Ce n’est pas une décoration littéraire. C’est une question que chaque génération qui voit son monde brûler doit se poser : qui suit-on quand le feu approche ? Les gardiens du seuil, qui demandent de ralentir et de regarder ce qui s’ouvre. Ou les opportunistes, qui promettent une sortie rapide, un ennemi à vaincre, un chef à suivre, pendant que l’incendie continue de faire ce que les incendies font.

L’été 2026 a posé cette question à la France de façon littérale. Trois épisodes caniculaires historiques, un exode comparé par la presse à celui de la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, un vocabulaire de guerre qui a traversé les discours officiels autant que les plateaux télévisés. Mais la France ne brûle pas seulement dans ses forêts. Elle brûle aussi dans son modèle économique, sa dette budgétaire et coloniale, la santé de ses citoyens, son récit de grandeur nationale.

Guide de terrain chorégraphique : La France en braises est né de ce moment. C’est une lecture du sol culturel français à travers la méthodologie Ecosystem Choreographies, pensée pour celles et ceux qui portent un travail durable et régénératif en France, ou qui songent à y semer quelque chose.

Ce que le guide propose

Le guide applique la Cultural Soil Analysis à la France de juillet 2026 : non pas une étude d’audience qui demande qui sont les gens et ce qu’ils veulent, mais une lecture des conditions de fertilité d’un terrain entier, pour comprendre ce qui peut y pousser, à quel rythme, et dans quelle langue.

Il se déploie en sept mouvements :

• Silence : une invitation à sentir ce moment de crise avant de le refermer trop vite dans un cadre.

• Soil : le terrain. Cinq critères de fertilité culturelle, un tableau de lecture rapide, et trois lieux déjà adaptés à ce sol : le café de quartier, le jardin communautaire, l’usine de réimagination.

• Style : les acteurs. Six figures archétypales qui organisent ce sol, du Président-Roi au Gardien du terroir.

• Story : les récits. Une étude de cas complète sur les canicules de 2026 : sept récits distincts, un tableau comparatif, et une ombre transversale, le cadrage guerrier, mise en parallèle avec la rhétorique du Covid-19.

• Seed : les semences. Six pistes concrètes déjà adaptées au terrain français, en tête desquelles le terroir comme porte d’entrée la plus large et la moins gardée.

• Synergy : les alliances. Trois structures à développer : un mycélium reliant les initiatives isolées, des nids protégeant les pionniers épuisés, un vol groupé transformant l’énergie de rupture française en mouvement durable.

• Stewardship : le carnet de voyage. Six chemins de régénération, chacun activant une stratégie de refertilisation, et un rythme de retour pour continuer à observer ce sol dans le temps.

Chaque mouvement se termine par un encadré concret, comment cela se manifeste dans votre propre travail, votre organisation, votre rapport à vos clients et parties prenantes, et par une question ouverte pour prolonger la lecture.

Une absence documentée plutôt que supposée

Un fil traverse les sept récits de canicule cartographiés dans ce guide sans que personne ne l’ait choisi : aucun, pas même les plus attentifs aux inégalités sociales, ne relie explicitement ce que vit la métropole à ce que vivent depuis longtemps les territoires ultramarins. Ce n’est le fait d’aucun acteur en particulier. C’est une ombre transversale, le genre de silence qu’un bon guide de terrain se doit de noter précisément parce que personne ne le nomme.

Le guide complet est disponible ici :

Lire le Guide de terrain chorégraphique complet

Une invitation à poursuivre

Ce guide cartographie un sol collectif. Il en existe un autre, plus intime : le vôtre.

Le Choreographic Check-in propose un temps court pour situer où en est votre propre travail dans les trois mouvements fondateurs d’Ecosystem Choreographies, Attunement, Embodiment, Value, et identifier quelle prochaine étape pourrait réellement prendre racine.

Faire le Choreographic Check-in

You probably know the magic of place.

That special spot in the wilderness where you witness the beauty of life unfolding. That vibrant community space where special encounters, deep conversations, and an emerging collective body moving to music that was calling you just happen. That “secret,” mesmerising corner of the city, forest, or neighbourhood you thought you knew finding you. When you were ready for it.

And perhaps that is the best recipe for tasting, smelling, touching what it means to live differently, more sustainably, more regeneratively: a profound connection to a place we deeply love. Because it touches something profoundly true in us. Because it speaks to the aspirational horizon of our lives. Because it gives us exactly what we need right now.

With what I would, to a great extent, call the “dark magic” of AI, and the dissociation, dislocation, and disembodiment that come with our digital Communication Age, place becomes grounding and orientation. It canalises ideas, actions, and visions into boundaries in a world with shattered boundaries.

With the notion of place archetypes, I want to explore how to facilitate the reconnection to place. But rather than some sort of universal return, I am interested in the diverse pathways of that reconnection: for different types of places, for different kinds of people, for different kinds of relationship to place and nature.

What Is a Place Archetype?

In mythology, we can find recurrent place archetypes that relate to personal and spiritual development.

Mythological place archetypes (European):

• The Underworld is a dark, subterranean place representing death, rebirth, or the unconscious (Greek myth, Dante’s Inferno).

• The Garden of Eden is a paradise that represents innocence, temptation, and loss (Judeo-Christian tradition).

• Mount Olympus is the home of the gods, symbolising power, divinity, and transcendence (Greek mythology).

• The Crossroads is a liminal space where choices are made, often associated with fate or magic (Greek myth of Oedipus, European folklore).

• The Island is a place of isolation, adventure, or both (Odysseus’ journey, Robinson Crusoe).

In psychology, Jung identified archetypal symbols in nature: the forest (the unconscious), the desert (spiritual emptiness), the mountain (aspiration or spiritual challenge), and the sea (the unknown or the unconscious mind).

Building on Jung’s work, Craig Chalquist’s research in ecopsychology ties these insights to the psychological relationship between humans and the natural world. He argues that places are active participants in our psychological and spiritual lives, not merely backdrops for human activity. Disconnection from place through urbanisation and environmental degradation leads to psychological and spiritual alienation. And reconnecting with archetypal places can restore meaning, purpose, and well-being.

Beyond their psychological role, place archetypes hold great potential for landscape regeneration and urban transition design based on unique local and regional needs; for bioregional convergence in economic policies, business ecosystems, and infrastructure development; for the development of more resilient local communities in the face of accelerating crises, a loneliness pandemic, and growing costs of living; and for greater convergence and collaboration among transition movements, public authorities, civil society, businesses, media, and academia.

As an integral part of Ecosystem Choreographies, and more specifically its Soil dimension, place archetypes are intimately linked to the personal and collective archetypes populating these places (Choreographic Style), the meaning-making around that place (Choreographic Story), the strategies to disseminate the idea and practice of place transformation (Choreographic Seeds), as well as the leadership capability of enabling such dynamics (Choreographic Stewardship).

The Ten Place Archetypes: An Overview

The place archetypes are organised across four ecological succession phases. Each phase calls different kinds of places into being, suited to different conditions of cultural soil and different moments in the life of a community.

Pioneer Places — arise in disrupted, depleted, or transitional soil. They do not require ideal conditions. They make conditions better by being present.

• The Art Invitation — makes a thriving, regenerative world experienceable; art as signpost, not illustration

• The Community Garden — grounds local communities back in place through food, soil, and collective exchange

• The Neighbourhood Cafe — the living room of a community; low-threshold, high-trust, the seedbed of social cohesion

• The Initiation Portal — holds people at crucial moments of transition; rite of passage as orientation field

Maturation Places — arise when the soil has enough depth and moisture to hold sustained, complex, and multi-generational work.

• The Ecovillage — the most complete attempt in contemporary culture to embody a regenerative way of life at community scale; prototype, not retreat

• The BioHub — a living laboratory where ecological literacy and economic vitality grow together; cross-pollination as methodology

Composting Places — work with endings; not places of failure, but places where what has served its purpose is invited to dissolve and become nourishment.

• The Ruins of Modernity — what remains when the story is over, and what is already growing in the cracks

• The Reimagination Factory — takes the shell of the old logic and fills it with something different; composting in its most architecturally ambitious form

Contemplation Places — where the cultural metabolism slows enough for depth to become possible; the active practice of receiving what cannot be grasped in motion.

• The Temple of Gaia — restores the sacred bond connecting us to the living world; a held space, not a building

• The Retreat Centre — holds the personal and collective healing that modernity has made necessary; restored capacity as ground, not wellness as product

These archetypes are suited to different moments in the life of a community, a place, and a person. They each have specific requirements for being able to thrive which this article helps identify.

A Full Example: The Ecovillage

How can we live the regenerative future, fully and in community, right now?

The ecovillage is perhaps the most complete attempt in contemporary culture to embody a regenerative way of life at the scale of community. It is a place archetype of profound ambition: to make visible that food sovereignty, ecological building, collective governance, emotional culture, and economic solidarity are not separate utopian projects but facets of a single, liveable whole.

At its best, the ecovillage does not retreat from the world. It prototypes the future for it. It demonstrates what is possible when people commit to living in right relationship with land, water, each other, and the larger web of life: not as an ideal, but as a daily, embodied, sometimes difficult, always instructive practice.

Ecovillages are schools of complexity. They confront their inhabitants with the full relational and political demands of collective life: shared decision-making, conflict, resource allocation, labour distribution, and the ongoing negotiation of individual freedom and collective accountability. This is both their most difficult dimension and their most important gift to the wider culture. They know things that cannot be known from the outside.

Cultural Soil Criteria

Narrative Diversity: Depends. Mature ecovillages can contain, and hold in tension, a remarkable diversity of worldviews, backgrounds, and cultural references. This is a source of creative fertility and of ongoing challenge. The capacity to hold this diversity without collapsing into monoculture is a primary measure of cultural soil health.

Porosity: Variable. A crucial question for every ecovillage is how porous it is to the wider world: to new members, to visitors, to critique, and to the communities surrounding it. Porosity guards against the insularity that transforms prototype into enclave.

Moisture (Emotional Literacy): High. The emotional culture of an ecovillage is foundational. Collectives that have developed practices for processing conflict, celebrating achievement, and holding grief together are more resilient than those organised primarily around ecological or technical systems.

Structure (Collaborative forms): Medium. A right balance between structure and openness is often found. Different forms of organising have been tested and implemented, adapted to the local conditions and seasons, and in memory of the relational history of the community. They hold great insights for associated initiatives and other ecovillages.

Microbial Life (Subtle Dynamics): Healthy balance. The rituals, ceremonies, artistic practices, and informal gatherings that hold the relational field of an ecovillage are its microbial life: invisible to external evaluation, essential to internal coherence.

Associated Personal Archetypes

The Steward takes responsibility for the long-term health of the land and the community over time, beyond their personal tenure.

The Mediator holds the conflict that is the inevitable companion of collective life: not resolving it prematurely, but helping the community metabolise it into learning.

The Elder carries institutional memory across transitions, providing continuity and perspective when the community is at risk of losing its thread.

Associated Collective Archetypes

The Hive describes the sustained, distributed, role-differentiated production of an ecovillage at full functioning: from food growing to governance to education to care.

The Fission-Fusion Group describes how ecovillage members actually live: in shifting working groups, project teams, and relational constellations that come together and separate around specific tasks and phases.

Examples

• Findhorn (Scotland): one of the world’s most established intentional communities with decades of ecological and cultural development

• Tamera (Portugal): peace research village combining regenerative agriculture with conflict transformation and social arts

• Damanhur (Italy): federated community and living art experiment with elaborate cultural and spiritual life

• ZEGG (Germany): community known for its process culture and conflict transformation practices

• Crystal Waters (Australia): one of the earliest permaculture ecovillages, designed as a template for sustainable regional development

The Full Article

The paid article develops all ten place archetypes in the same depth as the Ecovillage above. For each one: the central question it holds, what kind of cultural soil it requires and helps create, the personal and collective archetypes associated with it, and concrete examples from existing places around the world.

It closes with a reading of succession itself: how to sense which place archetypes are missing from a cultural landscape, and what their absence tells you about what the ecosystem needs in order to move.

The question worth sitting with, wherever you are working: which of these thresholds does your place most need to open? And who are the archetype-holders already there, waiting for the soil to be ready?

To read the full article and access the complete framework, become a paid subscriber.

That special spot in the wilderness where you witness the beauty of life unfolding. That vibrant community space where special encounters, deep conversations, and an emerging collective body moving to music that was calling you just happen. That “secret,” mesmerising corner of the city, forest, or neighbourhood you t…

Read more

At the heart of what emerged was The Hive. It asked us about our capacity to shapeshift into being an artisan bee, to belong to a guild within a honeycomb structure, and by doing that, to contribute to thriving landscapes.

“Instead of being a mass or coming into one big circle, we can actually honeycomb it. Maybe that’s the shape we need to look at more.”

What the space held

We moved through three bodies in that session. The personal body. The movement body. The place body. Three of the moves of an ecosystem choreography, each opening a different question.

The personal body asked: which archetype are you currently carrying, in this field, at this phase? Which one is present, hinting at your contribution to the ecosystem(s) you are part of?

One person observed that they find themselves in the Pioneer, the Weaver, and the Elder simultaneously, in different ways, and that these archetypes are also in relationship among themselves. Not a single presence but a mosaic. Like essences in a perfume doing the enchantment together, each note necessary to the composition.

For another, in the movement, what surfaced was the image of tidal movement. The back and forth of contrasting forces composing a wave that lands on shore, stretches, and slowly retreats. A coming back into lunar rhythm. Fluid between polarities pulling and releasing. And with it, at times an overwhelm, an intuitive uncertainty, until the moment of sudden clarity: “I know exactly what I’m talking about.”

We danced between sensing the moment as immersive experience, and stepping back to observe the pattern from a wider perspective. A rhythm in itself: immersion, emergence, return. What one participant named as a kind of remembrance:

“It feels like a kind of remembrance that means we can choose. Now we’re the swarm, now we’re the hive, now we can dance. When we don’t feel a choice, we feel either completely paralysed or completely swept away with the wind. This feels like an anchoring.”

This choreography landed in cultural soil, a modern soil marked by complexity. The Hive emerging as the structure that can hold the complexity of the changes at hand. And perhaps importantly, re-integrate functions played within professional, economic, and social systems that are currently in disintegration.

Three threads that moved through the room

Looking at what connected the personal, collective, and place bodies across the session, three threads kept reappearing.

Hybridity. We are rarely accompanied by a single archetype. Most of us carry the Pioneer, the Weaver, and the Elder in different proportions, at different phases, in different contexts. There is the longer-term archetype that has been present across years, and the more acute presence arriving right now as a guide. Archetypes are not chosen. They find you, through synchronicities, through what keeps reappearing in the peripheral field.

Thresholding. Someone described moments in her professional life when the group was truly swarming: that extraordinary feeling of collective momentum, emergent movement, direction without direction. Until the initial energy wasn’t held anymore. It imploded. Became something else.

“There were moments at work when we felt we were literally swarming. An amazing feeling. Until the initial energy isn’t held anymore. It implodes and becomes something else.”

The swarm has its own cycles of intensity and rest. It is not a permanent state. There is landing, reconstitution, and the question of what shape comes next. The choreographic intelligence lies not in sustaining the swarm indefinitely, but in developing the sensitivity to know when it is time to let it land.

The quality of movement. Is it slow and steady? In tension or creatively loose? Erratic or collectively synchronized? Where is it in flow and where is it stagnant? Reading the quality of the dynamic as indication on what’s possible here.

The Hive Archetype

The hive is an astonishing example of distributed intelligence producing complex, coordinated production. The queen does not command. She reproduces, holding the generative and energetic core — less a ruler than a living anchor of continuity. The workers do not receive orders. They follow chemical gradients, waggle-dance communications, and local feedback loops. What results from all of this is not simple:

• Architecture: honeycomb geometry with near-perfect efficiency, encoding both shared memory and future capacity

• Climate regulation: the hive maintains a precise internal temperature regardless of external conditions

• Collective decision-making: swarm sites are chosen through democratic quorum through dancing, not executive directive

• Surplus: the cultural equivalent of honey, enabling the whole constellation to survive winter

The hive is not a factory. It is a living, breathing, climate-regulating, decision-making organism constituted collectively through shared dance, a specifically shaped place, and different (archetypal) roles played.

The hive embodies a specific role architecture. These roles are biochemically assigned and may shift across an individual worker’s lifecycle. Mapped to human organisations, they look something like this:

• Queen: holds reproductive continuity; what an organisation’s founding vision or cultural DNA actually is when it is healthy

• Nurse Bees: tend the developing young; mentors, educators, onboarding stewards

• Builder: produces the geometry of shared memory; designers, architects, protocol-writers

• Forager: ranges widely, brings nourishment and intelligence back, performs the waggle-dance; field researchers, connectors, business development

• Guard: holds the threshold, determines what enters and what does not; legal, values stewardship, editorial

• Scout: explores beyond the known range; futures practitioners, R&D, horizon-scanners

• Climate Regulator: maintains internal conditions; operations, HR, culture stewards

The hive also follows patterns of disintegration. Calcification. When the waggle-dance stops working because the foragers have found nothing new, and the system keeps sending scouts in the same directions out of habit. Or when the hive mistakes its own internal climate for the health of the wider ecology, a disconnected self-image. The organisation maintains perfect internal culture while extracting from the watershed it depends on. Hive-choreography applied to contexts that need swarm or pioneer responses will suffocate them.

The Hive belongs to a mid-succession to climax ecosystem phase. It takes years to reach its full complexity. Its gift, when it arrives at the right stage in the right soil, is the production of surplus that makes cultural winter and economically difficult times survivable.

What this might teach the labour market

The current labour market operates on what I have been calling the atomisation of being: a logic of radical individualism in which every person is a sovereign unit competing for position, negotiating separately, absorbing risk alone. Employers cannot find the workers they need. Workers cannot find work attuned to what they actually carry. Youth unemployment swells while specific sectors face massive unmet demand:

• Regenerative agriculture and soil restoration

• The care economy and relational work of all kinds

• Renewable energy and the built environment transition

• Bioregional food systems and local value chains

The macro disruptions already underway in automotive, white-collar administration, and large-scale production will accelerate that mismatch in ways the current architecture has no capacity to absorb.

The guild was a pre-modern answer to exactly this problem. Medieval guilds organised vocational education. They held apprenticeships, transmitted craft knowledge, encoded shared standards, offered solidarity funds for members in difficulty, created belonging through shared symbology and ceremony, and maintained relationships with the places and communities they served. They were often local (or bioregional) by nature rather than by design philosophy, but because the soil they grew from was local, the clients they served were local, the knowledge they encoded was place-specific.

Their shadow is equally real. Guilds could be exclusive, protectionist, and resistant to new forms of knowing. The compound-eye potential of diverse expertise — the way different professional disciplines can collectively see what no single lens can — can collapse into the defensiveness of protected identity. The guild without the hive’s distributed intelligence becomes a cartel. The hive without the guild’s craft transmission becomes anonymous coordination without embodied knowledge.

What if we reconstituted something like a guild, but structured like a hive?

Bioregional Hive Guilds: constellations of practitioners working at the intersection of a specific craft and a specific territory. Not organised by platform or professional association, but by place and practice. For instance, water cycle regeneration in Iberia, protecting tourism and enabling regenerative agriculture.

Each such Guild would carry the Hive’s functional architecture: structural anchor roles holding the whole, energy-producers maintaining generative momentum, foragers and scouts ranging to the edges of the field, temperature regulators sensing when the collective body is overheating or going cold, and a centre for renewal. Something that ensures the next generation can live.

The Guild hints at the role of:

• The craft itself, and the apprenticeship traditions that transmit it

• The ceremony of initiation and the pride of belonging

• A solidarity fund, so that a member who loses work does not lose everything

• Place-rootedness, so that the knowledge stays in the bioregion it grew from

• Cross-pollination between different specialisms working in the same territory

Before the hive, the soil

Being able to become a Hive is conditional, and emerges from a longer lineage.

The Hive does not thrive in bare ground lie a Pioneer Symbiosis nor is it just the next stage of being a swarm. The swarm’s high porosity and lateral momentum are essential for early movement, but they are insufficient for the complexity the Hive requires. What the Hive needs is very high structured collaborations, strong microbial life in the cultural sense (shared tacit intelligence, encoded norms, a history of having worked and struggled and learned together). The hive struggles in highly porous, rapidly changing soils. Disruption kills hives as surely as pesticides.

The sequencing matters. You cannot declare a Hive Guild into existence. You may have to pioneer, then swarm, then weave, then consolidate. And you may need to develop the sensitivity to know which phase you are actually in at any given moment. Running Hive coordination in swarm conditions will suffocate what is trying to move. Holding swarm energy back in a field that has already matured enough to hold something more complex will frustrate everyone.

One participant put it plainly: “The swarm is a moment, right? It happens, and then we have to ground. And then maybe we can swarm again, but if you push the swarm, there comes a moment that we have to settle.”

The question for your own choreography

Here is where the field story becomes a diagnostic.

Where in your own work do you feel the pull toward Hive structure? Toward something with holding more memory, more role clarity, more collective intelligence built over time? And where are you still rightly in fast and spontaneous swarm conditions, not yet ready to consolidate into the complexity and structure the Hive requires?

Consider your own organisation, collective, or field:

• Which roles in the Hive architecture are present and functioning? Which are absent or collapsed into one another?

• Is there a queen function, like a renewal centre ensuring continuity across generations, or is the whole system dependent on one person who cannot be replaced?

• Are the foragers bringing genuinely new intelligence back, or has the waggle-dance become habit, pointing in the same directions?

• Is the internal climate being regulated? Or is the organisation maintaining its own culture while losing attunement to the wider ecosystem it is embedded in?

And underneath all of that: what craft are you actually carrying? Not your offer, not your methodology, not your positioning. Your unique contribution, as a living skill, shaped by place, held in community, practised (perhaps in different form) across generations, and at the same time unique to you?

Continue the dance

If you sensed a sector, a collaboration, or a field you are working in where the Hive Guild question feels alive, or if you sense a mismatch between the choreography you are dancing and the succession phase you are actually in: I would love to talk about it with you directly.

The Choreographers Conversation is a one-to-one conversation in which we look at the dance between your personal body, the collective body and the field you serve ad work with. A conversation rather than a sales call. What you leave with is more clarity over what may want to move through you.

Book 45-minute conversation

And if you want to go deeper into the full map of ten Choreographic Constellations — including the other patterns we did not have time to explore — the complete guide is available to paid subscribers.

The choreography is already moving. The question is whether we are moving with it consciously.

I hear this question surfacing in conversations about AI, in reflections on our role in the sixth mass extinction, and in contemplations about our potential beyond destruction.

The modern answer has reduced us to being a supposedly enlightened homo oeconomicus, a thinking machine. A functional and interest-maximizing individual. It shapes how we move through life, how we organize work, and what we count as contribution to society.

We have been rehearsing our own replacement by machines by first agreeing to become like them, accepting that what matters is what can be calculated, measured, and processed.

With the notion of “kinship” (e.g. Robin Wall Kimmerer) we are reminded of a cultural repertoire we have largely lost in modern societies. It invites us to reconnect to indigenous traditions, to our bodies, to being integral part of nature again, in right relationship to the more-than-human world.

However, there is a risk of romanticizing this reconnection, as well as applying a monocultural framing to it. I often hear that we can access this way of being by moving away from the drive to action by “just being, without performing.”

Can we be without form? What does “just being” human then mean? Is there a pure essence beneath we just need to access? A pre-modern “right” way of being human? It often comes with an appeal to inner work, as a precondition of being a “good human”.

In this respect, I share the challenge by Dave Snowden and Nora Bateson, among others, regarding “inner development” as drawing a false binary between inner and outer worlds. A well-intended attempt, but nevertheless implying a homogenization of what it means to be human. After all, we co-evolve, we are mutually constituted in relationship.

If anything, the (quite ancient) conversations on “human nature” point at radical diversity, as expressed by the great variety in human cultures, affecting worldviews, practices, rituals, postures and gestures of being alive. In sum, a rich cultural repertoire of what it means to be human, as nature’s means of building resilience and abundance.

And yet, as the words of Vandana Shiva remind us, diversity is threatened at all levels: biodiversity, the diversity of practices, beliefs, and ways of being. This modern homogenization is also largely prevalent in movements that aim to make the world a more conscious, sustainable, or regenerative place.

There seems to be a structural incapacity of connecting, of weaving between different narratives, subcultures, lifestyles, and roles played in regenerating places and the planet. The polarization of our times is mirrored by the annihilation of the diverse spectrum of being that makes life rich, meaningful, and abundant.

It shows up as:

- homogenizing narratives around sustainability, the circular economy, regeneration etc. arguing, convincing, influencing for “the right way” thereby adopting an expert up to colonial posture
- the evocation of a larger “we”: “we” are sitting in “the same boat”, “we need to” while this “we” is not based on consent, may involve speaking on behalf of others, and lacks the representation of the diversity within the “we” under the veil of well-intended, but superficial convergence. At the same time, individualistic logics remain in place through virtue signalling an inexistent and often unfelt “we”.
- the invisibilization of edge perspectives in speaking about “the future” in singular, excluding the diversity of voices and bodies of more-than-human beings, disabled, LGBTIQ, Global South people etc. (cf. decolonial approaches, queer ecology etc.)
- this goes hand-in-hand with the massive waste of diverse “talent” that escapes the monopolizing idea of worthiness we see today from job recruitments on a broken labour market, in youth unemployment, to the exclusion of whole categories from contributing to society.
- hidden power dynamics even in horizontal approaches to power, incl. sociocracy, holacracy and others, unreflective of the diversity of power dynamics and very understandings and manifestations of power. Reduction to “The Circle” as unique archetypal form of organizing.
- the projection of community in transactional networks, groups, and social media platforms without deeper forms of belonging, shared meaning-making, and solidarity.

This leads to the incapacity of embodying diverse collective and more-than-human ways of being – what I call choreographic constellation in which both individuals and collective groups play a role contributing to a greater whole – an organization, a community, a place, or an entire ecosystem.

Modern constellations of uniformity

It leads to “modern constellations” that you will recognize in how our societies are organizing and moving through life and work.

I call these the four modern choreographic constellations.

The Hierarchy of Masses. Schools, political parties, corporations, mass media, administrative states: organising large numbers of people through a single dominant logic, centred at the top, homogenised at the base. The movement is top-down, the rhythm is command-and-comply, the cultural soil is authoritative narrative monoculture.

The Highway of Progress. Factory production lines, corporate processes, marketing funnels, innovation cycles, algorithmic feeds: movement as efficiency, direction as singular, speed as the only legitimate metric. The choreography is linear. Everything that cannot be placed on the conveyor belt does not exist.

The Polarisation of Belonging. Citizen and foreigner. Friend and foe. Able and disabled. Normal and different. The reduction of the radical diversity of identity and belonging to binary opposition: a choreography that generates permanent conflict precisely because it cannot hold the complexity of what it simplifies. Every excluded middle becomes a wound.

The Atomisation of Being. The maintenance of isolation through the projection of a higher, unattainable power: heaven, utopia, AI, political messianism, religious dogma. Meaning exists somewhere other than here: in the future, in the transcendent, in the next upgrade. This choreography keeps individuals separated and reaching, never arriving, never feeling enough to act in genuine relation.

These four are part of a larger system. The Hierarchy creates the masses that the Highway processes into output, which the Polarisation keeps from organising across difference, while Atomisation ensures that no one feels located enough in a particular place and people to resist. Combined, they produce a culture that is, as I keep putting it: disembodied, dislocated, and dissociative.

While it is easy to dismiss these modern movements, they have emerged for a reason, raising the question: what legitimate need or urgency may they have been an answer to, at least originally?

The Hierarchy answered the need of organizing industrial societies. The Highway ensured that the permanent growth need of these societies can be met. The Polarisation points at the role of discernment and judgment (of what’s right and wrong). The Atomisation follows something beyond the immediate, something larger than ourselves to orient toward.

Emerging from a European context of industrialization in which poverty, famine, (civil) wars, poor education etc. were still largely present, they offered a response our modern systems are still largely based upon: nation-states, education systems, health systems, political systems, mass media narratives, organizational structures, etc.

Having originated from a context of scarcity, it is perhaps unsurprising that these modern constellations are catastrophically impoverished in the diversity of choreographic responses available to them.

Which brings us to what nature has actually been rehearsing.

Regenerative Choreographic Constellation Archetypes: nature’s full repertoire

Long before humans invented organisations, living systems developed a rich and differentiated repertoire of collective movement forms. Rather than picturing them as metaphors, they are actual patterns of self-organisation, each adapted to specific ecological conditions, specific succession phases, specific relational challenges.

We carry these patterns. They can even at times already move through us. The challenge today is to develop the literacy to recognise them (again), name them, and consciously work with them.

I have been mapping ten Choreographic Constellation Archetypes as a living framework for reading and redesigning how human collectives (can) move. Each carries its own genius, its own shadow, its own cultural soil requirements, and its own place in the succession sequence of a living ecosystem.

As part of the Ecosystem Choreographies framework’s Synergy Move, they are tightly linked to the Soil Move, the cultural soil they help nurture and transform, and to the Style Move, the individual archetypes that make the collective constellation possible, or not. The following archetypal constellations provide an overview.

If you’d like to receive the full guide with full constellation portraits as with The Swarm archetype, consider joining as paid subscriber.

1. THE SWARM (full profile example)

Starlings, sardines, herring, baitfish, murmurations

The Pattern The swarm is perhaps the most breathtaking demonstration that coherence does not require command. Thousands of starlings shift, fold, compress and expand across the sky with no conductor. Only local rules of proximity, alignment, and avoidance. Each individual tracks its three to seven nearest neighbours. The global pattern is breathtaking, predator-confusing, beauty-generating and emerges from such simple organizing principles.

The swarm is an emergent order operating at a scale no single node can perceive or control in its entirety. With few individual archetypal roles present, it makes an ideal starting point for pioneering efforts, such as launching a new product, creating a pioneering community project or testing innovative approaches.

Human Cultural Analogues

• Flash mobs and spontaneous street protests

• Viral social media movements (#MeToo in its first surge, Arab Spring cascades)

• Open-source development sprints and hackathons

• Wikipedia’s early collective editing behaviour

• Festival-time economies where thousands coordinate without central planning

• Market microstructure (high-frequency, short-horizon trading behaviours)

• The early, pre-institutional phase of any social movement

Labour Division / Role Archetypes
The swarm distributes leadership across all nodes simultaneously. There are no permanent roles, just temporary local influence. The Catalyst is momentarily whoever is on the leading edge of the direction-shift. The Body is the mass that amplifies and transmits. The Sentinel is whoever happens to be at the periphery, first to sense a predator or opportunity. No one holds these roles across time.

• Catalyst / Edge-Mover: initiates micro-direction changes; influence lasts seconds

• Body / Amplifier: follows the nearest signal; creates the mass coherence

• Peripheral Sensor: triggers the collapse or expansion by sensing the edge first

Cultural Soil Conditions

The swarm needs:
- high porosity (information flows instantly and without gatekeeping),
- low structural density (no hierarchy to slow the signal),
- strong moisture (people trust each other’s embodied sensing enough to follow rapidly), and
- adequate microbial life in the form of shared tacit norms.
- It does not require narrative diversity. In fact, narrative monoculture can intensify swarm behaviour, for better and worse.

It thrives in low-trust-in-institutions, high-trust-in-peers environments.

Ecological Succession Phase Early pioneer. The swarm is the pattern of immediate response: to threat, to opportunity, to spectacle. It appears at the disruption-and-reassembly phase of succession: after a clearance event, before new structures have crystallised. It is the shape that occupied space before a forest can begin.

What It Is Best At

• Rapid, non-hierarchical collective response to threat or opportunity

• Predator confusion: creating enough complexity that the dominant system cannot target any single node

• Generating collective emergence without coordination costs

• Mobilising at scale before institutions can catch up

Shadows and Thresholds The swarm’s gift is also its fragility. Without the five-dimension soil conditions, it tips into stampede, panic, or mob. It cannot hold complexity over time, carry institutional memory, or coordinate toward multi-year goals. Every swarm moment eventually needs a different choreographic form to metabolise what it has generated. The failure mode is: swarm forever, never nest. Movement without roots.

The Nest

birds: from thrushes to raptors to penguins

The choreography of protected becoming, of incubating with care and nourishment. Built with extraordinary precision and relational labour for a specific developmental window, then left. The nest holds the not-yet.

In human culture: residency programmes, founding-team intimacy, sanctuary spaces, initiatory circles, and — yes — the Cœureographers programme in its holding of practitioners before they are ready to fully emerge into the wider field. The gift is the capacity to hold what is not yet ready to meet the world. The shadow is the protector who cannot release, the nest that does not know it has become a cage.

The Hive

honeybees

Distributed intelligence producing complex, coordinated, surplus-generating production without a commander. The queen does not rule but enables continuity over generations. The workers follow chemical gradients and waggle-dances rather than orders. The result is architecture, climate regulation, collective decision-making by quorum (through popular excitement about the waggle-dance), and the production of honey as the surplus that makes winter survivable.

In human culture: worker cooperatives, monastic orders, guild systems, the best of what institutions can be when their microbial culture is healthy. The gift is sustained production and accumulated surplus over time. The shadow is calcification: when order becomes rigid, when the waggle-dance stops finding anything new and the colony follows its own trails to exhaustion.

The Pack

wolves, African wild dogs, orcas

Cooperative pursuit across complex terrain, through total relational attunement. The pack’s extraordinary hunt success (African wild dogs succeed in roughly 80% of attempts) comes not from individual dominance but from the collective capacity to read each other in motion.

In human culture: surgical teams, jazz ensembles, start-up founding cohorts, special forces units, high-trust facilitation partnerships, theatre ensembles with long collaborative histories. The gift is collective intelligence in dynamic conditions where the whole genuinely exceeds the sum. The shadow is insularity: the relational depth that creates the gift also closes the group to what is outside it.

The Herd

wildebeest, horses, bison, caribou

Collective safety in open terrain through distributed sensing. Every individual contributes vigilance; the alarm of one becomes the response of all. The migration follows routes that encode ancestral knowledge across generations.

In human culture: religious congregations, pilgrimage traditions, political mass movements past their swarm phase, and consumer trend cycles and the herding behaviours of financial markets. The gift is the embodied transmission of memory and the safety of collective presence. The shadow is conformity pressure that eliminates the edge species, and the stampede that follows when collective panic overrides individual judgment.

The Fission-Fusion Group

chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants

The most cognitively complex of the collective movement forms. A community that regularly divides into smaller working sub-groups and reconvenes. It can split and reunion following social, ecological, and relational logic that all members track simultaneously. This requires high distributed intelligence compared with other archetype constellations, because managing who is with whom, what alliances are active, and what knowledge each sub-group is developing demands extraordinary cognitive and social capacity.

In human culture: project-based organisations, university ecosystems, bioregional networks, jazz scenes, regenerative territorial experiments. The gift is holding diversity of perspective within a container of relational trust. The shadow is fragmentation when the reunion rituals (the grooming, the shared meal, the gathering) are defunded in the name of efficiency.

The Flock

geese, cranes: migratory formation flyers

Organised formation flight in which each position has a distinct aerodynamic function, and the lead rotates to share the energetic cost of cutting through resistance. The V-formation creates uplift for every bird behind the leader. The whole flock arrives after migrating thousands of kilometres on significantly less energy than any bird flying alone would need.

In human culture: leadership-rotation cooperatives, relay teams, editorial collectives, long-distance caravans, facilitator networks with rotating lead roles. The gift is sustaining collective movement toward a shared destination without burning out any single node, making visible the gift of shared uplift. The shadow is rigidity: when one leader remains in position, burning out, and putting the whole constellation at risk.

The Colony

ants, termites

A million nodes producing architecture, agriculture, climate regulation, and coordinated defence without any individual understanding of the whole, through chemical gradients and distributed computation. Termite mounds have been continuously occupied for over two thousand years. This is complex infrastructure.

In human culture: large bureaucratic institutions, global logistics networks, national administrations, the long memory of religious institutions. The gift is sustained production at scale across generational timescales. The shadow is the brittleness of a system that cannot absorb novelty: when the pheromone trail leads nowhere, a million ants follow it to exhaustion, and the caste structure cannot metabolise what it cannot categorise.

The Mycelium

fungal networks: the Wood Wide Web

A single organism expressed as a network. Simultaneously decomposing dead matter and transferring nutrients, carbon, water, and chemical signals between living organisms across hundreds of hectares. The mycelium is not a collective of individuals. It is a distributed intelligence that connects what would otherwise remain isolated, and dissolves what needs to be composted.

In human culture: informal knowledge networks, diaspora webs, dark social (the WhatsApp threads and email chains that carry most of the actual relational value invisible to any institutional map), peer learning ecosystems, and the connective tissue of regenerative practice networks. Its gift is making soil, making connection, making decomposition possible. Its shadow is extraction: when the connectors stop returning value to what they connect; and permanent invisibility, mistaken for discretion.

The Pioneer Symbiosis

lichen, dandelions, nitrogen-fixing bacteria with legumes

The choreography of making the impossible habitable via improbable partnerships. Lichen colonises bare rock: not one organism but two or three (funghi, bacteria and algae), each providing what the other cannot. Together they produce the acids that break stone into proto-soil as the foundation on which every subsequent succession depends. The dandelion arrives on disturbed ground, drives its taproot through the compacted layer, brings up minerals from below the plough line, and flowers first for the earliest pollinators. Like an alchemist for degraded soil.

In human culture: social entrepreneurs working in contexts written off by institutions, early bioregional practitioners in conventional landscapes, whistleblowers who create the conditions for accountability processes that arrive after them, first-generation practitioners bringing regenerative agriculture into farming regions where it has no precedent. The gift is making soil where there was none. The shadow is the martyr who mistakes tolerance of harsh conditions for a permanent virtue. It’s the pioneer who does not know when the soil is ready for something to follow.

These ten are a living repertoire of moving together with the intelligence and space-shaping power of nature. This article has covered patterns that co-exist, intersect, and succeed each other in any healthy ecosystem. A mature ecosystem like forest can hold many of them simultaneously.

The work of choreographic constellations is not to choose one pattern and implement it. It is to develop the literacy to read which patterns are already moving in a given cultural field: what is composting, what is emerging, what is overextended, what is missing. It’s learning to embody a greater cultural repertoire of being and acting in the world.

This is the diffractive move building collective resilience: not replacing the Hierarchy of Masses with a single alternative, but introducing enough choreographic diversity that different parts of the human community can reorganise around the patterns that actually fit their soil, their succession phase, their specific gifts.

Something is composting. And beneath it, the mycelium is already moving.

The succession is underway. The question is whether we have enough choreographic literacy to dance with it, rather than against it.

The full profiles with how each archetype divides labour among role archetypes, what cultural soil conditions it requires, what ecological succession phase it belongs to, and what it costs when it stays past its time are available for paid subscribers.

Jean-Philippe Steeger is an Ecosystem Choreographer working at the intersection of cultural soil analysis, regenerative leadership and communication practice, and systems change.

By Jean-Philippe Steeger

Read more

As many as 90% of startups fail. Common reasons mentioned include running out of money, being in the wrong market, a lack of research, bad partnerships, ineffective marketing, and not being an industry expert. What gets less talked about is the failure of the very operating model of entrepreneurs and startups: the approach to growth, the learning journey, the inner resilience and embodiment of being a founder, the actual listening capacity to clients and their needs, as well as what “good” partnerships actually are.

Entrepreneurship and startup culture largely draw on unvalidated (behavioralist) assumptions in management theory, the myth of the heroic “genius” founder, and often abstract models to “scale fast, fail fast” that in reality lead to burnout. Furthermore, they aren’t built to deal with a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

How many books about business success and entrepreneurship are written by people who have actually managed and led a business for many years?

Being an entrepreneur is inherently dynamic, requiring learning, attunement to new conditions, creating and adapting structures, and developing resilience and stamina in moving forward in a healthy rhythm. Furthermore, for those who care about leaving a healthy legacy for communities, places, and the planet, there is a need to design the work in a way that contributes to the vitality of the natural, social, economic, and cultural systems it is part of.

That’s why Ecosystem Choreographies works like a dynamic operating system: an iteration weaving between the inner aspects of work, the market, and the offer. It allows adapting the own “work choreography” to the succession phase of the business or organization, to changing audience segments, and to the evolving inner clarity that may emerge on that journey.

So what is the difference between the standard operating model of founders and startups, and the Ecosystem Choreographies approach with its 7 moves, concretely?

0. Before anything moves: the practice of Silence

The very ground from which work becomes possible is mostly ignored by entrepreneurial guidance: silence, rest, wintering, and “just being”. Before diagnosing the market, before naming the audience, before designing the offer, before even knowing what you are building it is a precondition for actually being able to receive the field you’re working on.

In Ecosystem Choreographies, Silence is not absence. It is the negative space from which all choreography becomes possible. The space of potential. In music, the rest is not empty: it is where the previous phrase lands and the next one breathes. In dance, it’s where the bodies “want to” move. In ecological systems, the dormant seed is already doing its work.

Pioneer founders who tend to take root most durably have developed an unusual capacity to be still and receptive facing a field they don’t fully understand. Attending to what the market is not saying as clearly as what it is, to what potential collaborators are circling without naming, to what the body registers as resonance versus performance. The latent, the inexplicit, the unconscious, the alluded, the homorous escapes even the best algorithms.

In entrepreneurial terms, it is the precondition for not projecting your solution onto a field that hasn’t asked for it yet.

What is waiting to be listened to, before you speak?

1. From heroic adventurer to composting the life journey

Choreographic Style and Story

In most guidelines, books, and advice to entrepreneurs, you can find something about an open mindset, positive attitude, motivation, and endurance. While these may be valid, they contribute to projecting a (mythologized) picture of the ideal entrepreneur as a hard-working hero climbing mountains. If you’ve been to startup pitches, you may feel the quite narrow understanding of the “entrepreneurial spirit.”

In the transition to an entrepreneurial journey, whether through incubators, trial and error, entrepreneurship literature, or ten-step guidelines to success, what is often absent is the personal journey, the life wisdom, the unique personal calling animating that pathway.

With Ecosystem Choreographies, I therefore ask: what kind of latent wisdom and capabilities wait to be composted before going on that journey? Accessing the archetypal roles we are able to play, the wisdom to be remembered, and the stories that can hold guiding knowledge are an important starting point.

The Pioneer archetype, in its very essence, is not the hero on the mountaintop. In ecological succession, pioneers are the first species to move to disturbed or bare ground: lichens on volcanic rock, fireweed after a forest fire. They are not less sophisticated than the mature forest that may eventually follow. They are differently sophisticated. Their intelligence lies in tolerating conditions that would stop most other life forms, in fixing nitrogen and breaking rock so that something richer can come later.

A pioneer founder is ecologically analogous. The capability is in being at home at the threshold, in the in-between, in conditions that have not yet stabilized. The archetype is not the conqueror of the mountain but the dweller of the ecotone: the edge species that makes new soil.

What is waiting to be composted from your life journey, which will serve you in a different way on your new endeavor?

2. From “like-minded” bubbles to transforming the field of work

Choreographic Soil

Paradoxically, innovation ecosystems often reproduce the very siloes that limit innovation. Predefined funding lines, checkbox criteria to be met, focus on sectors that won’t exist tomorrow. In sustainability innovation, that can mean choosing to focus on environmental OR social impact, as though the distinction were given by nature rather than by administrative norms.

Furthermore, the entrepreneurial culture of “like-minded” people is too often quite monocultural. In US venture capital, Black and Latino founders received only 1% and 1.5% respectively of total venture capital. Women-founded teams received only 1.9% of VC funds.

That affects how businesses and organizations serve their fields of work. Today, that relationship is largely mediated by data analytics, extractive in its appropriation of attention and labor for profit, and one-sided in its broadcasting logic.

With Cultural Soil Analysis, I help founders and organizations develop a deeper understanding of the reality of those they work with: the worldviews and narratives they hold, the emotional waters they navigate, the space for innovation they’re open to, and the capacity to adopt new patterns of thinking, being, and acting.

This reading moves across five dimensions: the narrative diversity of the field (whether multiple worldviews cross-pollinate or one frame dominates), its porosity (whether new ideas can breathe and contradiction can be held), its moisture or emotional literacy (whether affective and somatic knowing is welcomed as legitimate), its structure or memory layers (whether composted history is still nourishing present action), and its microbial life or subtle dynamics (what is happening beneath the visible surface, whose voices are marginalised and taking their knowledge with them).

The soil conditions determine not just what might grow, but how it needs to be introduced, at what pace, and through what relational approach.

How are you listening to the needs and aspirations of those you work with?

3. From linear planning to diverse experimentation

Choreographic Seeds

Whether from funders or from incubator programs, entrepreneurs are often advised to create a business strategy and plan with KPIs and a roadmap. This is probably one of the safest routes to failure, since it runs counter to the need to sense the field, to experiment iteratively with what works and what doesn’t.

This can mean launching multiple small offerings, conversations, and interventions rather than betting everything on one perfectly designed program. It means reading the resonance of the audience and field of work and adapting accordingly, rather than investing a lot of time and effort into getting the field to adopt your solution. To use the agricultural analogy: using lots of fertilizers and pesticides for the crop you want, rather than planting locally adapted crops that the soil can actually hold.

Choreographically spoken, it means designing your seed of change in a way that can be received. The Resonance Value Compass guides this seed design as a value proposition, asking how the offer speaks to remembrance (root value), what potential it opens (aspirational value), what needs it addresses (practical value), how it works (methodological value), and how it is experienced (experiential value).

A fractal offer principle and example is useful here: testing your work through exploratory (sales) interviews and conversations, a free resource that reflects the essence of your work, a short trial programme for instance. Tested with different audiences. Seeds from the same plant.

How can you iterate on designing seeds of offering with a minimum viable structure while testing them playfully within different contexts and with different audiences, sensing what works?

4. From transactional collaboration to complementary constellations

Choreographic Synergies

Relationship-building is key. And yet relationships often remain transactional and interest-led. This affects trust, long-term outlook, and the transformative power of collaboration. Furthermore, transactional collaborations are most likely to fail precisely because the conditions for them to last are not being nurtured: community, shared narratives, a shared belonging to place.

In modern culture, the available forms of working together are deeply limited. There is the hierarchy of masses with a leader on top (schools, corporations, administrations), the motorway of progress with people following legal orders and protocols (production lines, administrative procedures), the polarization of belonging siloing people into categories (nationalities, political family, social class, department), and the atomization of being isolating people on behalf of a higher ideal or order (ideologies, dogmas, authorities).

Since there is no widely shared cultural access to other forms of living and working together, approaches like sociocracy or holacracy are most likely to fail: the cultural soil is not fertile to them. While they offer an alternative to modern constellations, their mode of organizing is equally reductive, often centering around the circle or multiple circles.

With Ecosystem Choreographies, I propose practicing movement archetypes: ways of collaborating together whose selection depends on the ecological succession phase, the cultural soil conditions, and the archetypal roles present.

For instance, pioneering businesses are unlikely to be able to create complex collaborative structures like an ant colony. However, they would be able to create simple synergetic collaborations like Lichen (with three complementary roles), or Flocks (where coordination emerges from a few shared principles rather than centralized direction). Once more developed, these constellations can evolve further, adapting to changing circumstances, available resources, and new audience segments.

5. From strategizing growth to choreographing transformative projects

Choreographic Stewardship

In the early stages of a business or project, the right balance between structure and openness needs to be found: to be able to test something, and to be able to learn and evolve. That means iterating and practicing the choreographic moves shared earlier, ensuring that there is a dance between what is emerging, how it resonates, and where the pull is.

By trying out multiple seeds, experimenting where they land and where not, it becomes possible to transfer the elements that work to other contexts, assembling them into a differently packaged offer. By doing this, the level of attunement to the soil, the quality of the seeds, and the clarity of presence improve over time.

Choreographic stewardship means leading the movement of development by discerning between helpful and unhelpful dynamics. If dynamics are draining, costly, and not going anywhere, it may be worth shifting the choreography. If dynamics are flowing, they may be able to branch out like a river and fertilize new fields, audiences, and offers.

Lichen doesn’t fail when the rock is slow to break. It is doing its work.

Reading the choreography: the Three Orientations

When a pioneer founder’s work isn’t rooting and resonate, three orientations (or gaps) tend to reveal where the choreography may have stalled.

Attunement: Finding Your Soil

Offering without genuinely understanding what the field can actually receive. The work stays in bubbles. It speaks to the like-minded. It circulates within the existing innovation ecosystem without reading the soil conditions that determine what that ecosystem can hold. The Soil and Silence moves are underactivated.

Embodiment: Moving From Presence

A story that people don’t feel. Narrative and presence are misaligned. The white papers are excellent; the in-person engagement is tentative. There is a gap between what the founder knows and what she is willing to embody, partly because the archetype being performed (the credentialed expert) is not the archetype she naturally carries. The Style and Silence moves are underactivated.

Value Proposition: Letting the Seed Land

Transformation appears distant or irrelevant. The offer speaks compellingly to where the field needs to go and how the methodology works, but says very little about the root value animating it, or the experiential value: what it actually feels like to be accompanied through it. The Seed and Story moves are underactivated.

Most projects carry all three to some degree. The diagnostic question is which gap is primary and blocking the others.

None of these gaps require becoming someone different. They require composing the choreography differently: reading the soil before entering it, embodying the archetype the field actually needs rather than the one the sector rewards, telling a story that speaks to the full range of what the work touches.

The shift is not in the substance. It is in the dance.

If you want to explore where your own choreography may be stalling, you can take the free “Choreographic Checkin - Where Does Your Work Want to Move” test here.

Jean-Philippe Steeger works at the intersection of regenerative systems thinking, narrative intelligence, and cultural choreography. He is the founder of Perspectivist and re:storied.

The post-war world order is breaking down. And with it, the leadership practices, investment certainties, belief systems, and stories of eternal progress that sustained that order across much of the Western world and beyond. What does it take to develop resilience, and how do we invest into what can last?

With the acceleration of geopolitical, economic, ecological, and social crises, we are witnessing an upward trend of reactionary forces, scapegoating, and attempts at conserving what is already breaking down. Many “transformative” approaches and pioneer projects end up failing or being absorbed by business-as-usual.

We see this clearly:

• Largely uncoordinated, siloed movements of changemakers that too often reproduce the very logic of separation they were built to overcome as evidenced by the fragmentation of the global movements to protect life on Earth (climate, degrowth, green growth, ESG, sustainability, regeneration…) often unable to weave a complementary narrative in which different approaches and roles can co-exist.

• Investments not reaching the most transformative projects, absorbed instead by incumbent actors. For instance, less than 2% of global climate finance currently reaches indigenous and community-led land stewardship, despite their land protecting 80% of remaining biodiversity.

• Extractive systems absorbing challenging paradigms, approaches, and narratives: from greenwashing in corporate sustainability reporting, to “regeneration-washing” appearing in real estate and food branding, to the co-optation of DEI frameworks into compliance exercises stripped of their structural critique.

• Brilliant, deep, ambitious founders and leaders are burning out, insufficiently held and supported. A 2023 survey by the Climate Psychology Alliance found that over 68% of climate and sustainability professionals reported symptoms of chronic stress and disillusionment, describing a sense of “running on empty” in the face of systemic inertia.

For those who have been working on future-fitting businesses and organizations for such turbulent times, what looks like a current “backlash” in sustainability, impact, and regeneration is also a chance to look at what’s most essential today: what will survive breakdowns and be constitutive for what’s next to come.

In this article, drawing on the work of Prigogine and Stengers, I explore the leadership capabilities needed to shift from a broken system to a spontaneously reorganizing new order — such as an ecocivilization as laid out in Jeremy Lent’s new book or the pluriversal vision of Sahana Chattopadhyay.

I apply these insights to Transition Network International, a movement I have worked with through re:storied. As one of the largest decentralized movements worldwide working towards a more sustainable and regenerative world, I believe such movements are likely to play an even more central role in distributing knowledge, practices, and narratives through what comes next.

Finally, I expand on the kinds of organizations and practices most likely to survive these times of collapse, asking what it takes to steward them. In the logic of thermodynamics, I explore the choreographic notion of the “negative space” as a cultural space of potential.

Moving to the space of potential

This “negative space” can be pictured as the dormant, yet unmanifested energy in the collective — and I would add more-than-human — subconsciousness. It is from that space that the future we will see will emerge, as a recomposition of past patterns. New in its composition, yet ancient in what it is made of.

For leaders, it means moving into that space with an enriched and embodied cultural repertoire of being and acting in the world. It’s the stories, gestures, postures, dreams, and memories we choose to consciously cultivate that will form the fabric of a future pluriversal ecocivilization.

Similar to mycelium in a forest exchanging and storing information and resources, what if the regeneration of our economy and culture could also access such a network of living intelligence? What if we were able to collectively embody such mycelial intelligence that makes forests grow 10x faster than those without such networks?

With Ecosystem Choreographies, I am exploring a language, a practice, and a living library for developing such a cultural repertoire. It’s the “cultural soil” we can draw nourishment from, archetypal intelligence providing information on the roles needed in a given ecosystem, and collaborative synergetic structures between actors, among others.

“An ecology of practices does not have any ambition to describe practices ‘as they are’; it resists the master word of a progress that would justify their destruction. It aims at the construction of new ‘practical identities’ for practices, that is, new possibilities for them to be present, or in other words to connect. It thus does not approach practices as they are — physics as we know it, for instance — but as they may become. The ecology of practice is a non-neutral tool as it entails the decision never to accept Capitalist destruction as freeing the ground for anything but Capitalism itself.”

Isabelle Stengers

Stengers’ framing is a scientific and political anchor for what follows. The ecology of practices she describes comes with a posture of embracing the unknown, the becoming, the emergent properties of life. It’s cultivating that capablity that Ecosystem Choreographies is designed for – in an embodied, dynamic, and collective way.

The choreographic approach I develop is designed to connect the spaces of transformation with individual and collective bodies through choreographic movements that draw both on the capacity to move spontaneously and on existing ways of moving — the “cultural repertoire” for acting in different situations, beyond extractive and exploitative modern traditions.

From broken systems to reorganized structures

What happens when a system collapses and new ways of organizing emerge? And what is the role of leaders in these in-between times?

In complexity theory, drawing on thermodynamics, highly structured and complex systems can break down when facing perturbation, stress, and uncertainty. In such situations, they can reorganize at a higher level of complexity. That means that today’s extractive global economy can reorganize into something else.

Nobel Laureate and chemist Ilya Prigogine’s and philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ work on complexity shows how a system in a state far from equilibrium (e.g. our broken economic system) transitions through dissipative structures (e.g. pioneering sustainable and regenerative movements, organizations, and business ecosystems) when there is fluctuation — that is to say disturbance and instability (e.g. supply chain collapse, pandemics, geopolitical conflicts).

Prigogine and Stengers identified four conditions that are necessary for a new system with new structures to emerge. With a cultural lens, I explore what choreographic leadership capabilities are needed to steward and work with each of these conditions.

The Four Conditions for Spontaneous Order

1. Openness

The pioneer system must exchange with its environment

The dissipative system or structure — which may be a pioneering regenerative movement — is defined by Prigogine as an open system that exchanges energy, matter, and information with the external environment. These systems are constituted of “giant fluctuations maintained by flows of energy and matter,” drawing from their environment.

It is a system that operates far from a (thermodynamic) equilibrium state. That is to say, there is disorientation, stress, and perturbance of old ways of doing. In contrast, closed systems that are largely self-referential and relying on their own resources tend toward dissolution.

For leaders, this means that siloes, monocultural approaches, and self-referential behaviours carry great risks of obsolescence. Like-minded “bubbles” in sustainability, circular economy, and regeneration lose their resilience and adaptability by clinging to narrowly defined boundaries and practices. This can include isolated ecovillages, narrow (often highly technical and procedural) understandings of what it means to be a “sustainability professional,” or pioneer projects that fail to integrate into existing communities and places.

Through virtue signalling, greenwashing and their cousins, and the pretence of innovation (when in fact reproducing past patterns), this openness can be simulated rather than actually embodied. In particular through AI, closed, self-referential systems can give the impression of being “open to the world” when in fact most of their data comes from a small demographic group.

Choreographically spoken, the “dancers” — leaders, workers, those you work with — are moving around in space, receptive to what is going on. They are able to see and integrate the movements of others, thereby enriching their own dance. They don’t stay only with the dancers they are used to dancing with, but also try dancing with others.

Choreographic leadership capabilities

• Sensing the cultural soil: Developing the deep listening capacity and ability to understand the “cultural soil” we’re working with, intellectually, emotionally, and somatically

• Reading the field: Identifying what kind of (archetypal) roles and (synergetic) structures already exist or could become possible in that cultural soil

• Listening for latent potential: Understanding what lies dormant in that cultural soil, drawing on (collective) memory, latent belief systems and narratives, and the accessible cultural repertoire for action

This openness to the richness and diversity of the latent cultural repertoire of the people and places we work with needs to be metabolised before moving into a new state of order.

Transition Network International’s very DNA is based on this structural openness, by bringing together permaculture practitioners, sustainability advocates, artists and craftspeople, as well as connected sustainable and regenerative businesses. Its founding principle that resilience is built through diversity and connection, not uniformity speaks that logic of openness.

2. Far-from-Equilibrium

The System Must Be Sufficiently Destabilised

According to Prigogine and Stengers, “we now know that far from equilibrium, new types of structures may originate spontaneously. In far-from-equilibrium conditions we may have transformation from disorder, from thermal chaos, into order. New dynamic states of matter may originate, states that reflect the interaction of a given system with its surroundings.”

In equilibrium states characterised by comfort, stability, and mild perturbations, systems return to their prior states. The disturbance gets absorbed, business-as-usual returns. We can observe this in how recovery narratives after each recent shock — the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic — were quickly framed as a “return to normal” by incumbent institutions, even as the underlying conditions worsened.

The science offers an answer to how we know when a system has crossed the threshold into true far-from-equilibrium territory: the system is sufficiently destabilised when its regulatory mechanisms can no longer absorb fluctuations back to the prior state. It’s when the “return to normal” after each shock takes longer, costs more, and eventually stops happening altogether. By Tainter’s measure of diminishing marginal returns, the investment required to maintain the old order begins to exceed any benefit it returns. The indicators are now accumulating: each economic crisis taking longer to resolve than the last; each climate event requiring greater emergency expenditure; each social fracture demanding more political energy to manage.

Inherent to human cultures is the great ability to adapt to new circumstances, including normalising harmful patterns. It’s what psychology calls desensitisation, and climate psychology calls the Shifting Baseline Syndrome.

Today’s attention economy, increasingly shaped by big tech companies, profits from keeping the modern patterns of disembodiment, dissociation, and dislocation alive, selling solutions to the felt scarcity it amplifies. Painkiller marketing for civilisational pain.

In industrial societies like those of Europe in particular, climate impacts, wars, and social conflicts are still largely framed as something far away, “out there,” despite Europe being the fastest-warming continent, already seeing 80% of natural habitats in bad or poor condition. The dominant narrative is living in the past, and the gap towards the lived experience of people is filled by opportunists of decline, from far-right populists to mental health pandemic profiteers.

Furthermore, those at the bottlenecks of decision-making in business, media, and politics are often the most insulated from experiencing the consequences of their decisions. The “bunkerised imagination” of incumbent power, its assumption that the next order can be designed from behind protected walls, stands in stark contrast with the thermodynamic reality: the new order will emerge from the open, the porous, the interconnected.

Choreographically spoken, the usual, repetitive, industrial patterns of moving are disaggregating. The “dancers” — people, organizations — are no longer following the prescribed movements. It becomes chaotic and everyone starts doing their own thing, before a new choreography is forming.

Choreographic leadership capabilities

(cf. Choreographic Stewardship Strategies)

• Flowwarding: Enabling flow when unexpressed emotions block collective movement (not being able to feel the pain of nature, of marginalised communities), e.g. through The Trickster archetype

• Hospicing: Tending what’s dying with care, ritualising the death of modern belief systems and embodied practices, e.g. through The Hospicer archetype

• Spacemaking: Holding space for diverse perspectives depicting a mosaic of a modern world in breakdown, e.g. through The Elder archetype

In the case of Transition Network International, the founding ethos itself is grounded in the reimagination of a world that is crumbling. This implies hospicing old narratives and holding spaces for new, community-anchored and place-based visions to emerge; visions capable of holding people and nature together. Their Inner Transition strand addresses the psychological and emotional work of release that is as necessary as the practical work of rebuilding.

3. Nonlinearity

The System Must Have Feedback Loops

Dissipative structures in nature are governed by nonlinear feedback loops that adapt and improve the flows of resources and information, thereby building resilience. The system is learning from its own activity.

In linear systems, when you increase the input, you increase the output proportionally. Nonlinear systems are different: small perturbations can have cascading effects, and outputs feed back into inputs in ways that are amplified, dampened, or transformed. The system becomes generative rather than merely productive.

Most businesses, organizations, and public authorities today are organised in increasingly ineffective linear ways. In most manufacturing, there is high dependency on constant input and little flexibility in changing production flow. Strategic plans, business processes, political programmes, and the logic of GDP growth all follow a linear logic. With increasing instability and perturbation, at a certain point they won’t be able to absorb shocks anymore.

For leaders, this means diversifying organizational learning, building processes that allow for more exchange with the environment, and enabling the decomposition of parts of the organization so that it can eventually re-compose into new configurations (e.g. modularizing production, rather than relying on fragile supply chains).

Picture the phenomenon of swarming in bees. A new hive is forming and about 3–5% of bees are recruited to scout for a new nest. They explore the best possible site, returning to dance their waggle dance. When more than 80% of bees are convinced of the best location, danced with excitement by multiple scouts, the hive moves. The decision is distributed, feedback-rich, and irreversible.

Choreographically spoken, there are “freeriders,” pioneers, spaceholders, bridge builders, and edgewalkers moving between fields of work, organizations, and departments. They help integrate learning processes, bring new practices, and filter what works and what doesn’t.

Choreographic leadership capabilities

• Designing integration cycles: Creating dedicated times for reflection and integration of learning, alongside moments of deliberate openness to information and practices from outside the organisation

• Space for pollinators: Ensuring that ideas, practices, and stories circulate both within and beyond the organisation — people who “fly” between what exists rather than functioning in a box

• Distributed leadership: Parts of the organisation become more autonomous, learning to deal with local challenges by themselves, thereby increasing overall resilience to systemic shocks

Transition Network International and its members across the world host conversations, community events, storytelling sessions, and more. They are providing space to integrate experiences and learnings, and to practise what it means to distribute leadership in place-based projects. The network’s Open Space Technology and peer-learning circles are structural feedback mechanisms: they allow local experimentation to flow back into global pattern-recognition.

4. Fluctuations Amplified at a Bifurcation Point

The Decisive Moment

When a system is far from equilibrium and the old order is no longer working, even small fluctuations can be amplified, self-organising into a new order. Small different actions, small new ways of being, small new conversations can tip the whole system into a new configuration.

This can happen at the moment of bifurcation points, when the old system no longer holds and one path is chosen over a number of other equally possible paths. This is where different possibilities, new ways of organising, being, and acting emerge. Individual action, or that of small groups, becomes amplified, becoming orientative for others.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

The new order then starts shaping the functions beneath it. That means that elements of the old system survive, but their roles or functions in the system change and are recomposed. Just as the Roman roads, Latin language, and Christian ecclesiastical structures persisted after the fall of the Empire, but now served entirely new configurations of social organisation.

Such bifurcation points call for practices, ways of relating, cultural forms, rituals, and collaborative structures that are able to self-organise and contribute to a new whole. At these moments, practices from subcultures, indigenous peoples, and pioneering regenerative organisations become orientative for the wider field.

Choreographically spoken, those who have been moving differently, who have practised diffractive movements with different stories, embodiments, and ways of being can take a leadership role in such moments. They are moving into the “negative space” of potential, where energy wants to move. And it is not an empty space: the cultural repertoire (often not yet conscious) becomes an orientation for others. Archetypal roles, synergetic ways of organising, and the capacity to work with local cultural soil all become decisive.

Choreographic leadership capabilities

• Diversifying (archetypal) embodiments: Becoming conscious of the cultural repertoire that is accessible, practising different roles (choreographic styles), and different relationships to space (cultural soil)

• Re-composing (archetypal) constellations: Understanding compatibilities and complementarities of archetypal roles for given situations and contexts

• Narrative-Weaving: Bringing different worldviews, beliefs, and practices together to diversify cultural repertoire and help the new system consolidate

In the case of Transition Network International, perhaps unlike most other movements due to its international spread, decentralised structure, and force of narrative, the movement is able to integrate different worldviews, practices, and narratives through community and place-based action. As such, it may play a key role as an “information node”: a living archive of bifurcation intelligence from which other actors at decisive moments may draw inspiration and practical guidance.

Pioneering into the space of potential

For leaders, investors, and community builders who would like to focus their time, energy, and (financial) resources on what will survive the current turbulent times, the exploration of the four conditions points toward what may guide us today: the safest bet is to invest in what already works with little input from the old system — in the pioneers, models, businesses, and ecovillages that have already proven they are able to survive, and thrive. While failure is likely, those able to embrace failure and continue their journey are most likely to develop what it takes to move through the chaos.

“If you experiment, you have to fail. By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you’ve never been, where failure is very possible. How can you know you’re going to succeed? Having the courage to face the unknown is so important.”

Marina Abramović

In choreographic terms, this means investing into the pioneering cultural soils, the transformative archetypes, and the synergetic collaborative structures that are able to re-organise through shocks. Developing the capacity to self-organise, to re-assemble, to attune to changing conditions, to form new movements of change is the choreographic leadership capability I believe we need cultivating today. Like a bee swarm re-assembling to create new hives.

This is the “negative space” of potential: reactivating a cultural repertoire drawing on the diversity of human and more-than-human cultures, composting what must be released, and choreographing what wants to emerge.

What if we could embody that choreographic and collective power able to withstand the breakdown of modern systems, and seeding what comes next?

Stress-testing investments, projects, and practices for times of breakdown and breakthrough

Based on the insights from the four conditions, patterns emerge on what kind of practices and structures survive such breakdowns.

What survives:

1. Low-input, high-feedback enterprises. The businesses that survive and seed new order are those that require minimal external energy subsidy to maintain themselves. These include regenerative agriculture, local food systems, cooperative infrastructures, and repair economies. They generate their own energy flows from within the ecosystem they serve.

2. Relational capital over financial capital. At bifurcation points, Prigogine showed that “the role of individual behaviour can be decisive.” Trust networks, community bonds, and relational webs become the actual currency of resilience. Businesses and cultural practices whose primary asset is deep relational embeddedness in a community or bioregion hold value that survives the collapse of financial abstraction.

3. Knowledge and practice that is embodied and transmissible. Skills that live in bodies and relationships such as crafts, ecological knowledge, somatic practices, regenerative design methodologies are not dependent on digital or financial infrastructure. They travel through apprenticeship and community. They are what Prigogine would call autocatalytic: they reproduce and amplify themselves from within.

4. Platforms for pattern amplification at bifurcation moments. Punctuated collapses can provide catalysts that introduce more adaptable and resilient systems to a dominant regime. By evaluating the landscape of systemic alternatives against the evolving parameters of the global polycrisis, we can identify which transformative social innovations are more likely to succeed because they are more fit under specific systemic constraints.

5. Cultural practices that metabolise disorientation. The cultural practices and organisations that will seed the next order are those with the capacity to hold people through the chaos without suppressing it. They can compost grief, meaning-loss, and disorientation into new coherence. This is precisely what Cœureographers is designed to hold: the leadership capabilities that are able to steward this transformation, from composting the old towards re-composing into new forms of being, organising, and creating value.

Beyond the manufactured pain of trauma-mining marketing and the performed suffering of virtue signalling lies the real, unmediated experience of being alive in a world that is genuinely suffering. How can we choose to stay present to it rather than reach for the nearest anesthetic?

This question sits at the heart of what I call the ecology of pain: the cultural space and conditions needed to welcome historically unprecedented, inflationary, and intensive personal and collective pain as crucial information pointing toward what transformational work needs to focus on.

For those of us doing sustainability and regenerative work, it is a familiar tension between marketing-as-usual, missing opportunities, and real impact. The difference lies in welcoming pain in ways that cultivate genuine capacity for transformation, and speaking to their pain in ways that keep them dependent, numbed, or temporarily relieved while the root causes deepen.

Mass extinction. Wars. Mental health pandemics. The world is in pain. And yet, we are witnessing mass delusion, escapism, and painkilling instead of an embrace of that pain. This “painkiller” approach has become predominant beyond just marketing, public relations, and politics. It is culturally shaping everything from medicament use and consumption behaviour to how we relate to each other and to the living world around us.

Rather than outsourcing this healing work to, often individualized, therapy alone, this article asks how we can learn to welcome collective, often rejected pain as the entry point for sustainable and regenerative work, especially when nothing else sticks, when resonance ripples into nowhere.

What Is Pain?

In our bodies, pain functions as a neural protection message that urges us to move away from damaging situations and to care for injured parts. The remembered experience of pain also acts as prevention, shaping future responses to similar situations.

But pain is more than protection. It is reconnection to the whole of an organism, a community, an entire ecosystem. Pain is the information of healing. It asks what relationships need restoring, what balances have been disrupted.

Its clarifying power can shed light on how a wound is connected to the broader organism, and which root causes need tending for genuine recovery to begin. Listening to the pain of those we work with, rather than rushing to relieve it temporarily, can reveal what parts of the cultural body need healing and what conditions need to be cultivated for resilience to grow.

This understanding recognizes that pain, when welcomed rather than suppressed, becomes a compass. As Joanna Macy writes, welcoming the pain of being in the world is the first step in healing our relationship with the world: through empathy, listening, and embracing what has been forgotten, repressed, or silenced.

The Painkiller Approach: Why Business-as-Usual Continues

Despite collapsing ecosystems, a burnout pandemic, and accelerating destruction visible almost everywhere, business-as-usual dynamics remain stubbornly alive. They are maintained by a cultural sophistication of avoiding, numbing, and symbolically outsourcing pain. These patterns are particularly present in cultures of Christian and colonial lineage, which have long practised the externalisation of suffering, despite the existence of contemplative and empathic practices in Christianism.

Marketing’s “success story” has refined the art of putting its finger in the wound. “Painpointing” speaks to the dis-ease, problems, and traumas of potential clients by promising solutions, or at least relief. Just as our health systems often leave underlying conditions untouched in favour of operational quick-fixes, painkiller marketing keeps a hurtful business-as-usual not only alive but actively pleasurable to maintain.

Painkiller strategies in marketing and culture

Here are the dominant painkiller strategies:

Anesthesia
Avoiding feeling pain and addressing root causes through compensation and surface-level behaviour.

Perhaps not coincidentally, some of the countries with the greatest consumption of painkiller medications — France and the USA — are also home to some of the greatest gaps between the national narrative inhabitants tell themselves and how the rest of the world perceives them. Here, the relation to pain and historical trauma is the most distant, requiring the cultivation to a different relationship to pain, and ultimately death.

Escapism
Redemption promises of a world without pain, from digital addictions to space colonization fantasies.

The modern economy runs on this script: the redemption promise. Become better. Optimize, upgrade, solve. The hero-billionaire as saviour of a “wild”, uncivilized world. Escapist narratives are easy to sustain only when a central authority holds narrative monopoly. This was the Church in the Middle Ages, or big tech billionaires on their own social media platforms today. It raises the question of how to enable homecomings, incl. in narrative strategy.

Outsourcing
Prentending pain is something just others face, next to displacing problems and responsibilities to others, usually without direct relationship.

Most people know “not in my backyard” as a response to renewable energy infrastructure. But the pattern runs through most supply chains today: exploitation and pollution are moved toward the most vulnerable populations and ecosystems, those without advocates or regulatory protection. What’s needed is reestablishing connection in chains of anonymity – through stories from farmers and workers, shorter value chains, and an understanding how we contribute to violent systems.

Delaying
Pushing resolution into the future, often legitimized by more pressing issues in the present.

Net-zero by 2050. Alcohol abstinence starting January. These commitments may or may not feel genuine in the moment of making them. The challenge is that they are made without transforming the conditions that generated the need for them, meaning the delay itself accumulates cost, incl. ecological, social, and psychological.

Invisibilizing
Those who visibly express pain are systematically ignored to avoid confronting its source.

Whether the LGBTIQ movement reminding us that love exceeds social conditioning, youth movements campaigning for a liveable future, or women in politics confronting structural inequality: strategies of invisibilization consistently amplify dominant power structures, often while even claiming to speak “on behalf of” those they’re erasing.

Instrumentalizing
Speaking to pain with opportunism, without care for healing.

Far-right movements have become masters of this: channelling real economic anxiety, cultural dislocation, and social precarity toward scapegoating rather than structural transformation. But instrumentalization isn’t limited to the political right. It increasingly appears anywhere pain is deployed as leverage rather than met with genuine care.

Trauma-Mining Marketing
The most sophisticated form of painkillerism is what I call trauma-mining: the algorithmically accelerated, culturally deep-rooted practice of marketing scarcity-compensation by activating and sustaining traumatic wounds in consumers.

Trauma-mining doesn’t solve any problem but keeps people in a dependency loop that repeatedly activates trauma to sell temporary relief.

• Young girls: Unreachable beauty ideals, anorexic social media content, or tradwife trends are all running on the premise of never being good enough. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have industrialized this loop.

• Young boys: AI girlfriends designed around toxic masculinity ideals, positioning a controllable robot as preferable to a real relationship. The underlying wound: profound uncertainty about what healthy masculinity is.

• LGBTIQ communities: Highly toxic dating apps that have replaced community spaces with data harvesting and violence exposure, reproducing queer loneliness while profiting from it. The closure of LGBTIQ bars and clubs which once spaces of genuine belonging has been filled by Grindr and co.

• Women: The impossible figure of the “perfect” wife, mother, and career professional, sustained by advertising, media, and the persistent gap between what employers promise and what they deliver. The tradwife trend is its reactionary shadow.

These aren’t marketing failures but marketing successes by design, emerging from within a paradigm that profits from pain without being accountable to healing.

The Ecology of Pain: A Different Paradigm

What if today’s pain points were not problems to be solved but signals pointing toward what our collective body most needs? Toward what we need to learn to collectively attune to – to choreograph together?

What if, instead of maps of wounds to exploit, they were invitations to listen, as the nodal points in the web infrastructure of a world being born beyond collapse?

The concept of the ecology of pain emerges from this reframing. It builds on Cultural Soil Analysis as part of the Ecosystem Choreographies framework (explored in depth here), by understanding key stress points and intervention points among specific cultural fields, audiences, and places that are characterized by distinct “soil patterns” and pain expressions.

Just as a healthy ecosystem contains a diversity of organisms that process nutrients, manage stress, and maintain resilience, a healthy cultural ecology contains the diversity of voices, stories, roles, and practices needed to metabolize collective pain and generate new vitality from it.

When that ecology is impoverished, when pain is systematically suppressed, instrumentalized, or numbed, it doesn’t disappear. Like soil deprived of decomposers, it compacts and hardens. The nutrients locked inside become unavailable. What could have been composted into wisdom becomes toxicity.

Perhaps our generation is waking up to the fact of inheriting millennia-old undigested traumata of genocides, ecocide, wars, forced displacement, and broken lineages.

Perhaps those of us who grew up with fractured relationships to indigenous wisdoms have built our entire cultural identity on that unprocessed pain. It has shaped our stories, belief systems, daily gestures, and postures. It determines what we see, what we can imagine, what we consider valuable, and what we consider impossible.

Consider subcultures that define themselves against the mainstream, like punk, metal, or rap, with varying degrees of metabolizing the experience of marginalization that their music holds. Or German post-war culture largely built on the shame of the Nazi era, still affecting Germany’s relationship to Israel today. Or a US culture in persistent denial of its original escape from European violence, sustaining a freedom narrative that cannot see the unfreedom it perpetuates through its own colonial legacies.

Rather than rejecting or reinforcing the pain, we can learn to accept and welcome it. By “moving through” the pain rather bypassing it, we can access deeper parts of ourselves (read my articles on “shadow mainstreaming”). This curious welcoming of unpleasant realms can shed light on shadow dimensions that block us, that make us sick, that prevent genuine transformation from taking root.

It is in learning to welcome our shadows that we may find the place of greater peace and creative capacity. It is the cathartic movement through pain that can show us the path to healing. Pain is an indication that a personal or collective body is out of balance. It can point, with precision, to where healing is needed and what conditions need to change for thriving to become possible.

Diagnosing Cultural Soil Health

Rather than diagnosing pain points to sell painkiller solutions, Cultural Soil Analysis addresses both the short-term need (alleviating immediate pain) while working on the conditions conducive to healing and thriving over the longer term, including, crucially, by promoting the agency of those we serve.

Drawing on the metaphor of soil health (explored in depth here), I assess cultural ecosystems across five criteria. They each reveals how pain manifests and accumulates in a cultural field:

1. Narrative Diversity

Multiple belief systems and worldviews coexist and cross-pollinate, forming a narrative-based ecology of meaning-making. When one narrative monopolizes the field — whether extractive growth, victimhood, or salvation by technology — imagination compacts and meaning withers. Pain signals narrative monoculture through the disappearance of genuine surprise, humour, grief, and wonder. The same tropes, the same heroes, the same solutions get repeated across sectors. Cultural innovation breeds at the narrative ecotones — where two ecosystems meet — yet these are precisely the spaces that monoculture eliminates.

Diagnostic question: How monocultural are narratives here? Where are the narrative ecotones — and who are the edgewalkers dancing between them?

2. Porosity

Ideas and practices can breathe. There’s room for contradiction and complexity. Space for newcomers — their contributions welcomed, grounded, and grown. When cultural soil is compacted — sealed by fear, institutional rigidity, or protective postures born from historical betrayal — pain has nowhere to go. Dissent, grief, paradox, and experimentation are squeezed out. What remains looks stable but is brittle: a surface that resists everything, including what would nourish it.

Diagnostic question: Is there space for dissent, contradiction, grief, or paradox? Can newcomers actually contribute — or does the field close around its own protective barriers?

3. Moisture

Emotional literacy and affective resonance are present. Work flows naturally, meandering through challenges. Confluencing collaborations are possible because there’s trust. When moisture is absent — when emotional and somatic ways of knowing are filtered out in favour of pure cognition and rigid rules — pain dries into rigidity. Historical trauma that hasn’t been collectively digested creates parched cultural ground where nothing new can germinate. Mental health crises, relational breakdown, and the inability to grieve are all symptoms of dried soil.

Diagnostic question: Are emotional and somatic ways of knowing welcome, or is everything filtered through cognition and rigid rules? What historical trauma hasn’t been digested?

4. Structure

Composted layers of memory and meaning nurture thoughts, feelings, wisdom, and actions in the present, connected through meaning-making structures. When ancestral mycorrhizae are severed — when threads to ancient, indigenous, place-based, queer, feminine, and relational ways of knowing are cut — pain expresses as rootlessness. People reinvent from scratch what was already known. They repeatedly fall into patterns they lack the historical perspective to recognize. The present floats untethered from the accumulated wisdom that could anchor it.

Diagnostic question: How intact are the ancestral mycorrhizae? What invisible threads to indigenous, place-based, relational ways of knowing have been severed — and which ones are quietly regenerating?

5. Microbial Life

The balance of relationships between subtle actors, traditions, and more-than-human influences below the surface. When the cultural microbiome is disrupted — when extractive habits, supremacist residues, and colonial narratives haven’t been composted — pain operates invisibly. Toxins perdure beneath the surface, shaping interactions, possibilities, and power dynamics in ways that resist conscious examination. The most dangerous cultural pathogens are the ones that have become so normalised they’re no longer perceived as harmful.

Diagnostic question: What toxins perdure? Which extractive habits and colonial narratives still operate invisibly? What supremacist residues haven’t been composted?

Cultural Pain Acupuncturing: Seven Choreographic Strategies

What if we approached our fields of work as we would a living ecosystem in distress intervening with the sharp attunement of acupuncture needles? Sensing the meridians, the blockages, the places where gentle pressure might release what has accumulated and restore flow?

Drawing on diverse therapeutic traditions (including Ayurveda and acupuncture, which I’ll explore in a later article), here is a brief summary of the seven choreographic strategies for addressing imbalances, pain, and stuck dynamics in the cultural fields you work within. You can find the full guide here.

1. Narrative-Weaving (for monocultural soil)

When one story dominates and crowds out other ways of making sense of the world, bringing different worldviews into dialogue can diversify the cultural repertoire. This isn’t about tolerance of difference — it’s about the regenerative power of genuine encounter between perspectives that have never met.

In practice: Facilitating cross-cultural conversations, bringing indigenous epistemologies into dialogue with scientific frameworks, creating containers where practitioners from different traditions can discover unexpected resonances.

2. Space-Making (for compacted soil)

Compacted soil can’t breathe, can’t absorb water, can’t support root growth. When cultural fields have been under too much pressure — from urgency, from scarcity, from the weight of accumulated crises — ideas and people need space to breathe before anything new can emerge.

In practice: Holding retreats that resist the agenda. Facilitating slow conversations. Creating formats where the pressure to produce is explicitly suspended, and emergence is allowed to surprise.

3. Flow-Warding (for dried or stuck soil)

When unexpressed emotions — grief, anger, shame, longing — have nowhere to go in a cultural field, they block collective movement. People stay stuck in patterns they can see are harmful but cannot seem to exit. Flow-warding creates the conditions for these stuck emotions to move.

In practice: Ritual and ceremonial processes. Grief circles. Art-based facilitation. Working with the body as well as the mind in leadership and organizational contexts. Creating explicit permission for what is usually unnamed to finally be named.

4. Remembrance-Structuring (for disconnected soil)

Modern culture has systematically severed connections to ancestral wisdom, place-based knowledge, and the long continuity of human experience. When a cultural field has lost access to its roots, it reinvents from scratch what was already known, and repeatedly falls into patterns it lacks the historical perspective to recognize.

In practice: Cultural archaeology — recovering forgotten histories, honouring those who did this work before us, integrating indigenous and traditional knowledge into contemporary practice. Oral history projects. Lineage work.

5. Archetypal Constellations (for all soils)

Every ecosystem needs diversity of roles — decomposers as much as producers, edge species as much as keystone species. When a cultural field is dominated by one archetype — too many pioneers with no settlers, too many challengers with no builders — it lacks the complementarity needed for systemic health.

In practice: Mapping which archetypal roles are present and which are absent in your ecosystem. Cultivating the underrepresented. Bringing in different kinds of intelligence — the dreamer, the pragmatist, the elder, the child — into processes that have become too homogeneous.

6. Hospicing and Midwifing (for nutrient-poor soil)

Some elements of a cultural field need to die for the field to regenerate. Others are struggling to be born. The hospice worker tends what is dying with care, preventing unnecessary suffering while allowing natural completion. The midwife creates the conditions for what is emerging to arrive safely.

In practice: Supporting organizations, initiatives, or paradigms that have reached their completion to end with grace rather than collapse. Creating protected conditions for nascent work that isn’t yet strong enough to survive in the open field. Holding both simultaneously without collapsing them.

7. Mycelial Networking (for siloed initiatives)

When wisdom and resources are locked within silos — initiatives doing related work without knowing each other exists — the cultural field cannot metabolize its own intelligence. Mycelial networking builds the connective tissue that allows learning, resources, and solidarity to flow.

In practice: Convening unlikely allies. Building learning communities across organizational and ideological boundaries. Creating platforms where practitioners doing adjacent work can discover the complementarities between them.

What This Means for Your Work

If you’re doing sustainability, regenerative, or impact work, you’re almost certainly navigating pain-related dynamics in the fields you serve, whether you’ve named it that way or not.

The crucial question is whether your work is speaking to it in ways that cultivate genuine capacity for transformation, or in ways, however well-intentioned, that replicate the painkiller patterns you’re trying to move beyond.

There is a different way of moving through and beyond that pain, a choreography: it lives in how you attune to your field’s pain (Cultural Soil Analysis), how you embody your response to it (Style), and how you articulate the transformation you’re enabling rather than just the problem you’re solving (Seeds).

Trauma-mining marketing asks: What wound can I activate to create urgency?

Cultural pain acupuncturing asks: What is this pain pointing toward? What wants to heal? And what conditions need to be present for that healing to become possible?

The shift from the first question to the second is the shift from extraction to regeneration. From painkilling to genuine transformation.

It’s also, practically speaking, the shift that allows your work to be recognized as strategically necessary rather than compassionately optional. Because when you can articulate the healing your work enables and not just the pain it addresses, you make visible something decision-makers can recognize as essential infrastructure for the world they’re trying to build.

Sensing Your Own Ecology of Pain

The place to begin isn’t with your audience, but yourself. From there, you can carefully listen to your audiences.

What pain in the world do you feel most viscerally? Where does your body respond, in what parts does it tighten, grieve, ignite when you encounter the places your work is trying to address?

That visceral response is an attunement signal. It’s how you know which part of the cultural ecology you’re called to serve.

The challenge and practice is learning to stay present to that signal without being overwhelmed by it. To use it as information rather than identification. To let it guide your work without becoming its hostage.

Where to Begin

The Attunement Gap is the first of three gaps I’ve identified in regenerative practitioners’ work, is precisely about developing this capacity: reading your field’s pain with care, precision, and ecological intelligence rather than instrumentalizing it.

Understanding which gap is most present in your work is the first step.

Take the Three Gaps Diagnostic (20 minutes, free): https://form.jotform.com/261095162526052

You’ll receive:

• Your scores across Attunement, Embodiment, and Value

• Identification of which gap is most present in your work

• Specific practices you can begin immediately

And if you want to explore how Cultural Soil Analysis and cultural pain acupuncturing might shape your specific communications and offers, the Choreographic Resonance Assessment maps your current choreography across all six moves: Soil, Style, Story, Seeds, Synergies, Stewardship.

Book a Choreographic Resonance Assessment: https://tidycal.com/1xgwkjn/assessment

This article is part of an ongoing series on Ecosystem Choreographies. Related reading: From Survival Mode to Ecosystem Choreography and Moving Beyond the Bubble.

References:

Macy, J. & Brown, M. (2014). Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects. New Society Publishers.

Tolle, E. (1999). The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. New World Library.

Steeger, J-P. (2025). “From Survival Mode to Ecosystem Choreography.” Perspectivist Agency Substack.

Steeger, J-P. (2026). “Moving Beyond the Bubble.” Perspectivist Agency Substack.

If you’re doing transformative work such as systems-change facilitation, bioregional development, or embodied leadership, you’ve likely felt this tension. Your work can land beautifully within communities who already speak the language. Yet when you try to reach decision-makers, funders, or stakeholders operating in business-as-usual, something gets lost. The translation fails. The depth flattens. The urgency doesn’t transmit.

The work gets perceived as “nice-to-have” rather than strategic necessity.

This isn’t about working harder or “being more authentic” as if that were a final destination. It’s about three fundamental gaps between deep work and lasting ripples.

The Pattern: Three Gaps That Keep Work in Bubbles

Through years of working with leaders at EU-level, “in” sustainability, and regeneration, I’ve identified three gaps that keep transformative work isolated:

Gap 1: Attunement

How deeply are we listening to the cultural soil of the fields we serve?

Rather than just labelling audiencies, this is about understanding the conditions of their cultural meaning-making and repertoire for action. How they see and listen to the world and people they work with, how they face the situation at hand, what cultural repertoire they have access to (storytelling, gestures, postures etc.).

What narratives are present in their field? What traumas remain unacknowledged? Which possibilities are stirring beneath the surface but lack language or legitimacy?

One workshop participant shared: “ When I was working in fashion, everybody was doing a lot, but nobody was actually listening to each other. And that the kind of the seeds I’m planting now. To listen more.”

What this can imply:

• Invisibilization: not recognizing who and what is already present (incl. more-than-humans), allowing patterns like ecocide to become background noise

• Normalization of harm: what psychologists call desensitization, what climate psychologists call Shifting Baseline Syndrome

• Pseudoinnovation: “discovering” what was never lost, ignoring existing solutions and those who’ve been doing this work all along

Gap 2: Embodiment

How can we play our role in enabling our ecosystem to thrive?

The modern Western culture has sophisticated its means of disembodiment: body-mind disconnect, systemic outsourcing of responsibility, general numbing of somatic and emotional intelligence.

Embodying our role in our field of work, like a species in an ecosystem, means standing out through our own irreplacable essence, rather than pretending to be like everyone else. But rather than a single essence, it is multifaceted and can change over time.

A participant reflected upon his work with impact investors. The exercise brought him to explore moving beyond “pioneer bubbles” by getting inspiration from pioneer archetypes (such as Fern and Dandelion) that create conditions for partnering with successors, so that their pioneer work can take root and spread.

What this can imply:

• Polarization between subjective perspective (artist) and pure audience focus (marketer), missing the reciprocal middle ground

• The growing gap between narratives and experienced reality (climate denial, conspiracy theories, greenwashing)

• The mindfulness trap: spiritual bypassing that pretends all change comes “from within” as if inner and outer were entirely separate

Gap 3: Value

At what levels can we reach decision-makers with what transformation actually offers?

It’s not that regenerative work lacks value but that we’re often unconscious about the levels at which the multidimensional value touches others. How it is present through sharing, or different modalities of experience (somatic, cognitive, emotional etc.). Furthermore, communicating our value within the dominant scarcity paradigm risks to this work being framed superficially.

One participant named it: “I have felt resistence towards using traditional marketing advice for painpointing. What I see in the US, is that there is a large avoidance of dealing with the roots of issues. Everything is put below the carpet.”

What this can imply:

• Everything flattened into decontextualized problem-solution framing

• Trauma-mining marketing that perpetuates pain to sell temporary relief (painkiller solutions)

• The difference between transformative and shallow work becoming invisible to decision-makers

The Choreography: Six Moves That Close the Gaps

During the workshop, we explored Ecosystem Choreographies: a framework for learning to move differently through our fields of work. It is designed to enhance the cultural repertoire of being, receiving, and acting in the world within the context of a modern culture that has largely lost access to that wisdom from ancestry.

Too often the “standard changemaker” sounds like everyone else, fails to communicate from a place of essence, and sees their work being absorbed by business-as-usual. The choreography is stuck.

Move 1: Cultural Soil Analysis (Addresses: Attunement)

Map the cultural territory of your audiences not as market segments, but as living ecosystems shaped by stories, values, historical patterns.

What narratives are present in your field? What traumas remain unacknowledged? Which possibilities are already stirring beneath the surface but lack language?

When it’s stuck: You’re offering solutions before sensing readiness. You speak a language your field doesn’t yet have capacity to hear.

When it’s in flow: You know the difference between resistance that means “not yet” and resistance that means “not this.” You attune to cultural conditions that either enable or block transformation.

Move 2: Style (Addresses: Embodiment)

Inhabit your unique leadership presence: your rhythms, your edges, your way of holding space.

Rather than pretending to be someone or something, it means inviting the wisdom of archetypal roles, as expressions of ourselves. This allows us to be present more consciously, and more attuned to the roles and options for action available in specific situations.

When it’s stuck: Your presence feels artificial. You sound like everyone else in your field. Your expertise is visible but your essence isn’t felt.

When it’s in flow: Your presence communicates before words. People experience your essence through how you move, not just what you say. You can shift between roles while maintaining coherence.

Move 3: Seeds (Addresses: Value)

Articulate what your work enables to grow as lived capacities, shifts in awareness, new possibilities for action.

When it’s stuck: Your value proposition sounds like problem-solution. Generic benefits. Decision-makers hear “nice to have” rather than strategic necessity.

When it’s in flow: You name what becomes possible through your offer / invitation: greater agency, deeper belonging, regenerative capacity. Decision-makers recognize this as strategic because you’ve made multidimensional value visible.

Move 4: Story (Addresses: Embodiment)

Narrate the transformation you enable in ways that land viscerally, not just intellectually.

When it’s stuck: Your story is either all expertise (CV facts, credentials) or all personal journey (memoir without professional anchoring). Decision-makers can’t connect your lived experience to their needs.

When it’s in flow: Your story skillfully weaves elements that can touch audiences at different levels of maturity and wisdom. You are consciously inviting participation into your story, and share it as a living example of what it means to be part of something bigger. It becomes an invitation into your world (of work).

Move 5: Synergies (Addresses: Value)

Map how your work creates ripple effects: how the value you generate for one stakeholder creates conditions for value elsewhere in the ecosystem.

When it’s stuck: You present your value in isolation. Decision-makers see individual services rather than systemic contribution.

When it’s in flow: You make visible the reciprocal relationships. Who else benefits when this succeeds? What becomes possible for the wider field? Value multiplies through connection.

Move 6: Stewardship (Addresses: Attunement)

Choreograph the conditions for collective, complementary, and coordinated movement.

Who else is needed to regenerate this field? What complementarities and capabilities must come together for breakthroughs to emerge?

When it’s stuck: You’re working alone or only with people who already think like you. You see transformation as your responsibility to push through.

When it’s in flow: You curate relationships, convene unlikely allies, create containers where different perspectives cross-pollinate. You choreograph the wider ecosystem whose movements, synchronized, generate systemic shifts.

Why This Matters Now

We’re in a moment where the most urgent transformation, such as climate adaptation, bioregional regeneration, decolonization of epistemologies, and restoration of belonging is being done by practitioners who often can’t land their work where it’s most needed.

Meanwhile, those with greater access to resources, decision-making power, and systemic leverage often can’t recognize transformative depth when they see it.

The challenges is about reconnecting the movement between them, between the bubbles. While bubbles can potentially ground the work in fertile soil, the magic happens when they start to weave ecosystems, and fertilize the fields at their in-betweens.

It’s about learning to move between worlds. Between the destructive patterns still dominant and the regenerative cultures already stirring. Between who we’ve been and who we’re becoming. Between isolation and genuine ecosystem.

This is what Ecosystem Choreographies addresses: a practice of sensing and moving that creates conditions for transformation to emerge through collective choreography. Yours and others’, human and more-than-human, visible and beneath the surface, pragmatic and deep.

Where to Begin

The choreography begins with sensing where you are.

Take the Three Gaps Diagnostic: a 20-minute self-assessment that reveals which gap is most present in your work right now:
👉 Take the diagnostic here

You’ll receive:

• An understanding where your work resonates and where not (yet)

• Clear identification of your biggest barrier

• Specific next steps you can take immediately

If the diagnostic reveals patterns you’re ready to address, the Choreographic Resonance Assessment (Module 0) maps your current choreography across all six moves, giving you clarity on where you’re in flow and where practice is needed.

The Question That Closes

During the workshop’s grounding exercise, I invited participants to sense into a final question:

What wants to move through you, and through your field, today?

What’s actually alive, asking for movement, pulling you toward it?

That’s where the choreography begins.

Because transformative work doesn’t stay in bubbles when we learn to choreograph the space between worlds. When we close the gaps between our embodiment, our attunement, and the value we offer.

When we stop commanding transformation and start creating conditions where it can emerge.

The Choreographic Resonance Assessment and Cœureographers Programme are available for regenerative practitioners ready to move their work beyond the bubble. The investment: €300 for the assessment (credited toward the full 4-month programme if you choose to continue). More information: tidycal.com/1xgwkjn/assessment

We can see the same thinking, the same behaviours, the same ways of moving through the world sold as solution to the very problems they produce. And it’s easy to disembody that pattern by framing it as something that just others do.

It’s most likely that you are contributing to patterns of extraction and exploitation. And most likely that you don’t want to see it most of the times. Just like those you perhaps even say “you want to change.”

Embracing this and feeling empathy for our world in pain is also integral part of “the work that reconnects” as Joana Macy coined it.

But how to reconnect with life within an all-pervasive attention economy that has sophisticated producing pills for that pain – quick fixes, AI-formulas to success, and escape promises from virtual reality to space colonization? How much can we be in integrity in extractive and exploitative systems?

Most of us without direct indigenous lineage are part of that culture of disconnection. Disconnection from nature, from ancestral wisdom, from our own essence. If we speak about disconnection, we speak about a loss of relationship – a forgotten or repressed relationship. It comes with disembodiment, dislocation, and disembodiment as I wrote earlier.

This story of separation lives in us. As forgotten longing. As disembodied potential. As “negative space”. Moving there is moving beyond the modern pain – something to invest time, energy, and money into.

If we follow the first law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transformed from one form to another. That means that what has moved into the (collective) unconscious holds the energy we need right now.

It’s the “cultural reperoire” that lies dormant: what kind of world we can imagine, what kind of stories we can tell, what kind of actions we know to follow in certain situations, what kind of language can connect us to others that are so different to us.

Like in choreography, I call this the “negative space” – it’s where to move when things are stuck, too dense, explosive. Like our times.

Moving where the energy lies dormant: the negative space of potential

It’s that negative space of potential that we need to learn to collectively move into. It’s the aspirational horizon of that work: giving life to the dream of thriving lifes for all. Specifically, in particular places and communities. It asks: what is the collective movement we need to practice here right now, in this organization, in this community, in this place?

With Ecosystem Choreographies, I propose a choreographic sequence for moving into that space of collective potential. It’s not an empty space though, it is a diverse, multi-polar space, an ecosystem with distributed centres. With distributed leadership. Held together by interconnected networks sharing resources and energy. Like mycelium in a forest. This is what I understand as the capability of “choreographing transformation.”

If we are to get ready for the collapse of social security systems, political systems, ecosystems, and economic systems, we better learn the choreography of weaving the fabric of what will hold us through these challenging times.

A solid, resilient fabric with layers as diverse as the weavers. A fabric like an abundantly diverse ecosystem in which every species plays its role for the thrivability of the greater whole. A fabric that knows how to heal and regenerate broken lands, communities, and souls.

How? By being yourself and going through phases of metamorphosis (embodiment), by being attuned and to and in synergy with others in the field (attunement), and by delivering a concrete contribution to the ecosystem (value).

Embodying and Moving Through Diversity

Landscapes, species, and also human cultures thrive in diversity. It is what makes them resilient, adaptable to changing conditions. Thriving cultures are able to activate a rich cultural repertoire of being in the world – welcoming endings, planting new seeds and stories, holding polarity, letting pioneers explore the horizon of what’s possible. “Sandbox innovation” under real conditions. So that we’re prepared.

And yet, in the sustainability and regenerative space, in which many claim to embody a different paradigm, a shadow is too often present, and perhaps (arche-)typical for pioneers: marketing something ancient as new, selling discoveries that are not. “The new world.” “The next paradigm.” When in reality, the status-quo comes just in new clothes, new vocabulary, new stories.

Perhaps what you are now reading is just that – a projected compensation. An AI-hallucination. A Fata Morgana. How do you know where to move? This is perhaps the biggest danger in transformative work: the illusion of progress, which Ralph Turm is often expanding on. How do you recognize this illusion?

In what I wrote on “cultural soil analysis”, this – today AI-boosted – illusion often thrives in monocultural narrative ground, lives in self-referential bubbles (e.g. “sustainability”, “regenerative” as labels), reproduces similar structures (e.g. hierarchy disguised as sociocracy at surface-level), and a shared disconnection from the own roots (history, lineage, heritage, tradition etc.).

What’s supposed to “change the world” reproduces the status quo: uniform calls to “slow down”, to “be more conscious”, to “be inclusive”, to “prioritize wellbeing”. Yet, perhaps it’s your projection, your need, your language, your priviledge, or your way of doing it that looks different to others.

The result? Those going faster are seen suspiciously. Those not having the “right words” are not reached or heard. Those who’ve been doing this work much longer than you have remain invisible, are not valued. Monoculture reloaded. Bubbles start becoming golden cages.

Instead: how can we practice “radical diversity” – a multipolar, pluriversal (read for instance Sahana Chattopadhyay’s work on the matter) way of being in the world, honoring different embodiments, worldviews, contributions to “a more sustainable and regenerative world”? Rather than just foster diverse egos taking space.

What would collective, interspecies individuation look like? How can we learn to embody “power as nature” – a diversity of personal and collective roles, in different contexts, attuned to these context, just like species in an ecosystem?

With the notion of choreographic constellations, I explore how different (archetypal) roles with complementary perspectives and capabilities can come together to transform a particular cultural soil, at a particular ecological succession phase. Think of employees in the European car industry facing the prospect of mass unemployment linked to the end of the combustion engine. Learning to embrace death. Compost for new career paths.

I think that developing the collective consciousness about the roles that need to be played in a particular context is key – to then embody these roles. Like bumblebee doing what bumblebee does. And thus, contributing to pollination. Without pushing, without too much thinking, but with knowing what’s yours to do. And it may change, we may play the pollinating (sharing ideas, practices etc. widely) role of a bumblebee for a while, but not forever.

Reactivating our cultural repertoire for facing collapse

Today however, transformation efforts remain siloed. And there is a lot of talking about “breaking beyond the siloes”. There are thousands of “professional sustainability” communities, theories of change, investors and entrepreneurs trying to build something different. Consequently, the greater momentum is just not there. Also, because it is absorved by extractive systems.

Actors in sustainability and regeneration are often not sufficiently conscious about their own role, not sufficiently attuned to each others complementary role, not sufficiently clear about the value they bring to the ecosystem they claim serving, not sufficiently working together on creating the fertile ground to hold their work over the longer-term.

There is often very little difference in embodiment. Many pretend to be an expert. Rather than practicing the embodiment of being an actual bridge builder, a community weaver, a space-holder etc. That’s because our culture has lost this cultural repertoire, this archetypal intelligence that mirrors nature’s diverse roles in an ecosystem.

It often results in not attuning to collective dynamics, not stepping in when our contribution is needed in the collective movement. If modern culture, including sustainability and regeneration, were a dance performance, everyone would just stand alone and move (beautifully) on their own. Pushed to the extreme, it means remaining silent about ecocide, genocide and other forms of violence. Just do your thing to survive.

Misattuned. Lost. Individualistic. With fancy transformation tools, with AI magic, with promises to change all that. Sharlatans of transformations perhaps. Fata Morganas of progress.

Ecosystem Choreographies therefore invites us to practice moving differently through the world – by knowing who we are and what role we play like a species in an ecosystem (our style and story), by attuning to the place and communities we are part of (soil and synergies), and by working on making our contribution to that ecosystem more powerful, more valuable (seeds and stewardship).

What does it mean to practice moving in diverse, choreographic constellations? Along the six choreographic moves of Ecosystem Choreographies, you can reflect in which dimension of your choreography your movement may get stuck, and focus on that dimension.

The questions can give you inspiration to bring back movement into your work – through more self-consciousness, attunement to your field of work, and clarity over your contribution to that field. You can also take the Three Gaps Assessment to assess where your choreography gets stuck.

Choreographic Style
- What kinds of embodiment are present in your field of work? Are “experts”, “specialists” working in siloes, or generic “change makers” present?
- What archetypes live beneath the surface? How can you help conscious embodiment of transformative roles (bridge builder, narrative weaver, space holder, trickster etc.)?

Choreographic Story
- How diverse are the narrative structures you work with? Are the same heroic narrative arcs, scripts for action, and moral implications present?
- How can your own embodied example create resonance in how others connect to nature, community, the future etc.?

Choreographic Soil
- What qualities does the culture you work with have and how does it impact those you work with? How pluricultural, porous, inspirational is it?
- What does this culture most urgently need to regain health and vitality? How would that support those you work with? What happens if they remain in toxic soil conditions, rather than investing into refertilizing their soil?

Choreographic Seeds
- How receptive is the culture you work with with what you offer?
- Which conditions are necessary for your value proposition to take root there?

Choreographic Synergies
- Who else is doing similar work like you, in the specific field you work in? What challenges do they face?
- Which kind of archetype would best complement your own capabilities right now? If you were a species, who would that be and who would be the ideal partner?

Choreographic Stewardship
- Who or what is making sure that energy, ideas, resources are flowing in the ecosystem you work with?
- What is needed for choreographing collective movements in that ecosystem to focus on priority intervention points?

If we are nature, then we need to learn again to act as nature. Just like a species plays its part in an ecosystem, we, as humans, may just be learning what it means to be human again. In our own ways, personally and collectively. It may feel uncomfortable, like a soul striptease revealing the vulnerable essence of who we are. But that’s also all the power that nature gave us.

Ecosystem Choreographies allow us to reconnect – to ourselves, to each other, to the places and planet we are part of. Because after all, that’s the best investment we can make into our future. To learn build the movement and energy that can bring us to a thriving future. That’s the “negative space” – the place of our deepest longings, the space of hope and potential that is ours to fill with life.

Move further

Would you like to apply the framework to your own work? Take the free Choreographic Resonance Assessment.

If what’s going on right now feels like a global wildfire and apocalyptic flood at the same time, it’s unsurprising that this is the same feeling those you work with will have.

With that in mind, it is extremely difficult to argue for sustainable or regenerative solutions within a permanent survival mode. In that mode, priorities are different for potential clients or the stakeholders you want to reach. We are facing the shadows of modern culture.

And yet, some are able to circumvent destructive business-as-usual culture. Because they work under conditions that are conducive to slower, healthier, and more resonant ways of living and working. They are able to ground their work in healthy soil, or what Dave Snowden calls “granularity”.

These are bubbles – spaces in which deep resonance is actually possible, yet too often working in isolation: ecovillages, agroecological farms, some neighborhood projects, vibrant communities, and a few businesses doing it the regenerative way in more or less integrity.

What does it actually feel like when one of these bubbles succeeds?

Picture a bioregional business where decisions emerge from listening to the land and community needs, where profit and regeneration move together, where Monday morning feels like possibility rather than exhaustion. The pace is different, just as the questions. And the people involved know they’re participating in something that nourishes rather than depletes.

What we can learn from these examples is however extremely important: they were able to nurture conditions in which a different way of being in the world, a different culture is actually possible. And it influences how we think, feel, and what we dedicate time and money on.

This is a common understanding of what regeneration is: creating conditions conducive to life. I would add that it is the very way that we are moving through life that creates these conditions.

With Ecosystem Choreographies, I have developed a practical framework to learn moving in such life-affirming way, creating the conditions for our work to resonate and be reciprocated.

It responds to questions many transformative founders and leaders sit with, each corresponding to a move in the Ecosystem Choreographies:

• What role can I play and embody in regenerating the organizations, communities, places I work with? (Choreographic Style)

• Which field of work and audiences am I serving? (Choreographic Soil)

• What value am I providing to that field? (Choreographic Seeds)

• How do I invite others to work on regenerating that field? (Choreographic Story)

• Who else can I work with to regenerate that field? (Choreographic Synergies)

• Which complementarities and capabilities need to be choreographed to lead to breakthroughs in that field? (Choreographic Stewardship)

These moves don’t follow a linear sequence. Sensing your field’s soil shapes how you embody your role, which influences the story you tell, which attracts the synergies that allow you to articulate clearer value and steward wider transformation. Each move creates conditions for the others – they spiral together as interconnected choreography.

The Three Gaps: Weaving Between Worlds

In my work with clients, and the interviews I have conducted that led to my new Choreographic Leadership Journey, I came across three main challenges that separate business-as-usual from embodied regenerative cultures.

They relate to how we listen to the field and people we work with (Attunement Gap), to the way we embody regenerative work (Embodiment Gap), and to the transformative contribution we make to our field of work (Value Gap).

If these are misaligned, transformative work will:

• remain in bubbles or siloes

• be perceived as nice-to-have rather than a strategic priority

• reproduce the patterns it was supposed overcoming or only have shallow effects

• feel elitist, disconnected, abstract to most

• be driven by saviour motivations without being able to make a livelihood from it

Ecosystem Choreographies addresses three main challenges in transformative, regenerative, systems change work. They weave between these three disconnects through strategic, choreographic, and often collective movements.

1. Attunement Gap: Weaving Your Field of Work

How are we listening to the needs of (potential) clients and stakeholders? And how does their cultural context influence them?

Beyond traditional audience development, attunement to our field of work looks at both the immediate needs of those you work with (like the species populating their field) and the context, or what I call the “cultural soil“ that holds them.

It is about the space of our work, between what is currently (materially and culturally) present and what could be.

Offering something without deeply understanding what that field needs leads to the work not landing (no clients, no collaborations etc.), to only shallow effects of the work, or to the work remaining in usual bubbles or siloes.

In today’s modern (Western) culture, many have lost the capability of “reading the land”, of “sensing the room”, of seeing reality for what it is. These capacities remain alive in many Indigenous, non-Western, and Global South practices – what Ecosystem Choreographies offers is not discovery but relearning what was never lost elsewhere.

This misattunement leads to:

• Invisibilization: not recognizing who and what is present. This allows patterns like ecocide or genocides to be accepted.

• Normalization of harm: the invizibilization is accompanied by the normalization of toxic patterns, called “desensitisation” or “habituation” in psychology. Or “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” in climate psychology. What is harmful becomes “normal” to avoid feeling the constant pain about it – as a psychological protection response of dealing with so much constant violence.

• Pseudoinnovation: not being able to see what is actually happening in a field of work leads to ignoring existing or past solutions, as well as those that have been doing that work for a long time.

Voices from the Ground

Past clients and interviewees said:

“I’d like to learn how to communicate less, but more essentially, with a smaller group of people that appreciate what I do. I want to know my audience.”

“I see how everything is interconnected and am challenged by this ‘problem-solving’ mindset”

“I have so many ideas, but don’t know how to articulate what’s relevant for clients.”

Choreographic Moves

Cultural Soil Analysis: Sensing the Space and Its Needs

Cultural Soil Analysis invites leaders to map the territory they serve beyond “market segments”, but as living ecosystems shaped by stories, values, and historical patterns. This move begins with sensing: what narratives are present in your field? What traumas remain unacknowledged? Which possibilities are already stirring beneath the surface but lack language or legitimacy?

Rather than imposing solutions from outside, this choreography develops your capacity to read the field’s readiness, resistance, and resonance. It attunes you to the cultural conditions that either enable or block transformation. It’s the difference between offering something people can’t yet receive and planting seeds in soil that’s ready to receive them.

Try this: Pause for three minutes. What stories are your potential clients or stakeholders telling themselves about why change is impossible? Listen without solving.

Stewardship: Weaving the Space

Stewardship choreographs the conditions for collective movement. Where Cultural Soil Analysis reveals what’s present, Stewardship asks: who else is needed to regenerate this field? What complementarities and capabilities must come together for breakthroughs to emerge?

This move recognizes that attunement is not passive observation but active weaving. Stewardship involves curating relationships, convening unlikely allies, and creating containers where different perspectives can cross-pollinate. It choreographs not just your role, but the wider ecosystem of actors whose movements, when synchronized, generate systemic shifts.

Try this: Map your field’s ecosystem. Who are three actors doing adjacent work whose movements could amplify yours? What would become possible if you convened them?

Through these two moves, the Attunement Gap begins to close: you become fluent in the language of your field while simultaneously shaping the field’s capacity to receive what you offer.

2. Embodiment Gap: Leading from Wholeness

What is my role to play here today? How do I show up with presence and care, practicing the change I want to see in the world?

Rather than just being “authentic” as if we were always the same across different contexts, embodiment asks us to be present in different roles, relationships, and contexts.

It is about the embodied story, the unique style we give life and shape to through our work – it’s that essence that others will feel, and remember - when they get in touch with you. Often beyond just words.

Without embodiment, transformative work can feel fake, distant, up to arrogant and hypocrite. The story we tell is not felt, the style we adopt looks like everyone else. In that way, transformative work looks just like yet another serial product of the industrial age.

Modern (Western) culture has sophisticated its means of disembodiment: body-mind disconnect, the systemic outsourcing of personal responsibility (in supply chains, in organizational decision-making processes etc.), and a general numbing and loss of somatic and emotional intelligence.

This disembodiment leads to:

• The polarization of communicating either only from the subjective perspective (like an artist) or just on behalf of the audience we serve (traditional marketing) rather than finding a reciprocal middle ground

• The growing gap between narratives and experienced reality sustained by climate change denial, far-right revival, conspiracy theories etc.

• The mindfulness trap (often coming with spiritual bypassing) pretending that all change must come “from within” (which is mistakingly not a Buddhist approach) as if the within was separated from the world– a criticism also of Nora Bateson regarding the Inner Development Goals, which risk standardizing this separation.

• The growth of projection and compensation marketing speaking to a feeling of not-enoughness and scarcity – from virtual realities to Netflix series and beauty ideals

Voices from the Ground

Past clients and interviewees said:

“I want to find a way to express for people get my essence, get my sense of humour.”

“I would like to communicate more with the body.”

“Maybe I’m not the right person for this.”

Choreographic Moves

Style: Inhabiting Your Unique Leadership Presence

Choreographic Style is the move that makes leadership recognizable. It’s about discovering and embodying the unique pattern of your (archetypal) movements through the world: your rhythms, your edges, your way of holding space.

This move works with somatic intelligence: how do you show up in a room? What does your presence communicate before words? What does it feel like in your body when your work isn’t landing – where do you notice that contraction? Style choreographs the answer to “who is the leader I’m becoming?” It develops your capacity to shift between roles — facilitator, provocateur, witness, anchor — while remaining attuned.

The result is leadership that doesn’t need to perform or prove itself. Your style becomes the signature through which your work is felt and remembered. People experience your essence through how you move, not just what you say.

Try this: Notice your next three interactions. What pattern of presence do people respond to in you? Where does your movement create ease versus resistance?

Story: Narrating the Transformation You Enable

Choreographic Story moves beyond personal brand narratives or mission statements. It’s the living story of how your work participates in wider transformation like an arc from what is to what’s becoming possible.

This choreography develops your capacity to articulate transformation in ways that land viscerally, and not just in the head. It weaves your embodied experience with the field’s needs, creating narrative that doesn’t just describe change but invites participation in it.

Through Style and Story together, you close the Embodiment Gap. Your leadership presence and communications become more coherent. What you say and how you show up are of one piece, not always, but the practice is there. Transformation is no longer just talked about; it’s enacted.

3. Value Gap: Being in Service

What transformation does my work enable? How do I communicate the regenerative, multi-functional, multi-dimensional value of that work?

Besides just “solving problems”, which may be needed if those you work with struggle with urgent issues, a regenerative value proposition asks how to cultivate conditions for thriving over the longer term – by enabling greater agency.

It’s about bringing an embodied contribution from who we are to what our field of work needs. It’s the match between essence and real world needs.

Without a solid value proposition, the work resembles either like business-as-usual or isn’t perceived as strategic, important, and/or urgent. The result is to struggle in converting interest into investment or undercharging for transformative work.

Today, we live in a value as scarcity paradigm – what is valuable is what you don’t have, what maybe others have, what fills a gap. Keeping people in a permanent not-enoughness sells.

Not coincidentally, the most “valuable” brands and products, the financially “wealthiest” people on Earth are made possible by a culture that is increasingly restless, lonely, and sick.

The consequences of the value gap:

• everything is put into a decontextualized problem-solution framing – missing the contextual conditions that make sure that this work can actually bear fruit and survive beyond the sandbox of trainings, consulting sessions, or service delivery packages

• trauma-mining marketing is able to speak to, and perpetuate, traumata, pains, and challenges. It is selling temporary solutions to keep customers in a dependency mode.

• challenge in making transformative work experiencable beyond the direct work experience – something precious is lost through traditional marketing

• the difference between transformative and shallow work is not visible, not felt, not amplified

Voices from the Ground

Past clients and interviewees said:

“I want to respect and honour the depth of my work. I feel unease with the demands of what the world is looking for.”

“What’s right to demonstrate value, to demonstrate thought leadership?”

“Many are saying shit. They don’t know what they do.”

“The offer description would help me translate my thoughts and values in an attractive way for clients”

Choreographic Moves

Seeds: Articulating Transformative Value

Choreographic Seeds is the move that makes transformation tangible and experienceable. It names what your work enables to grow — not as abstract benefits, but as lived capacities, shifts in awareness, new possibilities for action.

This choreography develops your ability to articulate value beyond problem-solution framing. Seeds speak to what becomes possible: greater agency, deeper belonging, regenerative capacity. They communicate value that doesn’t extract or exploit, but genuinely cultivates conditions for thriving.

The key is making multidimensional value visible and felt. Seeds capture the essence of transformation in ways that decision-makers can recognize as strategic while remaining true to the depth and complexity of regenerative change.

Try this: Name three capacities that someone gains after working with you. Ways of being, acting, and/or perceiving that shift. Notice which one makes your own chest open.

Synergies: Weaving Reciprocal Value Across the Ecosystem

Choreographic Synergies recognizes that transformative value doesn’t exist in isolation. This move maps how your work creates ripple effects: how the value you generate for one stakeholder creates conditions for value elsewhere in the ecosystem.

This choreography makes visible the reciprocal relationships and complementary capacities that amplify impact. It answers: who else benefits when this work succeeds? What becomes possible for the wider field? How does value multiply through connection rather than extraction?

Try this: When your work succeeds with one client or community, what becomes more possible for adjacent actors in your field? Trace the ripples.

Through Seeds and Synergies, the Value Gap closes. Your work becomes recognizable as genuinely transformative by not just solving immediate problems, but cultivating long-term conditions where transformation can take root and spread.

Conclusion: From Survival to Choreography

The destructive patterns of business-as-usual thrive on disconnection: between our words and our presence, between our offerings and the field’s readiness, between the value we create and the world’s capacity to recognize it.

Ecosystem Choreographies offers both a different language and a different cultural repertoire for regenerative leaders and founders. It is not a rigid methodology to follow, but a living framework for developing your capacity to move in life-affirming ways. Each of the six moves (Style, Soil, Seeds, Story, Synergies, Stewardship) addresses a dimension of the three gaps while remaining interconnected, mutually reinforcing.

The invitation is not to perfect all six moves simultaneously. It’s to begin where resonance pulls you. Perhaps you’re already attuned to your field’s cultural soil but struggle to embody your unique leadership style. Perhaps your transformative value is clear but you haven’t yet woven the synergies that could amplify it. Perhaps you know your story but need to steward the wider ecosystem of actors required for breakthrough.

What changes when we approach leadership not as commanding or controlling, but as choreographing? We shift from survival mode — where everything feels urgent, scattered, never enough — to regenerative movement, where each gesture creates conditions for the next.

The work stops being about you pushing transformation forward through sheer will. It becomes about choreographing the conditions where transformation can emerge through collective movement. Yours and others’, human and more-than-human, visible and beneath the surface.

This is how we move from what merely survives business-as-usual to what actually thrives: by learning to choreograph the space between worlds. Between the destructive patterns still dominant and the regenerative cultures already stirring. Between who we’ve been and who we’re becoming. Between isolation and genuine ecosystem.

The choreography begins with a single move. What wants to move through you, and through your field, today?

Move further

Want to learn more about Ecosystem Choreographies? Join the free “Moving Beyond the Bubble” workshop on 20 May 2026.

Would you like to apply the framework to your own work? Take the Choreographic Resonance Assessment.

Read more

If you are working in sustainability, regeneration, systems change, you are likely to face a huge invisible barrier. It’s a barrier for making a living out of it, for making the effects of your work last, and/or for working in integrity.

Your work may look like a nice-to-have, a distant and abstract concept, or even a dangerous, woke ideology. That’s why this work too often remains in bubbles and fails to become relevant more broadly.

The challenge is a mismatch between who you are, what you bring, and the cultural soil that can hold it, or not.

Your most brilliant frameworks won’t take root in compacted ground. Your deepest offerings won’t grow in nutrient-depleted conditions. Your transformative vision can’t spread through disconnected networks.

What Sits Between Us and Breakthrough

Culture isn’t just narratives floating “out there” or beliefs living “in here.” Culture moves at the threshold by connecting stories with bodies, rituals with places, consciousness with matter.

As I explored in my recent piece on Cultural Soil Analysis, culture moves communicatively through voice, gesture, posture, and movement. Through rituals, rhythms, and cycles.

In modern culture, these movements are often erratic, misaligned, unattuned, and atomized. They reflect consumerist, individualistic patterns. The ritualized collective repetition of this movement is culture.

The ability to attune to and modify this movement is regenerative culture.

So how do we bring the cultures our clients, collaborators, and stakeholders participate in back into movement beyond business-as-usual?

The Three Gaps That Keep Work Stuck

After working with dozens of regenerative entrepreneurs, sustainability leaders, and systems-change practitioners, I’ve noticed three recurring patterns that prevent transformative work from landing:

1. The Attunement Gap

Being disconnected from the soil

How can we listen to the deeper needs of the field we work with?

Attunement requires radical (root-level) listening to understand the reality of those you serve. Beyond direct audience needs, this listening extends to the broader cultural field: the soil conditions that determine whether needs can actually be met.

Misattunement looks like: “We support organizations who want to integrate regenerative principles and living systems design into their work.”

What’s missing: Understanding the actual cultural conditions—the dominant narratives, power dynamics, and meaning-making systems—that shape whether “regenerative principles” can even make sense to those organizations right now.

2. The Embodiment Gap

Not playing the role the soil needs

What does it take to embody the presence the situation calls for?

When the gap between words and action becomes too large, the depth, presence, and unique texture this work requires cannot be perceived. You risk reproducing the monocultures you’re trying to replace.

Disembodiment looks like: “I am passionate about applying holistic systems thinking to achieve sustainability”

What’s missing: The uniqueness you embody, potentially guided by the specific archetypal presence you bring. Are you a bridge-builder? A soil-tender? A memory-keeper? Each archetype serves different soil conditions.

3. The Value Gap

Not relevantly contributing to the soil

How can this work meet immediate needs while contributing to deeper transformation?

Regenerative value propositions must serve both urgent needs and nurture long-term conditions. When the value remains abstract or distant, the work gets perceived as optional.

Disconnected value looks like: “By joining, you will reconnect with nature’s wisdom.”

What’s missing: The practical bridge between where people are now (stressed, overwhelmed, needing results) and where transformation becomes possible (restored relationship with living systems).

Choreographic Strategies: Seven Approaches to Cultural Regeneration

Once you’ve diagnosed which gaps are present in your work and your field, choreographic strategies offer pathways for addressing them.

Rather than marketing tactics, they’re ecosystem interventions: ways of working that align consciousness, bodies, movements, and transformation space so energy can confluence toward strategic breakthroughs.

Here’s a brief overview of the seven strategies:

1. Narrative-Weaving (for monocultural soil)
Bringing different worldviews together to diversify cultural repertoire

2. Space-Making (for compacted soil)
Holding space for radical emergence where ideas can breathe again

3. Flow-Warding (for dried/stuck soil)
Enabling flow when unexpressed emotions block collective movement

4. Remembrance-Structuring (for disconnected soil)
Cultural archaeology that reconnects to forgotten roots and wisdom

5. Archetypal Constellations (for all soils)
Assessing and cultivating diversity of roles in your ecosystem

6. Hospicing and Midwifing (for nutrient-poor soil)
Tending what’s dying with care; protecting what’s emerging

7. Mycelial Networking (for siloed initiatives)
Building connections that enable wisdom and resource flow

Each strategy addresses specific soil conditions. Each requires particular archetypal embodiments. Each offers distinct value to the field.

From Diagnosis to Choreography

The choreographic approach recognizes that transformative work doesn’t succeed through better pitches or clearer messaging alone. It succeeds by understanding the specific cultural soil you’re working with, embodying the archetypal presence that soil needs, and offering value that’s both practically urgent and systemically transformative.

This is what it means to act as nature. It’s recognizing that just as pioneer species prepare ground for climax forests, different archetypal presences prepare cultural ground for different phases of transformation.

Want to assess your own gaps? Take the free Three Gaps Diagnosis Self-Assessment.

Want to learn more about Ecosystem Choreographies? Join the free “Moving Beyond the Bubble” workshop on 20 May 2026.

Want to explore the full strategies? The complete guide to all seven choreographic strategies, including detailed practices, real-world examples, and assessment tools for each soil type, is available for paid subscribers below.

Paying subscribers get access to:
- Detailed breakdown of all seven choreographic strategies - Specific practices and examples for each soil condition
- Archetypal embodiment guidance for each strategy
- Cultural soil succession framework
- Integration with the Three Gaps diagnostic

Why does transformative work struggle to land with decision-makers?

It is a question that makes the difference between transformative work being a “nice-to-have” and an investment that is urgently needed. The workshop touched upon the embodied choreography between what we bring and tending the conditions where it can take root.

The Pattern That Surfaced

Most participants in the room could feel it: the gap between what they bring and what the cultural soil can hold.

As one participant put it:

“In these types of spaces, the soil is really rich. But it’s also very niche, a bubble. So the question that comes to me is: how do I see my role as a bridge builder?”

This captures one central challenge facing regenerative work today: We’ve built deep practice within our communities. Now we need to choreograph movement beyond the bubble. Spreading our seeds to other fields.

The Three Gaps

Through the workshop visualization and soil analysis exercise, three distinct gaps were mirrored:

1. Attunement Gap: Offering Without Understanding What’s Needed

The pattern: You may have developed your approach, built your methodology, crafted your offer. But it comes from what you think is needed rather than from deep listening to the cultural soil and audiences that populate it. To the conditions in which your clients and stakeholders work in.

How it shows up:

• Your work reaches people already convinced (the choir)

• Decision-makers don’t see how it addresses their actual challenges

• You describe what you do (methods, frameworks) instead of what they need (conditions, transformation)

The consequence: Work stays in regenerative bubbles. The broader field where transformation is most needed can’t hear you.

2. Embodiment Gap: Story People Don’t Feel

The pattern: You have compelling arguments for your work. But it doesn’t match who you’ve become or what you’ve actually lived. The story sits in your head, not your body.

How it shows up:

• Your professional story feels like a performance, fitting the expectations of your bubble or the market

• People sense the mismatch between what you say and what you embody

• Your communication feels generic, like other “regenerative practitioners”

The consequence: People don’t work with you. They don’t feel what’s in it for them. Your depth doesn’t translate.

3. Value Gap: Transformation That Appears Distant

The pattern: You know your work creates transformation. But to outsiders, it looks abstract, distant, impractical. A nice-to-have rather than an essential investment.

How it shows up:

• Decision-makers see your work as expensive consulting, not strategic necessity

• You struggle to articulate concrete outcomes

• Your pricing feels disconnected from perceived value

The consequence: Financial unsustainability.

Cultural Soil Analysis: The Diagnostic Framework

The core of the workshop centered on Cultural Soil Analysis: a framework for understanding the field conditions where your work needs to land.

Just as a gardener assesses soil before planting, we need to diagnose the cultural conditions before choreographing our offers.

The Five Soil Quality Criteria

During the workshop, participants scored the field they work in across five dimensions.

Assessing these dimensions is key in the next steps of Ecosystem Choreographies - to identify choreographic strategies for accessing and refertilizing relevant fields of work. Different fields are populated by different species - it’s about knowing your place and your strategy in place.

1. Narrative Diversity
Are multiple belief systems coexisting and cross-pollinating? Or are the same stories, heroes, and solutions recycled in monoculture?

2. Porosity
Is there room for new ideas, complexity, paradox? Or is the soil compacted—defensive, resistant, sealed off from deeper wisdom?

3. Moisture
Are emotional and somatic ways of knowing welcome? Or is everything rational, transactional, dry?

4. Structure
Are there diverse collaborative networks? Connections to ancestral wisdom, elder knowledge, cultural memory? Or isolated silos?

5. Microbial Life
Is the overall culture healthy and alive? Or are toxic patterns, extractive habits, and colonial narratives still dominant?

Bridging the Three Gaps Through Cultural Soil Analysis

Here’s how understanding your cultural soil helps bridge each gap:

Bridging the Attunement Gap

The shift: From “Here’s what I do” to “Here’s what this soil needs and how my work addresses it”

How Cultural Soil Analysis helps:

• Narrative Diversity score low? Your work might need to introduce new stories, alternative to heroism, different frameworks. Frame your offer as expanding the cultural repertoire. It may also make sense to weave between different narratives – amplifying female, LGBTIQ, disabled etc. voices. That’s how you hold space for ecotones to emerge.

• Example reframe:
  ❌ “I offer 12-week leadership programmes using somatic practices”
  ✅ “Decision-makers in your sector are using the same stories and same behaviours when speaking about change. I help you access leadership models rooted in the body, so you can navigate complexity beyond the usual playbook.”

The practice: Before crafting your next offer, spend time in deep listening. What does this specific cultural soil actually need? Not what you think it should need, but what does it need? What signs can you read in the voice, in the posture, in the gestures of those you work with? And what would nature do (e.g. dandelion reaching deep waters despite hard, sealed soil)?

Bridging the Embodiment Gap

The shift: From performing a professional identity to embodying your actual journey

How Cultural Soil Analysis helps:

• Porosity score low? The field may be compacted. Your role isn’t to perform expertise but to model what becomes possible when soil opens. Here you may bring creativity, inspiration, a greater vision.

• Structure score low? Share your story of holding space, connecting isolated initiatives, weaving in memory of what has worked in the past or not. Integrate what kind of collaborations have worked here or failed before? Why?

The practice: Map your career choreography. Where did you shift? What called you? What did you compost? The soil you came from informs how you tend the soil now.

Bridging the Value Gap

The shift: From abstract transformation to concrete soil conditioning

How Cultural Soil Analysis helps:

• Moisture score low? Frame your value as bringing emotional literacy, somatic wisdom, trust-building capacity. Communicate how people feel working with you. And ask yourself: how would a river flow through your field of work?

• Microbial Life score low? Position your work as detoxifying extractive patterns, introducing healthy, resilient cultures. Clarify how these patterns are blocking your clients or stakeholders. And reflect upon “mycelial strategies” to transform toxins into food for others.

Example reframe:
❌ “I help organizations become more regenerative”
✅ “Your teams are burned out and uninspired because emotional ways of knowing are punished. I create conditions where vulnerability becomes strategic resilience - so your people can navigate turbulence with greater ease.”

The practice: For each low-scoring soil criterion, articulate the concrete transformation your work enables in that dimension.

What Happens Next?

After the workshop, participants left with one assignment:

Plant one seed within 30 days. One move to tend the soil where their work needs to land.

Some examples:

• Attunement: Interview 3 people in my field about what narratives dominate and what’s missing

• Embodiment: Write and share the story of my career composting journey

• Value: Reframe my homepage by leading from the experience readers face in their work

Bridge the Gap: Soil Resonance Mapping

If this article surfaced something for you—a pattern you recognize, a gap you can feel—there’s a next step.

Soil Resonance Mapping is a focused 60-minute session where we diagnose:

✓ Your cultural soil across 5 criteria—where focus is needed
✓ Your current value proposition using the Resonance Value Compass
✓ The 1-3 strategic moves that would create most breakthrough, inspired by nature’s strategies

You’ll leave with:

• Diagnostic scoring across soil + value

• 2-page written summary

• Next moves for the next month

• Recommendation on whether the full Ecosystem Resonance Assessment serves you

For workshop participants and readers of this article.

Book Soil Resonance Mapping →

The Work Is Choreography

Here’s what became clear:

Transformative work doesn’t struggle to land because it’s not good enough.

It struggles because there is lacking movement between who you are, what you offer and the fields of work that could reciprocate what you bring. Change is dynamic and responsive.

Cultural Soil Analysis gives you the diagnostic.

The movement is yours to choreograph.

Jean-Philippe Steeger is a regenerative communications consultant, leadership coach, and (co-)founder of Perspectivist and re:storied. He developed Ecosystem Choreographies as a methodology for making transformative work resonate in challenging cultural conditions - after career composting from EU Affairs to bioregional organizing in Transylvania.

Related Reading:

Cultural Soil Analysis: Why Transformative Work Doesn’t Root - The framework with diagnostic questions

Continue the Practice:

Book Soil Resonance Mapping - 60-minute diagnostic session
Ecosystem Resonance Assessment - Full 90-minute deep-dive + report

As a founder, leader, or community builder working in systems change, you likely bring unconventional approaches to those you work with.

And yet: sustainability initiatives remain hollow. Transformation programmes don’t stick. Innovation repeats the past. Regenerative work stays in bubbles.

Why?

Brilliant, caring, potentially transformative work gets absorbed by business-as-usual—or more precisely, by an extractive culture characterized by disembodiment, dislocation, and dissociation.

These are three main cultural barriers to systems-change work. (See my piece on shadow mainstreaming)

The issue isn’t just the quality of your work. It’s the cultural soil conditions that determine whether transformative work can take root or gets absorbed by toxic conditions.

THE CULTURAL SOIL METAPHOR

Beyond a dualist understanding of nature-culture, cultural soil describes our relationship to physical soil, to place, and to communities through embodied narratives and belief systems.

I say embodied because it’s more than intellectual understanding: culture moves communicatively through voice, gesture, posture, and movement. Through rituals, rhythms, and cycles.

In modern culture, these movements are often erratic, misaligned, unattuned, and atomized. They reflect consumerist, individualistic Western patterns.

This means telling a different story isn’t enough. We need to bridge the story-embodiment gap.

The ritualized collective repetition of this movement is culture. The ability to attune to and modify this movement is regenerative culture.

Culture can be hard to change, like hard soil. It’s what sociologists call “path dependency.” Historically, institutionally, conventionally shaped norms of how reality “should” look, feel, and be embodied.

HOW WE TEND CULTURAL SOIL

First: Through radical listening - careful attention to deeper patterns affecting the culture we work with.

Second: Through systematic understanding of soil constitution and composition - Cultural Soil Analysis.

To illustrate, I’ll share insights from my work with Regenerative Futures Transylvania and how we’re refertilizing that cultural soil.

FIVE CULTURAL SOIL CRITERIA

1. NARRATIVE DIVERSITY

Multiple belief systems and worldviews coexist and cross-pollinate, forming a narrative-based ecology of meaning-making.

Watch for: Edgewalkers dancing into narrative ecotones (where two ecosystems meet) as the breeding ground of embodied cultural innovation.

Diagnostic question: How monocultural are narratives here? Are the same tropes, heroes, and solutions repeated across sectors?

Transylvania example:
Through waves of colonization, narratives became multilayered. Multiple communities (Romanian, Hungarian, Saxon, Romani) bring narrative diversity. However, communist heritage and neoliberal consumerism sealed that soil.

Our work: Breaking through to lost wisdom heritage by creating spaces where diverse narratives can resurface.

2. POROSITY

Ideas and practices can breathe. There’s room for contradiction and complexity. Space for newcomers - their contributions welcomed, grounded, and grown.

Diagnostic question: Is there space for dissent, contradiction, grief, or paradox?

Transylvania example:
Under communism, collaboration equalled confiscation. Trust is difficult. Even within families, you couldn’t be sure someone wouldn’t inform the secret police. Working with locals requires stamina and providing clear, practical benefits for collaboration.

Our work: Traditionalist values as protective posture may become more porous through creative, imaginative work - which is why we chose “regenerative futures” framing. We create safe spaces for experimentation.

3. MOISTURE

Emotional literacy and affective resonance are present. Work flows naturally, meandering through challenges. Confluencing collaborations are possible because there’s trust.

Diagnostic question: Are emotional and somatic ways of knowing welcome, or is everything filtered through cognition and rigid rules?

Transylvania example:
Historical implications haven’t been digested collectively. Emotional literacy is scarce. Mental health issues rise.

Our work: Making space for emotional resonance, healing historical trauma, genuine exchange. The first module of our Regenerative Tracks incubator focuses on integral entrepreneurship to tend the inner dimension before outer strategy.

4. STRUCTURE

Composted layers of memory and meaning nurture thoughts, feelings, wisdom, and actions in the present. Connected through meaning-making structures.

Diagnostic question: How intact are ancestral mycorrhizae? Are there invisible threads to ancient, indigenous, place-based, queer, feminine, relational ways of knowing?

Transylvania example:
Beyond revisionist narratives or toxic positivity, there’s scarcity in narratives weaving between communities and value systems.

Our work: Leading with integrative narrative and receptive posture. Holding space for new collaborative structures to emerge that honor diverse roots.

5. MICROBIAL LIFE

Assessing balance of relationships between subtle actors, traditions, and more-than-human influences below the surface.

Diagnostic question: What toxins perdure? Which extractive habits, supremacist residues, or colonial narratives haven’t been composted?

Transylvania example:
Through ecosystem mapping with community and Regenerative Tracks, we map the inner dimension of stakeholder relationships and reflect upon often invisible collaboration patterns.

Our work: Valuing and welcoming diversity. Holding space for voices of LGBTIQ+, the feminine, youth, as part of our diversification strategy for regenerative futures.

DIAGNOSING DISRUPTED CULTURE

Much of today’s modern cultural soil is sealed, dry, poisoned, and depleted.

To understand the field we’re working in, we need to get our hands dirty.

Cultural Soil Analysis Checklist:

Narrative Diversity:
□ How monocultural are narratives?
□ Same tropes, heroes, solutions repeated?
□ Where are the narrative ecotones?

Porosity:
□ Is there space for dissent, contradiction, grief, paradox?
□ Can newcomers actually contribute?
□ What protective barriers exist, and why?

Moisture:
□ Are emotional and somatic ways of knowing welcome?
□ Or is everything filtered through cognition, mental constructs, rigid rules?
□ What historical trauma hasn’t been digested?

Structure:
□ How intact are ancestral mycorrhizae?
□ What connections to ancient, indigenous, place-based, queer, feminine, relational ways of knowing exist?
□ Which connections need healing?

Microbial Life:
□ What toxins perdure?
□ Which extractive habits haven’t been composted?
□ What supremacist residues remain?
□ What colonial narratives still operate invisibly?

WHY THIS MATTERS

The Transylvania example shows how crucial a listening posture is for understanding the cultural world of people we work with.

Missing this understanding results in transformative work remaining shallow and staying in bubbles.

Most transformation efforts fail not because the work lacks value, but because:

1. They don’t diagnose cultural soil conditions first

2. They impose top-down change strategies on compacted soil

3. They tell new stories without bridging the story-embodiment gap

4. They work with monocultured narratives instead of cultivating diversity

Cultural Soil Analysis creates conditions for transformative work to actually take root.

YOUR CULTURAL SOIL

If you’re working toward systems change and struggling to make it land, ask:

What is the actual cultural soil I’m working with?

Not the soil you wish existed. Not the soil your frameworks assume. The actual soil with its specific history, trauma, protective barriers, and latent wisdom.

Then:

What does this soil actually need to become fertile ground for the transformation you’re seeding?

The answer shapes everything: who you partner with, what language you use, what pace you work at, what structures you create, what you tend first.

NEXT STEPS

Understand your cultural soil:
Book an Ecosystem Resonance Assessment (Module 0)
90-minute diagnostic mapping where your work sits in the field and what transformation is actually possible.
€300 (fully credited to Cœureographers Programme)

Go deeper:
Discover Ecosystem Choreographies - a 4-month choreographic leadership journey. Create audience clarity, resonant offer, embodied communication that honors depth while landing with decision-makers. Book free exploration call.

Jean-Philippe Steeger is a regenerative communications strategist, leadership consultant, founder of Perspectivist, co-founder or re:storied, and steward of Regenerative Futures Transylvania. He develops Ecosystem Choreographies—a methodology for making transformative work land in challenging cultural soil conditions.

If culture and nature are not separate—as modern narratives would establish—then the solutions to the destruction of the planet are also to be found within us and among us:

• In the language we use and the diverse—or monotonous—worlds we share through it

• In the narratives shaping our worldview, stories, and what we consider important in life

• In the somatic culture expressing as specifically patterned gestures, postures, and ways of moving

This movement between our consciousness, bodies, and the lands we are part of is regenerative communications in my understanding. It’s what connects us to the web of life—a dynamic web of embodied and shared consciousness.

The ritualized collective repetition of this communicative and connective movement is culture. And that can be hard to change—it’s what sociologists call “path dependency.” Historically, institutionally, conventionally shaped norms of how reality “should” look like, feel like, and be embodied like.

Today, this movement between consciousness, bodies, and our living environment is stuck, deviated, compensated, and controlled. The more tamed and canalized the movement becomes, the easier it is to control and profit from others’ lacking vitality—and disease. An economy of scarcity despite the banners of progress.

We live in what Yanis Varoufakis calls a “technofeudalist” attention economy, governed by the logical continuation of Enlightenment ideas—with ideologies of transhumanism, longtermism, and other futurist escape logics governing many C-suites and government strategies, as I wrote in “Totalitarianism Reloaded”.

The Brutal Impact of the Nature-Culture Divide

The impact of this ritualized separation is visible everywhere:

Disembodiment: The Health Pandemic

We face stress and burnout at record levels, booming psychotherapy and “self-help industries,” civilizational diseases affecting majorities of populations under pharmaceutical medication. There’s a systematic disconnection between somatic, mental, natural, social, and spiritual health.

The body has become a machine to optimize, medicate, and manage—not a source of wisdom to listen to.

Dislocation: The Loneliness Pandemic

We’ve normalized localized expressions of ecocide. We’ve lost the ability to live from and in peace with the land we inhabit. A mainstreamed (but mostly repressed) feeling of being lost and without roots pervades modern life.

Place has become real estate to extract from—not ecology to belong to.

Dissociation: The Escape from Reality

We see escape into virtual worlds, the “scientific” separation between subject and object, the repression of facing historic trauma and systems of oppression. Fundamentalist and ideological redemption promises proliferate. Global drug use rises. Nostalgic narratives and aesthetics revive. The systematic invisibilization of our own contribution to chains of suffering (in global supply chains) continues.

Reality has become something to transcend or deny—not ground to tend.

The Scarcity Paradigm: Creating Misery to Sell Solutions

This scarcity paradigm pushed to the extreme is the most successful business model today: creating misery to sell the solutions to it.

• Fossil fuel industries power “progress” while driving climate collapse

• War industries sell “peace” through violence

• Pharma sells “health” while maintaining disease

• Big tech sells “knowledge” while fragmenting attention

• Finance sells “security” while extracting from communities

This business-as-usual is directly dependent on maintaining bullshit-as-usual culture—the practice of enacting norms that view destruction as “normal.”

Why This Matters for Regenerative Work

This has profound consequences for those working toward a more sustainable, circular, well-being oriented, and regenerative future.

It is the reason why many projects have limited effects.

These effects get absorbed by the toxic logic of our time, by the toxic “cultural soil” we live on. It’s that soil that decides if our work can take root or not.

You can develop the most brilliant regenerative business model, the most transformative community project, the most healing practice—but if the cultural soil is compacted, monocultured, and poisoned, your work won’t spread. It won’t metabolize. It won’t create the ripples you’re working toward.

Most theories of change focus on:

• What needs to change (systems, policies, behaviors)

• Why it needs to change (data, urgency, moral imperatives)

• How to change it (strategies, tactics, interventions)

But they miss the somatic and cultural substrate through which all change moves. They miss the bodies that will need to feel different, the cultures that will need to move differently, the lands that will need to be related to differently.

Introducing Cœureography: An Embodied Theory of Change

With cœureography, I propose an embodied reactivation of the movement between consciousness, (collective) body, and land.

From French cœur (heart) + choréographie (choreography): the heartful leadership practice of bringing stories of healing and thriving into collectively embodied movements—so that organizations, places, and whole ecosystems break beyond business-as-usual culture.

It’s three things:

1. A theory about communicative practice becoming culture

2. A diagnostic framework for understanding how your work relates to the cultural soil you’re working with—and how to re-attune

3. A practical sequence for strategizing collaborative breakthrough movements that shatter bullshit-as-usual in business and beyond

Why Cœureography Is Relevant Now

1. Most Change Work Fails to Address Cultural Soil

Sustainability initiatives, regenerative projects, and transformation programmes often focus on surface-level interventions while ignoring the deeper soil conditions that determine whether new practices can actually take root.

Example: A company implements a well-being programme while maintaining extractive work cultures. The programme gets metabolized by the toxic soil—it becomes another “initiative” that changes nothing fundamental.

Cœureography asks: What is the actual cultural soil here? What narratives, gestures, and patterns are being ritualized daily? What would it take to refertilize this ground?

2. We Need Theories That Work With the Body, Not Just the Mind

Most organizational change and systems transformation theories are cognitive. They work with mental models, frameworks, and rational processes.

But transformation happens in the body first. New ways of being must be felt before they can be thought. Cultural patterns are carried in posture, gesture, breath, and movement—not just in ideas.

Cœureography integrates:

• Somatic practices (how we embody change)

• Cultural analysis (what soil we’re working with)

• Collective choreography (how we coordinate movement together)

3. Individual Transformation Without Collective Movement Leads to Burnout

The self-help industry places the burden of transformation on individuals: meditate more, optimize yourself, fix your mindset. But individual change without collective movement is exhausting.

Cœureography recognizes: Transformation is choreographic, not heroic. It emerges when the right constellation of complementary roles coordinates together—when the Weaver, the Pollinator, the Guardian, and the Disruptor move in relationship, not when one hero tries to do it all.

4. We’re Facing a Crisis of Embodiment

From Zoom fatigue to AI-mediated relationships to metaverse escapism—we’re systematically disconnecting from embodied, place-based, relational reality.

Cœureography is a practice of re-inhabitation: of our bodies, of our places, of our cultures, of the web of life we never actually left—we just forgot we’re part of it.

The Ecosystem Choreographies Sequence

Here’s how you can apply cœureography to your business, project, or community work:

Phase 1: CULTURAL SOIL ANALYSIS

Guiding Questions:

• What is the cultural soil I’m actually working with?

• How monocultural are the narratives here?

• What toxins perdure (extractive habits, supremacist residues, colonial narratives)?

• How intact are the ancestral mycorrhizae (connections to ancient, place-based, relational ways of knowing)?

• How aerated is the soil (is there room for contradiction, grief, paradox)?

Practice: Diagnose before you intervene. Understand the field conditions before you plant.

Phase 2: CAREER COMPOSTING

Guiding Questions:

• What from my past experience actually nourishes my emerging work?

• What patterns am I releasing?

• What wisdom am I carrying forward?

• What needs to metabolize before something new can emerge?

Practice: Your previous work—even the parts that feel “failed”—is fertile soil. Compost it. Don’t bypass it.

Phase 3: ARCHETYPAL ATTUNEMENT

Guiding Questions:

• What archetypal energies are alive in me (Weaver, Pollinator, Guardian, Trickster, etc.)?

• Which archetype does this situation call for?

• Am I trying to play one role when a different medicine is needed?

• Who holds the complementary archetypes I don’t embody?

Practice: Shapeshift between roles with situational wisdom. Different moments call for different medicine.

Phase 4: RESONANCE MAPPING

Guiding Questions:

• Who actually needs what I bring?

• What fields are ready for the seeds I’m carrying?

• Where is the fertile soil for this work?

• What audiences resonate not just intellectually but somatically with what I offer?

Practice: Map resonance, not just demographics. Find the people who feel the match, not just think it.

Phase 5: OFFER CHOREOGRAPHY

Guiding Questions:

• What is the transformation I’m actually facilitating?

• How do I structure my offer to honor complexity while remaining clear?

• What is the fractal pattern (simple on surface, depth underneath)?

• How do I price for multi-capital value (not just financial)?

Practice: Design offers as invitations into movement, not transactions for services.

Phase 6: CONSTELLATION COORDINATION

Guiding Questions:

• What constellation needs to form for breakthrough to happen in my field?

• Who holds complementary capabilities?

• What choreographic roles are needed (who pioneers, who consolidates, who connects)?

• How do we coordinate without hierarchical control?

Practice: Breakthrough emerges through choreography, not solo heroics. Map the constellation and your role within it.

Phase 7: ECOSYSTEM WEAVING

Guiding Questions:

• What seeds am I planting that grow beyond my individual effort?

• How does my work create conditions for others’ work to thrive?

• What projects weave the ecosystem together (beyond my brand/business)?

• How do I disperse value into the field, not just capture it?

Practice: Design for mycelial multiplication. Your work succeeds when it enables others’ work to succeed.

From Theory to Movement

Cœureography is not just a framework to think about. It’s a practice to embody.

It requires:

• Slowing down enough to sense the cultural soil

• Listening somatically to what your body knows that your mind doesn’t

• Moving with others rather than performing solo

• Tending the field rather than just harvesting from it

This is the work of our time: reactivating the movement between consciousness, body, and land. Not as abstract philosophy, but as lived practice. Not as individual optimization, but as collective choreography.

The question is not whether we can change the world.

The question is: What constellation needs to form—and what role is yours to play—for breakthrough to happen in the field you steward?

An Invitation

If this resonates, I invite you to:

Explore the framework through my Cœureographers programme - a 7-month journey applying these phases to your own work.

Start with diagnosis through the Regenerative Brand Assessment - understand your current cultural soil and what transformation is actually possible.

Join the conversation on LinkedIn where I share ongoing explorations of choreographic leadership, cultural soil analysis, and ecosystem coordination.

The movement between consciousness, body, and land is always happening. The question is whether we’re participating consciously—or being moved by forces we haven’t yet named.

Let’s choreograph together.

Jean-Philippe Steeger is a regenerative communications strategist, leadership consultant, and developer of the Ecological Choreographies methodology. Based between Paris and Transylvania, he works with founders and leaders navigating the gap between transformative vision and embodied movement.

Further Reading:

• Refertilizing the Soil of Modern Culture through Queer Movements - On cultural soil analysis

• From Ego to Eco: The Emergence of Cœureography - My personal journey developing this framework

• Entrepreneurial Pathways Towards Regenerative Futures in Transylvania - Bioregional application of these principles

Oops—I did it again. After being given a hard-to-pronounce first name, and choosing “Perspectivist” for my agency, I’ve created another tongue-twister: cœureography.

The challenge in pronouncing it is intentional. It represents exactly what stands between what could be and what is—in your business, your community, the ecosystem you serve. Between business-as-usual feedback loops and systemic breakthroughs. Between storytold ideas and embodied movements of change. Between heroic scripts and choreographies of kinship.

Cœureography (kɜːriˈoɡrəfi): The heartful leadership practice of bringing stories of healing and thriving into collectively embodied movements—so that organizations, places, and whole ecosystems break beyond business-as-usual culture.

From French cœur (”heart”) + choréographie (”choreography”). Choreography itself derives from Greek khoreia (”dance”) + graphein (”to write”).

This framework emerges from my own journey of questioning theories of change, offering a new approach to collective leadership that weaves together imaginative storytelling, collective role-playing, and attunement to concrete ecosystem dynamics.

The Journey Back to Heart

With cœureographers, a cycle closes for me—reconnecting the passion that drove me toward social justice and ecological democracy in my teenage years, while integrating the wisdom and leadership capabilities I’ve acquired over two decades.

Born with a lineage spanning Western and Eastern Europe, educated as a German citizen, I’ve often felt at the in-betweens of cultures, identities, and places. Perhaps my longing to belong deeply drove me to become a community-builder. Perhaps a feeling of not-enoughness through oppressive systems pushed me to seek transformative approaches.

My path led me to found and lead a youth political movement, study political sciences and sociology, graduate in Public Affairs, work in EU Affairs for nearly a decade in Brussels, co-found Managers for Future, later the Regenerative Communications Collective, my agency Perspectivist, and the re:storied living lab.

Wandering Through Theories of Change

Throughout this journey, I encountered embodied theories of change—frameworks affecting postures, ways of moving through the world, behaviors:

The political equilibrium needs change. We need to invest more in sustainability. We need awareness-raising, agenda-setting, capacity-building. We need to change the narrative. I need to change. The system needs changing.

While these elements seemed relevant, I missed the bigger picture. The threads connecting it all. The alignment between inner and outer for integrity. The attunement of action to ecosystem dynamics for resilience. The movement between story, body, and landscape for effectiveness.

COVID became my threshold moment—a painful realization of entanglement and a clairvoyant wake-up call to live into the truths and callings resonating within me. I needed space to digest and time for something new to emerge. I call this process career composting.

Career Composting: The Ground of Sustainable Livelihood

Beyond idealized pictures of entrepreneurial success and magical formulas, I faced hard truths.

First: My outer business success depends on “what’s inside.” This means shedding layers of social and historical conditioning to create something beyond repetition of the past. Through my work with African Way, I’ve explored this as “somatic decolonization.”

Second: Pioneering something radically different requires stamina, strong support networks, time, and the right space. My place in the world I envision needs the right cultural soil to grow upon—what I call a “mycelial place” of connecting ecosystems. Queer ecology in practice. Forests with mycelial networks grow 10x faster—could this apply to human projects?

Tending the Cultural Soil

This insight led my choreography to begin with understanding the “cultural soil” I actually work with—the hard, poisoned seal of modern culture. Most sustainability and regeneration leaders face this: a culture of disembodiment, dissociation, and dislocation.

This soil needs careful observation—cultural soil analysis—then tending. Breaking through historical illusions and narratives of separation (colonial, consumerist, extractive). Reconnecting to lost roots and the memory living in our bodies. Refertilizing with care, compassion, and creativity.

Observing what local culture needs—the beliefs, stories, embodiments, postures, repetitive movements of organizations and communities—is not neutral. I’m not a disconnected scientist. I’m an active participant. So who am I in this?

Archetypal Embodiment: Who We Are in the Field

“Who can I be when I am with you?” asks Nora Bateson. I’m unique, yet defined by relationships to others. I have roots and dreams, a certain body-mind constitution without being determined by it. Archetypes live through me—some lifelong, some temporary. I’m a mosaic of many, yet whole.

Organizations and communities are microcosms too. Yet I see repeating patterns: recruitment fast-tracked in small networks, then failure. Teams with similar profiles producing groupthink that crashes. Funding flowing to usual suspects, reinforcing the status quo. Embodied practices of business-as-usual.

If regeneration involves inner work, this work is too often delegated to individuals. We crucially lack collective inner work. From deep personal understanding and insight into hidden group dynamics, we can see clearly what’s needed. But also to enact that inner word outside - it’s both inside-out and outside-in.

I call this working with complementary capabilities: skills, personalities, archetypal embodiments creating constellations with what it takes to transform specific places, organizations, or ecosystems. They create conditions for transformative change by each playing a specific role the ecosystem currently needs—like different pioneer plants moving into destroyed fields.

This is when choreography becomes collective and attuned to what’s needed here and now. It’s the fit between ecosystem dynamics and who we are together. Doing the right thing (ecosystem intervention) in the right space (cultural soil) with the right combination of roles (archetypal constellation).

These constellations bring new stories into movement—reimagining their field of work, experimenting with choreographic formations (biomimicry patterns like swarms or hives) to create ecosystemic dynamics responding to local challenges and the needs of cultural and physical soil.

Introducing Cœureographers: An Invitation to Dance

This brings me to my new programme: Cœureographers—a 7-month choreographic leadership journey for regenerative entrepreneurs and purpose-driven founders whose depth isn’t fully landing yet.

The Pattern I’m Seeing

You’ve invested years developing your wisdom and approach. You have depth, experience, something truly valuable to offer. Yet when you try to convey what you do:

• Your messaging feels either too complex or too simple

• The right clients aren’t finding you consistently

• You’re unsure how to package your depth without losing integrity

• You sense a gap between who you’ve become and how you’re showing up

The culture you’re working with is like hard, poisoned soil. It’s difficult to break through—to reach hearts and souls.

“I want to respect the depth of my work. I feel unease with the market demands of what the world is looking for.” — Programme participant research

The Deeper Challenge

It’s not about doing more. It’s about bridging inner transformation and outer attunement.

You’ve tried updating your website, creating content, joining communities, rebranding offers. But something still feels misaligned.

The core feeling: A mismatch between the story you’re embodying and the story you’re telling.

The Transformation

Moving from holding a lot with little in return → Attuning to inner alignment, outer resonance, and ecosystemic opportunities.

From:

• Overcomplicated messaging that doesn’t land

• Inconsistent communications

• Working alone, figuring it out yourself

• Feeling like you lack confidence

• Worrying about your professional future

To:

• Clarity on your unique value and key offer

• Confident, natural communication

• A client system bringing rhythm to acquisition

• Sustainable, aligned livelihood

• Being held by community

The Method: Ecosystem Choreographies

The programme is grounded in my Ecosystem Choreographies methodology, integrating three core principles:

1. Succession Thinking
Match your energy to what your field phase actually needs right now—not what worked last year or might work eventually.

2. Archetypal Attunement
Shapeshift between multiple archetypal energies with situational intelligence. Different moments call for different medicine.

3. Constellation Consciousness
Choreograph breakthroughs through complementary roles working together. Transformation emerges from the whole, not solo heroics.

Every module weaves three dimensions: Inner Work + Outer Expression + Ecosystem Positioning.

The Journey: 8 Modules Over 7 Months

Module 0 – Regenerative Brand Assessment (Entry Point)
Module 1 – Understanding Your Foundation (Career Composting)
Module 2 – Embodying Your Role (Archetypal Intelligence)
Module 3 – Identifying Who Needs You (Ecosystem Value)
Module 4 – Crafting Your Invitation (Brand Storytelling)
Module 5 – Designing Your Offers (Resonant Value Design)
Module 6 – Building Strategic Relationships (Choreographic Moves)
Module 7 – Creating Consistent Presence (Ecosystem Weaving)

What You’ll Leave With

1. Brand Ecology Report – 8-10 page roadmap covering audience mapping, value proposition, brand foundations, validated offers, and next steps.

2. Your Mythologized Story – 2-3 page narrative arc ready for your About page that makes ideal clients say “yes” before booking.

3. Validated Offers – Clearly articulated, confidently priced offer with complete sales copy elements.

4. Ecosystem Positioning – Your “fertile soil” of markets, audiences, and strategic partners mapped with your unique value proposition articulated and tested.

The Container

• Monthly 2-hour live group sessions

• Bi-weekly community check-ins (60 min)

• Two 1:1 strategy sessions with me

• Signal community for ongoing support

• Self-learning resources between sessions

• Community buddy system

Timeline: 7 months (one module per month)
Start: When 10 committed participants join

This Is For You If:

• You’ve done deep inner work and wonder how to share your insights

• You want both pragmatism AND depth

• You’re tired of undervaluing your work

• You’re ready to stop doing this alone

• You’re willing to invest 7 months in your leadership

This Is NOT For You If:

• You want quick formulas

• You’re not willing to do inner work alongside strategy

• You expect to be told exactly what to do

Ready to Bridge Your Depth With Your Expression?

I’ve walked this path myself—from EU Affairs advocating for Sustainable Leadership to composting my career and rebuilding from the ground up. I’ve trained hundreds of managers across the EU, coached regenerative founders through this exact transition, and developed the Ecological Choreographies methodology from years of witnessing what works and what doesn’t.

Start without commitment:
Book your Regenerative Brand Assessment (Module 0 of the programme: €300, fully credited toward programme fee)
→ Self-assessment questionnaire
→ Brand Ecology Report
→ 1-hour coaching on your priorities

Or schedule a free 33-minute exploration call to see if this is right for you.

With cœureographers, I invite you to dance—from the heart intelligence connecting us to what matters in the places, narratives, and roles we inhabit.

Jean-Philippe Steeger
Founder, Writer, Coach & Consultant
jp@perspectivist.net
www.perspectivist.net

Bring your story into movement—so that your work breaks through business-as-usual.

With this new article series, we’re exploring the ecological, social, and economic conditions for making Transylvania a lighthouse bioregion in Europe.

What Place Does Your Work Have in the Future of Your Region?

There is a particular feeling that comes over you when you arrive in Transylvania, arguably by train, which has been my favorite. Something is relaxing and something ancient remembered in your body. You open up to what has grown so unfamiliar: wilderness, enchantment, mystery, deep connection with something almost unnamable. It may happen when you reach the mountain portals to Transylvanian forests, some of the last primal forest areas in Europe.

Coming home to wilderness

Like in Zarnesti, at the gateway to Piatra Cranului national park, at Co-bana ecoliving and coworking hub, where Regenerative Futures Transylvania has started. The Transylvanian scenery is protected by the Carpathian mountian range, holding sheep herds grazing on unfenced hillsides, mass tourism Dracula castle, industrial hubs in urban centres, old women with a headscarf working the land, and smells of hay and pine and something older than memory.

Those who have lived most of their lives in urban centres, in front of screens and spreadsheets and strategy decks, the encounter is disorienting—not because Transylvania is backward, but because it is abundant in ways the modern economy has largely forgotten how to value. Old-growth forests. Wildflower meadows hosting pollinators that have vanished from most of Europe. Agricultural landscapes tended by families for generations. Myths and crafts and seasonal rituals still alive in mountain villages.

Transylvania beyond Dracula and scarcity narratives

And yet the economic story being told about this place is, too often, one of lack. Brain drain. Low wages. Dependence on foreign investment. Young people leaving for the UK or Germany in search of a future that somehow isn’t here.

This article is an invitation to read the landscape differently. Not with nostalgia for a past that cannot be retrieved, but with the fresh eyes of someone seeing, perhaps for the first time, what is actually here—and what it might become if we dared to build from it rather than despite it.

That is, in essence, what regenerative entrepreneurship means. And Transylvania may be one of the best places in Europe to practice it.

Regenerative, Bioregional: A New Vocabulary for Old Wisdom

Let’s be honest: the words “regenerative” and “bioregional” can sound abstract, even fashionable. If you’ve encountered them at a sustainability conference or in a startup pitch deck, you might reasonably be skeptical.

But look more carefully, and you’ll find that what these words describe is something that Transylvanian communities have practiced—in fragments, imperfectly, but genuinely—for centuries.

Regenerative doesn’t mean “sustainable” in the sense of “maintaining the current equilibrium.” It means actively restoring vitality—to soil, to ecosystems, to communities, to people. A regenerative farm doesn’t just avoid depleting the land; it builds fertility year after year. A regenerative business doesn’t just minimize its footprint; it creates conditions for the communities and ecosystems it touches to thrive.

In Transylvanian villages, the hay meadows that today host some of Europe’s richest wildflower communities¹ were not preserved by conservation policy. They were maintained because farmers understood, through generations of observation, that cutting at the right time in the right way kept the meadow productive and alive. The meadow gave; the farmer gave back. That reciprocity is regeneration—it just didn’t have a name.

Bioregional refers to organizing economic life around the natural, geological, and cultural boundaries of a living place, rather than administrative or corporate borders. A bioregional economy sources materials locally where possible, keeps economic value circulating within the community, and designs livelihoods around the actual ecology and culture of where it sits. In practice, this looks like traditional ecoconstruction with regional materials, farm to fork distribution channels, and experiment-based innovation based on the ecological, economic, and social needs of the region.

Neither of these ideas is new. What’s new is the urgency with which they’re being rediscovered—and the evidence base, from ecology to economics, showing why they matter more than ever.

A Land That Remembers: Transylvanian History as Resource

To understand Transylvania’s regenerative potential, just like looking at the fruit a tree can bare, we need to look at the roots, at the natural and cultural history of the region—not as a catalogue of suffering, but as evidence of extraordinary resilience.

The archaeological record suggests that Bronze Age cultures in this region developed sophisticated astronomical knowledge, metalworking, and trade networks alongside spiritual practices deeply attuned to seasonal cycles.² The Dacians, whose kingdom had its capital at Sarmizegetusa Regia in the Orăștie Mountains, built temples aligned with solar and lunar cycles, suggesting a civilization that organized time itself around the rhythms of the natural world.³

What followed was layer upon layer of influence: Roman colonization (which gave Transylvania and Romania its name), Hungarian settlement, (germanic) Saxon founding of autonomous towns, becoming a Ottoman vessle state, Austro-Hungarian province administration, and finally communist rule under Ceaușescu until 1989. Each wave brought new cultural registers, new languages, new ways of building and cooking and worshipping. Rather than erasing what came before, these layers folded together into something uniquely complex: a region where Romanian, Hungarian, Romani, and German Saxon traditions still coexist, often in the same village, sometimes in the same family.

The Wisdom of the Mountains: Resisting through Traditional Crafts and Living Tradition

What survived in the mountains. There is a pattern visible across this history: whenever political upheaval disrupted the plains, something ancient persisted in the Carpathian highlands. Pagan ceremonies continued alongside Christianity—the Bear Dance (Dansul Ursului) in villages like Comănești still enacts an ancient relationship with the bear as forest guardian. Or Sânziene, the midsummer celebration of the fairies that protect crops and heal illness.⁴ Traditional ecoconstruction methods—timber framing, lime plaster, thatched or wooden-shingled roofs—survived not as nostalgia but as practical knowledge passed between craftspeople.

This persistence matters economically. It means that Transylvania still holds, in living form, a knowledge base that much of Western Europe has lost: how to build with local materials, how to cultivate biodiversity, how to organize community life around seasonal rhythms, how to make things by hand that last.

The communist inheritance. Ceaușescu’s collectivization of agriculture in the 1950s–60s created large-scale monocultures that devastated soil health and severed the relationship between farmers and specific pieces of land. The chaotic privatization of the early 1990s broke these collective farms into millions of small parcels—roughly three million family farms today, representing more than 50% of all small-scale farms in the EU.⁵ This fragmentation has been ecologically beneficial in some respects (biodiversity has partially recovered on smallholdings), but economically challenging: small farmers lack the scale, infrastructure, and market access to compete.

The cultural inheritance of communism is subtler but equally significant: a deep distrust of collective organizing, a reflexive turn toward individual solutions, consumerist ideals, and an often exhausted relationship with institutional promises. Any regenerative initiative in Transylvania must reckon honestly with this inheritance—it shapes how people cooperate, what they trust, and what they dare to imagine.

The Economic Reality: Seeing Both Shadows and Light

As a region of Romania, Transylvania today is an economy in complex transition. Understanding both its constraints and its overlooked assets is the starting point for regenerative entrepreneurship.

The structural picture. Romania has one of the EU’s lowest corporate tax rates at 16%⁶, which has attracted significant foreign direct investment—approximately $12 billion in 2022.⁷ Major Western European corporations including Kaufland (retail, with over 13,000 employees, making it one of Romania’s largest private employers⁸), Bosch, and NTT Data have established significant operations here, drawn by a highly educated workforce being offered relatively (EU) low wages.

Cluj-Napoca, in Transylvania, has earned comparison to Silicon Valley as a hub for technology and innovation—home to an IT startup ecosystem attracting outsourcing operations of global companies. Brașov and Sibiu anchor manufacturing. Bucharest, two hours south of Transylvania, concentrates financial and administrative functions.

Yet this economic success story has a shadow side. Romania has among the highest rates of net emigration in the EU⁹—a brain drain that has left some rural areas with aging populations and skills gaps that constrain regional development. Salaries, while rising, still lag significantly behind Western European comparators while inflation has pushed living costs toward parity in many categories.¹⁰ The agricultural sector employs roughly 26% of the workforce but generates less than 5% of GDP¹¹—a ratio that reflects not the sector’s potential but the fragmented, undercapitalized, market-disconnected condition in which most farming currently exists.

The overlooked assets.

Transylvania holds some of the highest biodiversity in Europe. A 2023 assessment by the Alpa Land foundation notes that the region’s “mix of pristine forests, flower-rich meadows, karst landscapes, and wetlands” and its “traditional small-scale agricultural practices, including hay meadows and pastures, have created a cultural landscape that provides a haven for numerous plant and animal species... preserving ecosystems that are now rare across much of Europe.”¹³

Romania is energy-independent relative to most EU countries, with a domestic energy mix that includes coal and gas (as key source of GHG emissions with some of the most polluting plants of Europe), hydropower (disturbing aquatic life), nuclear (with an aging and costly infrastructure), and growing renewables (with dependency on import), resulting in import dependency of approximately 28% against an EU average of 57%.¹⁴

The UNESCO World Heritage Sites in and around Transylvania—including Sighișoara citadel and the fortified Saxon churches of the Transylvanian villages—represent cultural assets of international significance. The Via Transilvanica, a 1,400-kilometer hiking route through the heart of Transylvania, was recently recognized among the world’s most beautiful long-distance trails.¹⁵

And then there is the living knowledge base: the craftspeople still weaving in traditional patterns, the farmers still practicing haymaking methods that support wildflower meadows, the herbalists still working with Carpathian plant medicines, the builders still using lime and timber in ways that have kept Romanian village houses standing for two centuries.

These are not museum pieces. They are active, living capabilities—and they are the foundation on which a regenerative economy can be built.

What Regenerative Entrepreneurship Actually Looks Like

Regenerative entrepreneurship is sometimes dismissed as idealism wearing a business suit. The evidence suggests otherwise.

The core proposition is straightforward: businesses that strengthen the ecosystems—natural, social, cultural—that they depend on are more resilient, more differentiated, and increasingly more attractive to customers, investors, and talent than businesses that simply extract from them. This isn’t just ethics; it’s strategy.

A regenerative framework that has gained a lot of traction in practice is the 8 Forms of Capital developed by Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua,¹⁶ which extends the narrow definition of “capital” beyond financial assets to include: social capital (relationships and trust), natural capital (ecosystems and resources), cultural capital (traditions, knowledge, and shared meaning), experiential capital (skills and learning), intellectual capital (ideas and frameworks), and several others. Regenerative businesses are those that build across multiple forms of capital simultaneously—so that success in financial terms comes with rather than at the cost of success in social, natural, and cultural terms.

In Transylvania, this framework illuminates possibilities that a purely financial analysis would miss:

A traditional shepherd practicing transhumance (seasonal migration with flocks) is simultaneously: maintaining wildflower meadows (natural capital), preserving a cultural practice (cultural capital), building relationships across multiple communities (social capital), and developing rare ecological knowledge (experiential capital). None of this appears in GDP. All of it has real economic value if the right business model is built around it—through tourism, through premium products, through carbon and biodiversity credits, through educational programmes for urban visitors hungry to reconnect with land.

A ceramicist working in the Horezu tradition¹⁷ (a UNESCO-recognized craft) holds embodied knowledge that took generations to develop and cannot be replicated by industrial production. The limitation of most traditional craft businesses is not the quality of the product but the absence of marketing, distribution, and business development support. Connect that knowledge to contemporary design sensibilities and European markets for sustainable, durable, handmade goods, and the economics shift dramatically.

A technology developer working on platforms for local food systems can address one of Transylvania’s core agricultural problems—fragmented supply chains that force local products to travel through distant processing facilities before returning to regional shelves—with tools that already exist elsewhere and simply need to be adapted and deployed. Companies like CO2Angels (co2angels.com) are pioneering regenerative finance tools that could help Transylvanian farmers access carbon and biodiversity markets.

In each case, the regenerative opportunity lies not in inventing something new from scratch but in reconnecting what has been disconnected: craft knowledge to contemporary markets; agricultural abundance to regional consumers and premium products for export (like Italy); ecological heritage to economic value; ancient wisdom to modern frameworks.

The Inner, Outer, and Ecosystemic Dimensions of Regeneration

One of the places where regenerative entrepreneurship diverges most sharply from conventional business thinking is in its insistence that outer change is inseparable from inner transformation.

The observation: the same extractive logic that depletes soil and fragments communities also depletes people. The burnout epidemic among purpose-driven entrepreneurs is, at least in part, a consequence of trying to build regenerative businesses using tools and mindsets shaped by the system they’re trying to change.

The inner dimension of regenerative entrepreneurship involves asking: What is my relationship to this place? Not as a resource to develop, but as a living system I am part of. What do I bring? And equally: What do I need to let go of? The entrepreneur who arrives in Transylvania from a European city carrying the assumption that “underdevelopment” is the problem and external expertise is the solution will miss most of what matters. The one who arrives as a learner—curious about what these communities already know—will find a different kind of opportunity.

Contributing to something larger beyond homogenization

This posture of listening and learning is, incidentally, one of Transylvania’s oldest stories. The myths of the region—particularly the Ielele, the forest spirits who can bestow blessings or curses depending on how you approach them—consistently model a relationship with wildness and wisdom that requires respect, not control. You don’t extract from the Ielele; you earn their favor. The metaphor translates directly to regenerative business: you don’t extract from a bioregion; you earn its trust through reciprocal contribution.

The outer dimension is about the concrete structures of economic life: how businesses are financed, how supply chains are organized, how value is distributed, how decisions are made. Regenerative businesses tend toward: local ownership, trust-building leadership, and co-governance rather than control; closed-loop supply chains that keep materials and value circulating locally; multi-stakeholder models that share benefit with communities and ecosystems; and impact measurement that accounts for all forms of capital, not just financial return.

The place of entrepreneurship: playing our role in the ecosystem

The ecosystemic dimension is about recognizing that no individual business, however regenerative, can transform a regional economy alone. What’s needed is a constellation of aligned actors—farmers and technologists, artisans and marketers, tourism operators and conservationists—working in coordinated ways on shared priorities. This is what RFT’s Consortium model attempts to build: not just a collection of regenerative businesses, but an ecosystem in which each element strengthens the others.

Four Pillars: Where the Opportunities Actually Are

With this framing in place, at Regenerative Futures Transylvania, in conversation with founders and residents from Transylvania, we have identified four specific opportunity areas in Transylvania emerge with particular clarity.

1. Agriculture and the Bioregional Food System

With hundred thousands of family farms and one of the EU’s richest agricultural biodiversities, Transylvania has the raw ingredients for a thriving regional food system—one built on agroecological methods, short supply chains, and the kind of provenance stories that premium food markets increasingly demand. The constraints are real: fragmented land holdings, aging farming populations, inadequate processing and cold chain infrastructure, and market access gaps that force local products into supermarket-dominated commodity channels where they compete on price alone.

The opportunities lie in: developing cooperative infrastructure for processing and distribution; connecting farmers directly to urban consumers through community-supported agriculture and farm-to-fork and farm-to-restaurant programmes; building the market for agroecologically produced, certified regenerative organic products in EU markets; and accessing the growing pool of EU and private funding for agroecological transition. Projects like Ermitaj Malin (ermitajmalin.com) are already demonstrating that viable regenerative farm businesses are possible in this context.

2. Regenerative and Community-Based Tourism

Transylvania’s tourism economy is chronically undervalued and misdirected—concentrated on a few iconic sites (with the Dracula cliché still dominant internationally) while the deeper, more authentic, and ultimately more valuable offer remains largely invisible. The Via Transilvanica demonstrates the appetite: thousands of hikers from across Europe and the region now walk a route that passes through living villages, working farms, ancient forests, and Saxon heritage towns—and the communities along the route are only beginning to understand how to capture the economic value of what they have.

Regenerative tourism goes beyond “ecotourism” to actively weave economic benefit into the fabric of communities rather than skimming off a surface-level hospitality income. It means: accommodation in authentic village houses rather than generic hotels; meals featuring local, seasonal, traditionally prepared food; experiences that transfer skills and knowledge rather than simply consuming scenery; and collaborative models and offers in which communities are co-designers and co-beneficiaries rather than passive hosts.

3. Traditional Crafts and the Bioeconomy

The intersection of Transylvania’s living craft traditions and the fast-growing market for sustainable, handmade, provenance-rich products represents one of the most underexploited opportunities in the region. Natural cosmetics from mountain plants, sustainable textiles using traditional dyes and weaving techniques with old weavers teaching yound ones, handmade ceramics with UNESCO-recognized heritage, eco-construction using local timber and lime—each of these sectors has global market tailwinds and locally rooted supply chains that industrial competitors cannot replicate.

Take Hodaia, a personal care and cosmetics brand with 100% organic and bioregionally sourced products. It’s founder Raluca, who I had the pleasure to coach on her brand storytelling, has inherited generations of feminine plant-medicine wisdom. A heritage, she recognized, lives in the products, in the story, in the land itself.

The constraint, again, is not the quality of what exists but the business infrastructure around it: design translation for contemporary markets, e-commerce and distribution, brand storytelling, and the kind of business development support that craftspeople—often working alone, without business training—rarely have access to.

4. Technology in Service of Regeneration

Romania’s IT sector—Cluj-Napoca alone has produced companies of international significance in cybersecurity, fintech, and software development—represents a capability that is currently largely exported to serve global companies rather than deployed in service of the regional economy. The question RFT wants to raise is: What if Romanian technology talent turned its attention to the regenerative challenges of its own bioregion?

The use cases are specific and tractable: platforms for connecting local producers directly with consumers and restaurants; tools for managing community-based tourism cooperatives; digital infrastructure for biodiversity monitoring and carbon credit verification; investment platforms that channel diaspora capital back into regional regenerative businesses; AI-assisted farm management tools designed for small-scale agroecological operations. These are not hypothetical—they are live development opportunities for technology entrepreneurs who want to root their work in something that matters.

Seeing the Abundance: A Different Story About Transylvania

The dominant economic narrative about Transylvania is one of deficit: insufficient capital, insufficient infrastructure, insufficient market access, insufficient institutional capacity. That narrative is not wrong. But it is incomplete in ways that have real consequences—because it shapes what entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers look for, and therefore what they find.

The alternative narrative—which this article has tried to sketch—begins from what Michelle Holliday calls “thrivability” – conditions conducive to vitality and health: extraordinary natural capital, a living cultural knowledge base, remarkable human resilience, a strategic position within the EU, and a global moment in which exactly the kinds of resilience value that Transylvania holds are becoming more, not less, sought after.

Regenerative entrepreneurship begins with this shift in perception. Before the business model, before the value chain analysis, before the funding application—there is the act of seeing what is already here. It’s what I call “cultural soil analysis” in my theory of change.

The meadow that has been maintained for five hundred years. The grandmother who still knows which plants treat which ailments. The craftsman who learned from his father how to read the grain of local oak. The farmer who rotates crops in patterns that industrial agronomists are now rediscovering as “innovations.”

These are not romantic footnotes to a modernizing economy. They are the foundation on which a genuinely distinctive and genuinely resilient regional economy can be built.

Regenerative Tracks: An Invitation to Build Together

Regenerative Futures Transylvania launched Regenerative Tracks as a practical response to a clear need: entrepreneurs in Transylvania and entrepreneurs who want to deeply feel bioregionalism in their body and hearts, who sense the opportunity but lack the frameworks, the connections, and the community to pursue it with confidence.

The Regenerative Business & Entrepreneurship programme has three rhythms of engagement (one week, one month, three months), all hosted at Cobana in Zărnești at the gateway to Piatra Craiului National Park.

What makes it different from a conventional business accelerator is precisely the integration of inner, outer, and ecosystemic dimensions described in this article: yes, you’ll work on your business model and your value proposition and your market access—but you’ll do it while walking primary forests, meeting regional craftspeople and farmers, exploring Transylvanian myths as frameworks for navigating complexity, and becoming part of a constellation of aligned actors who are, together, beginning to build something that none of them could build alone.

The question this programme begins with is the one that opened this article: What place does your work have in the future of your region?

The Carpathians, Europe’s oldest mountains, are waiting for your answer.

References and Notes

¹ Pärtel, M., et al. (2005). “Species richness in temperate grasslands: why are there so many species in small areas?” Ecological Research, 20(5), 505–512. For Transylvania specifically, see also the work of Adler, P.B. et al. on European grassland biodiversity.

² Gimbutas, M. (1989). The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row. See also Gimbutas, M. (1991). The Civilization of the Goddess. For the revisionist and supporting DNA evidence, see Haak, W. et al. (2015). “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe.” Nature, 522, 207–211.

³ For Sarmizegetusa Regia and Dacian astronomical knowledge, see Florea, G. (2011). Dava et oppidum: débuts de la génèse urbaine en Europe celtique et dans le monde geto-dace. Cluj-Napoca: Mega.

⁴ For ethnographic documentation of Bear Dance and Sânziene in Transylvania, see Kligman, G. (1981). Căluș: Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; also Marian, S.F. (1994). Sărbătorile la Români [Romanian Holidays]. Bucharest: Fundația Culturală Română.

⁵ European Commission (2020). Agricultural Census 2020 - Romania. Eurostat. Romania’s 3.1 million farms represent approximately 33% of all EU farms, with the vast majority under 5 hectares.

⁶ PricewaterhouseCoopers (2023). Worldwide Tax Summaries: Romania. pwc.com/taxsummaries.

⁷ Romanian National Bank / Banca Națională a României (2023). Foreign Direct Investment in Romania 2022. bnr.ro. [Note: verify exact figure against BNR annual report].

⁸ Ziarul Financiar (2023). “Top 100 cele mai mari companii după numărul de angajați” [Top 100 companies by number of employees]. [Verify Kaufland employee count against 2023 data.]

⁹ Eurostat (2023). Population and Demographic Statistics. Net migration data, Romania. ec.europa.eu/eurostat.

¹⁰ Eurostat (2023). Price Level Indices. Romania’s price level for consumer goods and services has risen to approximately 70% of the EU average, while average wages remain at approximately 40–45% of the EU average. [Verify with latest Eurostat data.]

¹¹ World Bank (2023). Romania Agricultural Overview. worldbank.org. Romania’s agricultural employment as percentage of total employment; GDP contribution from the World Bank national accounts data.

¹² Romanian National Institute of Statistics / Institutul Național de Statistică (2023). Tourism Statistics. insse.ro.

¹³ Alpa Land Foundation (2023). “Biodiversity in Transylvania.” alpa.land/idea-accelerator-pilot-farm-project/

¹⁴ Eurostat (2022). Energy Dependence Rate by Country. Romania: approximately 28%; EU average: approximately 57%. ec.europa.eu/eurostat/energy-statistics.

¹⁵ Via Transilvanica received the EDEN (European Destinations of Excellence) designation and was featured in international travel media including Lonely Planet and National Geographic Traveller. See viatransilvanica.com.

¹⁶ Roland, E. & Landua, G. (2011). Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-Capital Abundance. appleseedpermaculture.com. See also Fullerton, J. (2015). Regenerative Capitalism. Capital Institute.

¹⁷ Horezu ceramics (Ceramica de Horezu) were inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2012. See ich.unesco.org.

Additional recommended reading:

• Mang, P. & Reed, B. (2012). “Regenerative development and design.” Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology.

• Lovins, H. et al. (2018). A Finer Future: Creating an Economy in Service to Life. New Society Publishers.

• Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Chelsea Green.

• Wilson, E.O. (2016). Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. Liveright.

Jean-Philippe Steeger is co-founder of Regenerative Futures Transylvania and founder of the Perspectivist Agency and the re:storied living lab. He works with entrepreneurs and leaders at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern strategy. He can be reached at jp@perspectivist.net.

Yet the value you offer doesn’t fully circulate. The ecosystems around you feel... stagnant.

You’ve done the inner work — the retreats, the leadership courses, the somatic practices. You can feel your own transformation. But the culture, clients, or stakeholders around you... don’t move with you.

Something remains siloed, disconnected in your ecosystem.

This is the gap most leadership and entrepreneurship development programs fail to address. They focus on building your skills, refining your strategy, improving your messaging. But they miss something fundamental:

Transformation doesn’t happen through individual development alone. It happens by attuning to the roles needed to choreograph ecological breakthroughs.

THE LIMITS OF CURRENT LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Traditional entrepreneurship and leadership programs operate on a false premise: that if you become more skilled, more strategic, more articulate, success will follow.

They teach you to:

• Craft a compelling vision

• Develop a unique value proposition

• Build systems and processes

• Scale your impact

But they rarely ask the deeper questions:

What is the cultural soil you’re working in?
Which archetypal roles does your ecosystem actually need?
How do complementary energies need to form alliances to enable breakthroughs?

Most programs assume a static, universal model of leadership. They ignore context, place, and the subtle dynamics of how transformation actually moves through living systems.

The result? Regenerative founders and leaders who are brilliant, committed, and deeply skilled — yet unable to activate the energy and movement their work requires.

WHAT PIONEER SPECIES TEACH US

In ecology, pioneer species are the first organisms to (re)enliven barren or disturbed environments. They arrive in harsh, inhospitable terrain — volcanic rock, burned forests, abandoned industrial sites — and begin the work of transformation.

Think of lichens on bare stone. Mosses in the cracks. Fireweed after forest fires. These organisms don’t wait for perfect conditions. They work with what’s there.

Pioneer species have three essential qualities:

1. They read the terrain
Pioneer species sense what the (cultural) soil can support. They don’t try to impose a vision. They attune to what’s possible in this specific place, at this specific moment of succession.

2. They prepare the ground for others
Pioneers don’t create stable ecosystems alone. They break down rock into soil. They fix nitrogen. They create shade and retain moisture. They make it possible for other species to follow.

3. They work in complementary constellations
Pioneer communities are diverse. Lichens, mosses, grasses, shrubs — each playing a different role. The breakthrough happens not through one species dominating, but through multiple energies working in relationship.

This is ecological succession — the process by which ecosystems develop over time through stages, each preparing conditions for the next.

As a regenerative founder or leader, you are a probably a pioneer species - embodying qualities of the pioneer archetype.

You may be working in cultural deserts. Grey landscapes of modernity. Places where extractive patterns have depleted the soil. Where communities are fragmented. Where old stories no longer nourish.

But here’s the question many leadership programs don’t attune to:

What phase of ecological succession is your field in? And what does that phase actually need?

THE IN-BETWEEN: WHERE REGENERATIVE VALUE LIVES

In my Resonance Compass framework, I explore why truly transformative work often remains invisible — unable to find traction in the ecosystem it’s trying to serve.

Regenerative value doesn’t live in the abstract. It exists at the in-between:

• Between your vision and the cultural soil that can receive it

• Between your offering and the audiences who can recognize it

• Between your presence and the archetypal roles the field is calling for

• Between your individual work and the complementary constellation needed for breakthrough

This is why so many regenerative founders feel unreceived. Their value proposition is placeless — disconnected from the specific terrain they’re working in.

Traditional value propositions ask: What problem do you solve? For whom?

Regenerative value propositions ask:

What field is the value you provide rooted in?
How does your work refertilize the cultural soil you work with?
Which greater potential, rooted in place and history, do you work to activate through synergies?
What is the unique contribution, value proposition, that will enrich the ecosystem you are (co-)stewarding?

This requires a fundamentally different approach than traditional marketing and business development. Weaving rather than positioning.

Weaving your work into the living fabric of place, culture, and ecosystem.

WHY WE NEED CHOREOGRAPHY

Here’s what I’ve observed working with regenerative founders and leaders:

Story alone doesn’t move systems.
You can craft the most compelling narrative, but if it’s disconnected from the cultural soil, it won’t take root.

Strategy alone doesn’t create flow.
You can design brilliant business models, but if they don’t attune to what the ecosystem actually needs, they remain theoretical.

Embodiment alone doesn’t activate constellations.
You can do deep inner work, but if you’re the only one holding that energy, transformation stays personal rather than systemic.

What moves systems is choreography.

Choreography is when:

• Story meets cultural soil

• Vision meets situational attunement

• Embodied roles meet ecosystem design

• Personal transformation meets collective movement

It’s when your inner essence meets the outer system with alignment, attunement, and embodied confidence — and resonance becomes viral.

This is what I mean by ecological leadership choreography:

Not fitting into a role, but sensing what role the constellation needs and shapeshifting into the archetypal energy that serves the field’s transformation.

EXERCISES: SENSING YOUR ECOSYSTEM

Before you can choreograph breakthrough, you need to read the terrain. Here are three practices to begin:

EXERCISE 1: Cultural Soil Analysis

Take a current project, offering, or initiative. Ask:

• What narratives already exist in this field? (What stories do people tell about the problem?)

• What’s the succession phase? (Is this pioneering new ground? Stewarding established patterns? Composting what’s dying?)

• What’s breaking down? What’s trying to emerge?

• Where is energy flowing? Where is it blocked or siloed?

Write for 10 minutes without editing. You’re not looking for answers — you’re sensing patterns.

EXERCISE 2: Archetypal Inventory

Consider the key roles in your ecosystem (yourself, team members, collaborators, clients, funders), informed by ecological, mythological, and other archetypes. For each, ask:

• What archetypal energy do they embody? (The Weaver? The Pioneer? The Guardian? The Pollinator? The Trickster?)

• What gifts does this archetype bring?

• What’s the shadow side when this energy is overexpressed?

• Which archetypal energies are missing in this constellation?

Notice: Are you trying to play all the roles yourself? Are certain energies dominating while others are absent?

EXERCISE 3: The In-Between

Map the gaps between:

• The vision you hold ↔ The cultural soil it’s trying to root in

• The value you offer ↔ The language your audience actually uses

• The role you embody ↔ The role your ecosystem is calling for

• Your solo work ↔ The complementary constellation needed for breakthrough

Where are the largest gaps? What would it take to bridge them?

FROM STAGNATION TO RESONANCE

The grey deserts of modernity are real. Vampirization. Zombification. Mass movements into the abyss.

As a pioneer, you can’t ignore these destructive spirits haunting the places, communities, and clients you work with.

But you also can’t transform the field alone.

You need allies. Friends. Clients. Funders. Complementary constellations of archetypal roles capable of transformation together.

That’s the leadership choreography you’re stewarding — when personal, collective, and ecosystemic roles confluence.

And break through.

With that choreography, you’re not just pioneering a business or building a movement. You’re choreographing a dance across liminal landscapes — from heartspace, so others can find their role, their place, their grounded livelihood.

PIONEER RHIZOMES: A LIVING LAB FOR CHOREOGRAPHY

This is the work I’ve gathered into Pioneer Rhizomes — a 7-module developmental journey for regenerative founders and leaders.

It’s not a traditional program. It’s a living lab where we explore:

Cultural Soil Analysis — Reading the succession phase and invisible patterns in your field
Resonance Compass — Diagnosing what your ecosystem truly needs (not just what you want to offer)
Archetypal Embodiment — Shapeshifting into the roles your field is calling for
Offer Design — Weaving your value into the in-between where it can take root
Ecosystem Choreography — Constellating complementary energies for breakthrough
Community Support — A cohort of pioneers who understand this work

We begin when 10 committed participants have gathered — creating the right conditions for deep transformation.

Learn more: www.perspectivist.net/pioneer

EXPERIENCE THE METHOD: TASTER WORKSHOP

Before committing to the full journey, I invite you to a taster workshop where you can experience the choreographic approach firsthand.

Developing Situational Intelligence: Shape-Shifting into the Roles of Transformation

In this 2-hour immersive session, we’ll work with:

• Cultural soil diagnosis (reading what’s blocking transformation)

• Regenerative archetypes (which energies you embody, which are missing)

• Choreographic design (constellating roles for breakthrough)

• Ecological attunement (sensing what wants to emerge)

Investment: €40
Register: https://luma.com/hjg449vf

Or book a free 30-minute exploration call to discuss your journey:
https://topmate.io/jpsteeger/1840648

These times need different stories, different postures, different movements.

Not the hero’s journey. Not the ego’s quest.
But a collective homecoming — toward bioregional, regenerative, peaceful economies where we can all thrive.

As pioneer species, we have a specific role to play. Not to dominate. Not to do it alone.

But to read the terrain. Prepare the ground. Constellation with others.

Let’s choreograph breakthroughs together.

This is the year we make our work work.

Welcome to 2026.
Year of the Fire Horse.

With heart-felt hope,

Jean-Philippe

***

P.S. — From March to June, I’ll be based in Transylvania at Co-bana, in Romania, joining Regenerative Futures Transylvania — a bioregional accelerator in the Carpathian mountains. If you’re working on regenerative projects in Central/Eastern Europe or curious about place-based transformation, let’s connect.