Ep 7: Transformation: imaginal cells and shifting patterns

Welcome. If you're joining us for the first time, this is a mini series of conversations with my dear friend and mentor, Bill Sharp. You're invited to join us in his study in Wales. Here we're exploring some of the core practices and ideas behind the future's framework of Three Horizons, so that you and I and anyone can learn as Bill says it to pattern hope. If you're not familiar with Three Horizons, we suggest you skip back to Episode 1. We're so glad you're here. Bill has some beautiful ways of speaking about transformation which you'll hear shortly. There's also a moment later in this episode where I throw Bill a bit of a bone to share one of his favourite practical stories about participating in change. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but it's about his journey of installing solar panels on his roof. I know it's not a very sexy example, but it had already taken some coaxing to get him to stop calling them photovoltaics at the risk of alienating more people, so I wasn't going to argue. I often lovingly tease Bill about his tech-focused examples of transformation, but I truly do appreciate them because they resonate with about half of the world who think and feel like that. However, if like me, you fall into the remaining other half of humans, who might be a bit more visual, this is for you. Let's take a moment to imagine the New York Easter parade in 1900. The streets bustling with horse-drawn carriages while one solitary motorcar rumbles along its shiny wheels starkly contrasting with the elegant equines. Fast forward just 13 years and the scene has flipped, the same parade now features a lone horse amidst a sea of automobiles. This is the reality of our world, no matter how fixed things seem, there is a constant current of movement in favour of something new. In this episode, we discuss how this process of transformation can be understood as three stages of change, envisioning, enrolling and mobilizing, which connect to the three horizons as one way to pattern hope. Possibly one of the most beautiful and illustrative ways that you've shared to think about change is the journey from caterpillar to butterfly. Could you take us on that journey? Yes, I like it just because it's so simple and obvious and we all know about the story of the caterpillar to butterfly. This is not the hungry caterpillar. Not the hungry caterpillar. Well, all caterpillars are hungry and that's sort of the point that the caterpillar has a certain way of life. It's born on the leaves that it's going to eat and it just gets going and eats and it gets bigger and bigger. It gets better and better at being a hungry caterpillar and of course it's the bane of the gardener's life. But the simple point is that however good it gets at being a caterpillar, that isn't the road that will take it all the way to being a butterfly, it has at some moment to go through this fundamental change and in that change it makes the pupil and there's this extraordinary process where it essentially dissolves the body that it's built up and I often think, you know, what does it like to sort of face that change where everything just becomes a goo on the way to this transformation? And then what I find very inspiring, I think it was Elizabeth Sarturis who first talked about this metaphor or model, not just a metaphor of transformation, though what happens inside the caterpillar is that these things called imaginal cells or imaginal discs and that they've always been there but they've been latent, they've been quiet. But now this moment they build a new set of relationships and these new set of relationships are the pattern of the butterfly, the structural pattern into which all the resources that the caterpillar has built up in its hungry phase can now be taken into this new structure, the new structural grows from the relationships amongst the imaginal cells out of which the butterfly then emerges. So for me this is just the perfect model and metaphor for transformational change where we as humans come together is that there's that letting go that sense of giving up of a pattern that is quite scary, the thing we've maybe been relying on and then the essential process of change is we as imaginal cells of the future come together build the new relationships, build the new pattern and start to embody this new way of being that is the butterfly. And of course the caterpillar knows in some sense it has the the actual imaginal cells within its body that it's on the pathway to becoming a butterfly that's already laid out for it but we humans don't have that necessarily so we in some sense have to create it for ourselves. There's a great mystery here where are patterns before they come into being and a simple way into this that I think of as you know here we look down on the beach and just imagine you know a group of you turning up on the beach wanting to play a game and you say well where is the game it doesn't exist yet we bring it into our minds and we bring it into our minds as a shared pattern that we're all going to play we chuck down a couple of jumpers they've got a goal you've got the ball now we can have a game of football and that game comes into being in our shared mind and as long as it's held there we can play it so as humans we have this extraordinary gift of imagination and I think I've already used the quote from Coleridge that imagination is the faculty by which we nurture reality into being so unlike the caterpillar which just has one story of its life we can tell other stories we can imagine other futures and storytelling of course is a key way that we bring a possible future into mind and share it with one another but the essential process is this one we call participative repatting we're all participants we've got to come together we've got to individually let go of the pattern we're in we've got to bring to mind through telling stories and possibilities and visions and so on there's new possibility the new game we're going to play the butterfly we want to become and then we can start to be on that path together so using the power of the imagination which is this powerful capacity we've been given as humans and so I'm someone who wants to change something in the landscape that I'm operating in or in my life and there needs to be some shared imagination or pattern between the others that I want to enroll right because I can't play a game of football to use your example on the beach on my own if nobody else has the pattern of football in their mind right I would have to develop it with them and so I'm just thinking here about the relationality that is required how do we bring other people along on the journey well in this most fundamental this is a shared visioning process and the people in the social sciences who have spent a lot of time looking at processes of change basically break it down into three main stages by which a new pattern gets going in society and as you're saying the very first stage is one of envisioning or maybe even just before that it's coming together in the recognition of a situation that we want to change as we said with three horizons you'd be bringing that into use because we're seeing a lack of fit between what we are now and what we need to be that adaptive change that we were talking about under dilemmas that the context we're in either opens up a sphere of opportunity or represents a growing pressure and threat that we need to accommodate to but we first come together with a sense of what's what's the fundamental shift that we're talking about haven't yet given it a real shape but we're responding to that opening of the future opening up of a third horizon with respect to the first that may involve then actually a long period of trying to say well have we got any idea of a vision of that what it might look like and have we got to do some fundamental invention go back 50 years and say we need renewable energy most of it hadn't been invented yet you could see in principle you could capture the sun's light and use solar cells for that and you build windmills and capture the wind power and maybe the tide and so that envisioning process moving on from we've stated the problem then has to say do we know how to do that yes the critical thing is painting that vision and then seeing have we got to now do some fundamental work before we can go any further or is this more a matter of making a commitment so the next stage is when we have a sense of how to do it we're moving into the the second horizon space of starting to embody and build that new pattern so we go from envisioning to then embodying and enrolling people into that new pattern that was the imaginal cells saying okay it's our turn now we've got the picture of the butterfly we need to get to work and start to pull in all the resources that we need so the old system will still be there you've got to sort of find some niche someplace you can start some maybe small enough patch of the possibilities that you can go and inhabit and start to build the new in the presence of the old you aren't taking over so we think of this as an enrolling process and a phrase I particularly like you know how entrepreneurs nowadays often talk about their minimum viable product it means okay what's the simplest version of this product we can get out there and then the market can start to tell us what we really need and we'll evolve and so on and you can just take that little acronym and call it the minimum viable pattern and that's a bit like saying okay what's the smallest living version of what we want that we can start to embody and then pick up on this characteristic that as humans we're very sensitive to the commitments people have made and oh I can see I might be able to buy that new product I'm up for being a driver of an electric vehicle I'll be one of the people or try that out. I can go and buy it, I can go and use it, I can see I can charge it, and off we go. And then from that enrolling stage, as more and more people start to engage with it and take up their own role in it, eventually it'll pick up enough momentum in competition, perhaps with other alternatives in the second horizon, something will stabilize as this is going to be the new normal. And then everyone else can pile in and it's called the stage of reconfiguration and mobilization. So we go from envisioning to enrolling to mobilizing. And you can see that in the story we explored earlier about the emergence of the web. There were lots of visions of that future information, super highway, there was lots of innovation and competition going on in the second horizon to try and get different visions going. And then finally, you know, the invention of the web itself crystallized all that and huge amounts of resource then got released from the first horizon and flooded into this new model and built out the new worldwide web and the rest is history. So what has to happen in that to get the little model going to begin with is the first horizon has not to say no or not have enough power to prevent you getting something going. To get the final change going, the first horizon has to say yes, you know, at some point the resources have to be released from the first horizon and flow into building out the third. I love this notion of creating a minimum viable pattern in that in second in role stage as the imaginal cells are breaking down and reorganizing. And I've often thought about it. The vision I see in my mind is almost like a little magnet that then had other magnets that were sort of drawn to it and they all clustered together and just began just a little almost like a pilot, right? It doesn't have to be a big thing. I'm struck by how when a tree grows everything is in the seed to create that tree. And is it correct or right? Do you think to think about creating a minimum viable pattern as having to have some of the core components of what you would like that next thing to become? Absolutely. I mean that's the core of the thinking. What do you just have to have that this thing can function in its context coming back to all living things are in relationship and they are feeding off some potential in the environment. So they're drawing in the flow of energy from the water that flows towards them and through them the light that comes towards them. So they're aligning themselves with some flow of resource. If you think about being in the computer industry then everyone in the computer industry was living off what has been known as Moore's Law, the progressive doubling of the underlying computer power over 18 months or so and you could sort of rely on that for a good long period of time. So there's this energy flowing that created a sort of potential for building all sorts of new things. And so using that energy you can then connect yourself into the growing field of all the computer products that we're now familiar with. And we were speaking in a previous episode about ecosystems and the different actors coming together. And I'm imagining that this is a place where if you've identified the ecosystem you want to work with and affect change within then in that second enrolling stage you're looking at the primary actors that you could work with and bring together to create that new pattern. Is that right? Yeah so what you're doing is bringing a new ecosystem into existence. So the thinker Richard Norman who I mentioned some while ago invented a lot of the ideas around value and value constellations called it eco genesis bringing a new ecosystem into being and the different ways you can set about that. And on the one side you've got building something that brings people together brings the different actors together. And you know the first web browser is an example of that. It was an intervention, an invention a very smart invention that allowed everybody to participate. So in no time at all everyone was putting up their very first web page and the phone companies were making it possible for you to plug the thing in and so on and so forth. So we got all the actors the basic models in place and people could self-enroll themselves into building this new model. So one thing is what we call the offering we've talked about the focal offering the one thing that starts to organize this new pattern and enable other people to come in and make relationships amongst themselves. So that's one. And the other thing is what meaning does this have? What sort of social linkages are we making here and seeing what sort of shared stories of meaning are going on that encourage people to take on these new roles? How do they see themselves in relation to this pattern? So creating new linkages both at the sort of practical level but also at the storytelling level. And then of course it takes on a life of its own and your hands are off the wheel. Yes. Could you give another example of change and transformation perhaps from your own life? Yeah there's one that for me really illustrates it quite well. We're sitting here in the house we moved to 15 years ago. We had quite a bit of renovation to do on the house and it turned out it was just the right time to be a fairly early adopter of solar panels on the roof that generates some electricity. The government had put in place a scheme that would enroll private homeowners in using their own capital to buy solar panels and put them on the roof. And in return get paid for the electricity we generate. So this worked out well for us that we got the local plumbers it turned out to start it up a new business. So he enrolled himself into this change to say it was a business opportunity he could train up his people in putting on the solar panels. We didn't have to do anything special the the electricians came and widened all up and we became electricity generators. So we enrolled ourselves into not just being consumers of electricity but actually generators and being paid as an electricity generator on the feed in tariffs. So you can see you've got the policy coming into place the business coming to place where's consumers these three different players in the system all coming together that now you know we became an electricity generator. And of course over succeeding years more and more people started putting theirs on the roofs and the whole business of supplying that market has got underway and there's a whole lot more work that now has to happen to make the full transition of our electricity grid happen which was designed for centralized providers of electricity. And now we've got very distributed providers of electricity which involves private citizens and many sources of electricity all over the place. And there were great worries to begin with about whether we would go to build a grid that was so distributed amongst so many providers. I was reading visions of this 20 years ago and the European Union was putting in research money into the design of this grid. So that was way back at the envisioning stage. They were having to invest in building up the vision of what made this really practical. I came in having seen that whole story building up and just caught the first real stage of this roll out and enrolling private citizens into the first wave of that. And we're now just beginning to get to the point where we'll start the complete reconfiguration and mobilization of the total transition. Which would require the first horizon to say yes. Indeed and you know you can see there are some some difficult points in that final transition of the whole system into a fully electric system, fully renewable system, not just relying on the old suppliers of power. So in vision and role and mobilize actually maps on to three horizons and you can use them to help think together. Yes. So the envisioning stage is the start of taking your third horizon and really working at it to the point where you really have clarity on what it is you're trying to bring into being. And also see whether there's a stage of having to invent an answer. So it's no use just having a third horizon vision. Let's end world poverty. That isn't really a vision. You might have to say we've got a real vision for a new way to harness emerging technologies for disenfranchised farmers as it might be and really give them new access to the market. And then you might say is there's some real invention to be done. So that envisioning an emergent stage then takes you into the second horizon where you can say yes. Now we're ready to deploy our first version of the minimum verbal pattern. Let's see where we go first. Let's see who are the people who need to be enrolled and enrolled themselves into this new pattern. And that's the second horizon. And as you progress over time then you'll get to the point where now you can let go of being in entrepreneurial mode because you're into the the final reconfiguration and mobilisation stage where the new institutional structures will come into place. And the critical changes in an entrepreneurial market if you stop doing it it stops. Whereas once something has become established at a societal level the current first horizon or the new third you're trying to build. If one player disappears a new one comes into place it's maintained at a societal level by the actual operation of society in the market. So yeah so we like to see those as mapped to three stages in the three horizon story. One thing that it's really a bit counterintuitive that I find helps people move into the second horizon effectively is that to move from invention to innovation you have to stop changing something. We can get caught up in the power of innovation that it's always great to be doing something new. But we've talked in an earlier episode about the story of the Hewlett-Packard calculator and the moment they stopped changing it it allowed the other players in the system to have a stable interface for their own contribution. the professors and teachers could write all their case examples and they could collaborate with other people in other application areas to say what do you need and we'll have wrote up some examples that the students can then learn and the students then train themselves in using all the tools of that particular calculators. So a really important part of getting traction in the second horizon is this moment when you stop changing things and again to our web example, the web was a very simple core structure, the basic underlying technology of it was at one level very simple much simpler than many of the other stories being built of the information super highway so it made it quite easy for everybody to start bringing in their own contributions and building them. So always think about in building the minimum viable pattern. What is it that we're stabilizing that allows other people to take part and of course in the case I was telling at the cellular panels there are a lot of really technical stuff that meant that any an ordinary local firm could come along and install this and electricians could wire you up to the grid and you know there was a set of things they could do that mean that they could then turn you on as a supplier into the grid. Obviously some pretty technical stuff going on under the hood there that all had to be turned into some standards that everybody could play to some interfaces that lets everybody make their own contribution and we talked about the work you're doing on new structures for rights of passage for young people in their growing up and just think about all the things that would have to be in place that things were properly qualified to offer those courses and so on. As I'm listening to you I'm thinking about the fact that we know this transformation journey so intimately as human beings everybody I think it's safe to say goes through periods of deep transformation in their life where they're going along in their caterpillar phase perhaps the mid-life crisis is the perfect example of this in our society and something disrupts us and changes the course that we were on and oftentimes we have to completely reinvent ourselves in order to continue to cope with the new pattern that has been either thrust upon, forced upon or we've chosen for ourselves reflecting in in my own journey. Yeah some of the deepest points of change that have helped me emerge butterfly like although it really really didn't feel like it at the time thinking of you know things like divorce and maybe I'll stop that list there but we've all got them and as opposed I'm reflecting on what transformation often feels like when you're in it and how we can be aware of that so that we can move forward hopefully gracefully and with real awareness to what's actually happening and do that well. I think when we pay attention to this I realize that there are two ends of a spectrum of situations here there are some where the giving up of an identity of a pattern is going to be deeply hurtful because we are so closely identified with it you get a personal example as it be the breaking up of a relationship or the end of a business that you were investing in and at the other end there's the the gung ho here we're an entrepreneur there's a real excitement around doing something new and you're keen to just push the old thing out of the way so it isn't that the transition and transformation is always painful but they're often going to be winners and losers and there may be situations of deep loss involved as we've seen with whole industries just disappearing and leaving a whole community sort of stranded on the beach you know the tide has gone out and they're stranded and the whole pattern of livelihood has gone away we were talking about you know just walking up the hillside here as we did yesterday and walking past just the humps in the ground are the old hut circles and there used to be hundreds of people living up on that mountain and now there aren't so yes the second horizon can be a place where we need to bring to bear all the support needed for those who've got to lose something now they may be the ones who can move into the new pattern or it may require some deeper transformation so it's sometimes talk about you know the dark night of the soul the dark night of the second horizon and that famous phrase of being hospice workers for the dying culture and midwives of the new makes me think of Vanessa and Riyotti and hospicing modernity or the work that I think some of the the biggest tasks of our time and what many people are actually pulling towards is helping these old structures of whether it's economic or social systems die literally hospicing them in service to the new as you say one of the things in diagnosing where you are in these processes have changed that I pay attention to is looking at the particular area of interest and saying is there some pattern of renewal socially supported in that area or not now of course we celebrate that the marketplace is set up to allow the new to challenge the old and we have these different ways of investing in the startups we have impact investing we have venture capitalists we have researchers trying to bring the new into being and some areas of our life function that way and other areas of our life don't so particularly where it's an issue of public good and consistency and offering the same service to everyone it can be quite difficult to introduce innovation because there is this element of needing to allow the new to challenge the old and to manage that and to recognize that some of the old just has to sort of give way to the new so we're quite good in some areas of our lives of managing that process well and in other areas not at all and as we were just saying the marketplace is good at introducing the new but very bad at taking care of those who've been left behind so that requires some sort of social settlement that says how do we support and help those who that's pattern of renewal is going to leave behind it makes me think of you know the coal country west Virginia the miners there and needing to offer new jobs if we're not going to mine for coal how can we support them to transition and some of our most important inventions of civilization are how to manage those processes of renewal and democracy this least bad way of governing ourselves is a way of taking what could be of need for violent overthrow and replacing it with a managed process where the new can take over from the old without that need for violent confrontation now Bill we're going to end but I promised you that you could share with the people your definition of transformation which well let's let the people decide I think it's quite dense but you're going to explain it well because you told me this I was thinking how to turn it into ordinary language but the definition I use for myself starts with life is a process of relationship and transformation is when we change those relationships we reconfigure them so we leave some behind and we create new ones so a process of transformation is one of reconfiguring the relationships and its relationships of identity just who we are are we a caterpillar or butterfly the ones of viability what do we live by do we eat cabbages or do we drink nectar from the flowers and the ones of agency what can we do can we crawl along leaves and munch them or can we fly beautifully through the air so transformation is about reconfiguring the relationships of identity viability and agency well when you say it poetically like that of course it's okay thank you and thank you for being with us in this conversation if you'd like to learn more we created a short video on the three stages of change which you can find on the future stewards website and in the show notes you can also jump over to the bonus episode to explore further