 100 years old. They have evolved out of imperial-colonial drives, perfected through neoliberal capitalism and the myth of the free market and its invisible hand, and has donned the garb of neocolonialism ably supported by IMF, World Bank, NATO, WTO, and regulations like Structural Adjustment Programs that devastated large swathes of Global South countries. Organizations of the future can no longer be driven by a narrative of endless growth and must reinvent themselves if they wish to survive and thrive.
As the world hovers on the brink of polycrisis, it is time to decolonize organizations, infuse them with life-sustaining narratives and norms, and deliberately design them as healing forces. This is entirely possible. Just as organizations have been used to decimate the planet; they can be designed to resuscitate, heal, and regenerate.
Organizations are and have always been living ecosystems. They are porous communities intertwined with and interdependent on their ecology, environment, humans and more-than-human lives. The denial of this essentials interrelatedness have led to the creation of monstrous, ravaging machines. It is time for organizations to reclaim their true identities.
The rest of the section discusses what organizations of the future will look like. I call them Wayfinders. Here are some questions to reflect upon as we collectively and deliberately design organizations that serve life.
What will future organizations be like?
What are their narrative(s)?
What paradigm shifts are becoming visible?
How will they shape the emerging civilizational narratives?
The era is changing. This shift will be as profound as the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. This is also a moment of Organizational Renaissance—a rebirth of organizations from Molochian Machines to thriving and flourishing Living Systems.
Who are Wayfinders?
Organizations are uniquely placed to create massive impact toward building a more beautiful, socially just, and harmonious world that we know is possible. Because they are platforms of convergence where individuals come together, the Narratives, Metaphors, and Purpose(s) that drive organizations can exert tremendous influence on how people connect, collaborate, and co-create. Thus, to reinvent organizations, we need to re-imagine the constructs—new narratives, new metaphors, and shared Evolutionary Purposes.
Organizations of the Future are platforms of transformation, crucibles for experimentation in new ways of being, seeing, learning, and unlearning, and containers of Evolutionary Purposes. Those that dare to step away from the hegemonic race will become the Wayfinders. They are organizations who will become sensemakers and imaginal cells nourishing the soil for different possible futures to take root and emerge. They will also become crucibles where capacities will be built for us to collectively reimagine and reconstitute different narratives.
This is a journey of metamorphosis. Those organizations that continue to hug the shores of safety and seek to continue with BAU will soon become obsolete. No amount of machination and manipulation can prevent dramatic climate change, bring peace to a polarized world, or prevent resource depletion. Nature is impervious to propaganda and threats of sanctions. Late-stage capitalism has become necro-capitalism.
"Subrata Bobby Banerjee developed the concept of necrocapitalism defined as contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death."
The good news is that the veil of hegemony that has been running the show for almost five centuries is being ripped apart. The cracks and fissures in the old system are becoming increasingly difficult to paper over. Words like progress, development, and growth no longer fascinate; tech utopia is rapidly vanishing as the promises of social tech degenerate into misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, surveillance, and farmed content. Even as billionaire technocrats talk of space travel and longtermism, ordinary folks are rising to regenerate our home, this blue dot called Earth.
Some of the promises of tech are being salvaged by the visionaries and the dreamers—those who are energizing the creation of a life-sustaining civilization. Online dialogue spaces are opening up across platforms like Zoom and Clubhouse spanning continents, bringing people together in shared vision toward a regenerative planet. There is hope yet.
In this liminal space between narratives, I see organizations as Wayfinders stepping in—as Connectors, Communities, Weavers, Narrative Builders, and holding spaces for Emergence. The nascent seeds of new narrative(s) are becoming visible here and there. It is these seeds that need to be nurtures and nourished, and Wayfinders can enable that by becoming the crucibles where the seeds cross-fertilize and pollinate each other.
What intellectual, affective, and relational capacities do organizations need to develop to hold space for the emergence of a life-affirming civilization?
To become Wayfinders, organizations need to build capacities that are counter-intuitive, and often deemed counter-productive in the current GDP-driven era. Notwithstanding, Wayfinders have to activate the exiled capacities in order to thrive. One of the core ones is Imagination.
Collective Imagination is one of the key capacities that can save our civilization from annihilation.
On these Wayfinders will lie the responsibility of radical re-imagination and world-building—a world that is not only multipolar but also pluriversal. A pluriversal world seeks to include and intertwine the many ways and beings, weaving the many narratives and epistemologies in a dance of entangled abundance, toward 'a world where many worlds fit’.
The future organization—the Wayfinders—will emerge from narratives of compassion and politics of healing. For far too long, the world has been run on ‘politics of power’ to the point where the word ‘politics’ has become synonymous with ‘power’, when it really means ‘affairs of cities’. Today’s organizations have emerged from these paradigms of hegemonic power; tomorrow’s organizations will curve out new paths.
Wayfinders are those organizations that refuse to be entrapped by these apparatuses of power. The journey will not be easy; obstacles will appear from everywhere; however, the powers of radical imagination and alternative narratives have the capacity to inherently create alternate possible futures.
Imagination is a dynamic and subversive force that defies conformity and oppression. It has always been at play in the formation of cultural tapestries from mythologies to migrations. Who gets to imagine becomes more important than ever. Imagination draws upon all kinds of intelligences and ways of knowing beyond the cognitive and the rational. Fearless imaginations asks, What else is possible? What can we collectively imagine that an individual never can?
Wayfinders will work in the entanglement of what is and what might be. They work at this intersection, at this chaotic space of lives and living, of the planet and its sentient beings, of the economy and ecology. And work, not to maintain but to subvert the status quo, be evolutionary in purpose and emergent in design. Embodied imagination and expanded empathy lead to new internal territories and perception, which open doors to different decision making, direction and action toward life-affirming futures.
Wayfinders have to build the infrastructure and core capacities for collective imagination. I am not denying the value of other capacities necessary to run organizations; but they are simply not enough any more. Linear, reductionist modes of thinking practiced by organizations from planning to project management, from task breakdowns to sprints will not help to create a thriving, anti-fragile organization in these times. Playing by the old rules are no longer viable. And new rules will be vastly different honoring the pluriversal and entangled nature of our existence.
Deliberately designing imagination infrastructures and putting in place practices for collective imagination to take shape in stewarding the new is the key capacity for Wayfinders.
If you wish to explore imagination infrastructures for your organization, connect with me at sahana2802@gmail.com
The Foundational Principles
How do we create structures that are flexible and adaptive,
that enable rather than constrain?
How can the structures inspire transformation rather than performance?
What intellectual, affective, and relational capacities
do organizations need
to hold space for the emergence
of life-sustaining civilization?
Nurture the Power of Imagination. The core capacity Wayfinders need is radical imagination facilitated by suitable infrastructures of imagination. Imagination is not wish-filled day dreaming or wild fantasies or even foresight. The capacity for imagination stems from a combination of ****generative listening to many voices from diverse epistemologies and ontologies, deliberately creating spaces for interweaving of diverse cognitive capacities, deep pattern sensing across seemingly disparate events, alignment with the universe, and the ability to befriend uncertainty and chaos. Deliberate development of these capacities require rigorous practice in sensemaking, staying with questions, and slowing down to for the new to emerge. Imagination requires being wholly and fully in the present while holding space for the future. Imagining and manifesting the emergent future into being is the core of Wayfinders’ existence.
Reactivate Exiled Capacities. The hegemonic narrative of efficiency, productivity, profit, and power have fractured organizations rendering them machines with humans as cogs. The gig economy with its piecemeal workflow has taken the fragmentation to a whole new level of atomization. The meaning void thus created has become an illness. Wayfinders are committed to reactivating the exiled capacities—those capacities that make us human and humane. For the longest time, organizations have shunned these capacities. The fads of ‘bring your whole selves to work’ only go as far as the self that continue to conform with the status quo. Wayfinders step out of the status quo to co-create very different futures. They reclaim the exiled capacities of love, sacredness, imagination, connection, and solidarity and community. They reconginze that they are living systems, communities of passionate individuals cohered around shared narratives and purposes. The hegemonic powers abhor communities and connection. They can only thrive by keeping individuals isolated, fearful, lonely, and in competition with each other. Polarized and fractured societies perfectly serve the insidious purpose of hegemonic control. Hence, Wayfinders deliberately focus on reconnecting and community building thus reactivating our inner source of wisdom and power.
Befriend Change and Uncertainty. Wayfinders are not static nouns but verbs; they are organizations in motion, in flow, reshaping and reimagining themselves, constantly moving towards life-affirming visions in dynamic equilibrium with their environments. Cohered around shared narratives, values, and purposes, these organizations have the capacity to respond and reimagine alternatives to the interconnected and escalating polycrisis of our times. For Wayfinders, change is a life-affirming force that helps them overcome entropy and embrace their future selves. The capacity to step into the liminal space of uncertainty is a skill that all Wayfinders deliberately build.
Weave Relationality. Wayfinders’ values are rooted in an understanding of our entangled, enmeshed, and inter-related world. The relational aspect permeates all levels—interpersonal, intrapersonal, and inter-species. This is closely linked to a deep awareness of humans as inseparable from nature, and a willingness to collaborate in worldbuilding as co-creators of a vast process where nature is our partner, mentor, model, and measure. “What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?'” asks Janine Benyus. This is precisely what Wayfinders ask as they navigate their environment, dialogue with their ecosystems, and participate in co-creating designs and solutions that move beyond anthropocentrism. This relationality go beyond communication and enter the space of sensemaking, generative listening, and holding space for the ‘magic in the middle’.
Design to be Dialogic. Being dialogic is closely linked to the earlier characteristic of relationality. They are complementary qualities of being and becoming Wayfinders. These qualities when practiced, give rise to organizations that are participatory, democratic, transformative, and recognize themselves as living systems. Collective coherence emerges when there is true flow of meaning which starts with holding space for many views. An organization or a society that works in harmony and balance requires a coherent tacit ground. This is what holds them together. The tacit ground is a dialogic field of shared meanings and narratives—not an imposition of a singular and universal truth conjured by a handful. It is in constant flow, a web of multiple worldviews woven and overlapping but not replacing and oppressing others. It starts to become incoherent when it becomes fixed and rigid, incapable of responding and flowing. Unchecked incoherence can grow into absurdities leading to stands like ‘we have always done it this way,’ ‘this will never work here,’ and other such hollowed out positions where the past is dragged forward as inviolate truths applied to the present.
Become Communities. Being dialogic entails organizations functioning as communities and networks—porous, resilient, decentralized, and self-organizing. Because they are living systems, organizations have the capacity for self-renewal (autopoiesis). This capacity is very often subjugated from being overly mechanized and controlled. Siloes and boxes render organizations incapable of resilience and reimagination. When these siloes are replaced by porous, connected, intentional communities of individuals cohered around shared narratives and values, holding the principles of biocentrism as a guiding compass, the designs and solutions emerging from such organizations are bound to be holistic, healing, and harmonious.
Embrace Biocentrism. Wayfinders are organizations who consciously eschew the necro-capitalist monomyth and move from an anthropocentric worldview to a holistic, biocentric one. They not only embrace biomimicry principles as their foundational values but also embody and practice participatory co-creation with nature. This may sound far-fetched but is the only practical way forward to become communities and networks of impact. They learn to listen to their ecosystems and bioregions, work in partnership with local communities, design for what is needed, and engage in world-building through place-based regeneration. They shift from a human-centered design to life-affirming designs and purpose.
Reimagine Tech Use. Wayfinders are counter-hegemonic networks of impact, movement of movements, imaginal cells of the futures, crucibles of becoming, and harbingers of alternative civilizational narratives. They provide infrastructures of collective sensemaking, imagination, and narrative-building. Using the powers of technology—not as surveillance tools and spurious algorithmic manipulations—but as true collective-intelligence and insight enablers, Wayfinders define conscious and conscientious use of technology.
Slow Down. Slowing down in the true sense enables deeper sensemaking and a holding of space for the future to emerge. It is about connecting to the source of wisdom within. It is about viscerally appreciating our entangled, more-than-human selves. It is about a profound sensing into our ineradicable interconnectedness. It is about presence, sensemaking, and listening at a generative level to each other, to the planet, to all sentient beings. These are essential capacities that Wayfinding organizations will have to build to eschew the old narrative. Slowing down means not having answers but staying with the questions. Questioning the questions**. a)**Where are the questions arising from? b)What assumptions are being made? c)What is the state of being giving rise to the questions?
In Summary
The visions need to arise from an intersection of pluriversality and the decolonization of our imaginations. The pluriversal was forcefully made ‘universal’ as a drive towards uniformity and conformity. Acknowledging pluriversality is to step into a convivial and dialogic relationship with our living, sentient world—human and more-than-human. Accepting pluriversality is to accept that the world we exist in is an entanglement of many cosmologies and epistemologies.
Wayfinders are here not to productize the world or to act upon it. They are here to engage in a ‘becoming-with,’ creating sanctuaries and safe spaces for the unfolding of possibilities. This requires moving away from the growth paradigm to an entirely different paradigmatic state where ‘regeneration is about equilibrium, enough-ness, interspecies harmony, and a heartfelt recognition of our entangled interconnectedness’.
Wayfinders are movers and shapers of a regenerative planet predicated on solidarity, contextuality, culture, pluriversal narratives, and diverse epistemologies and ontologies. They eschew the old patterns of homogeneity, uniformity, conformity, competitiveness, and hyper-individualism. Wayfinders balance sovereignty with solidarity; co-creation with collaboration; creativity with practicality; and innovation with impact.
They are microcosms of the world we wish to create. They are also sandboxes where we can explore, experiment, and execute. As Wayfinders flourish and thrive, they send out ripples of healing and wholeness, inspiring and teaching others to take on this journey. Thus, they can spawn other Wayfinders. When Wayfinders proliferate, we have ‘archipelagos of connected islands of sanity’— placemaking at its best. To that end, every choice, decision, word, and action coming from Wayfinders is a vote for the kind of world we envision. Such interconnected nodes have the capacity to shift civilizational narratives one place at a time.
The diagram below shows some of the roles that Wayfinders can play. It requires deliberately developing the capacities to move from degenerative machines to regenerative, thriving, and anti-fragile organizations. I do hope you will undertake this journey of emergence and reimagination.
This is a suggestive diagram for the roles that Wayfinders can play in becoming platforms of regeneration.
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