Nurturing the Underlayer of Systems Transformation Work | Essay 2: Building the Connective Tissue

A decade ago, the discourse around the polycrisis and the metacrisis was marginal. It is now widely present, in many serious institutional conversations, on social media, in live conversations. Something is shifting here, in the discourse at least.

What has not shifted at the same pace is what we do about it, on the ground and in the board rooms. What we continue to observe is disconnected initiatives that fail to connect meaningfully with work happening at other levels or in adjacent domains. There are local initiatives doing genuinely relational work with no clear pathway to influence the broader conditions that shape them. There are global forums with sophisticated analysis but limited embodied, applied, practical traction. Climate here, poverty there, and conflict in the next room over.

This does not come out of nowhere. Fragmentation stems from deeply ingrained systems dynamics that go back centuries, from ‘command and control’ to ‘divide and conquer’, and more. It lives not just in what we do, but how we perceive.

Noticing what is missing

A project about energy sufficiency that never mentions mining, land rights, or the welfare of affected communities, is not simply incomplete. It reveals something about the underlying frame held by those running it: what counts and what doesn’t. A regenerative agriculture initiative that hardly mentions land ownership, or a social innovation programme that hardly mentions power and doesn’t dare to work through tender, sensitive and highly charged terrain. Both tell something important about the frame through which those projects are seen. Those omissions speak far more loudly than any claim about systemic reach.

Tending to what we call the underlayer, or the relational web, begins by noticing those omissions. It’s building a habit of asking not just ‘what is this project aiming to achieve’ but also ‘what is not mentioned that should be in the brief ?’ ‘What gets marginalised here?’ ‘What has been edited out?’ It’s building a visceral sense of relationships, so that it becomes near-impossible to ‘just not think’ about the broader system.

When enough people start asking the same questions, they become part of a new mental infrastructure. We call this building the connective tissue.

Beyond cognitive knowing

This work calls for collective and individual retraining, but also requires challenging default epistemological models, particularly those that continue to prevail in academia. If we are to experience this visceral sense of relationality, ‘feel’ the pain that an intervention somewhere causes elsewhere, or cultivate instant reactions to key dimensions being edited out, we cannot rely on purely cognitive modes of thinking. We need to embrace wider ways of knowing.

In turn, this means we need settings where those wider ways of knowing are embraced as legitimate, and where they’re put at play to connect the dots. In other words, we need to develop a connective tissue through wider ways of knowing that, in turn, will reinforce our capacity to ‘know’ things differently.

When everything becomes connected

We should make it clear that what we’re proposing here is nothing like the benign addition of new tools to our existing mental toolbox. It’s an existential matter. When we give close attention to the connective tissue, when we start to perceive everything as interdependent, we must be ready to witness and experience a paradigm shift within ourselves. If we pay serious attention to the underlayer, then it’s no longer possible to say ‘the distant past is of no relevance to my actions and your actions ’ or ‘this thing over there is not my problem’, or ‘what I do doesn’t really matter in the end’. If everything connects, and if we feel this viscerally, then it becomes impossible to act as if things were separate, or indifferent. It comes with a weight. Hence the pressing need for collective structures to hold us as we go through this shift: it’s a lot to bear alone.

Designing for synergy

Concretely, one important channel to build this connective tissue is through initiatives that are natively cross-sectoral, and whose explicit purpose is to activate synergies between people, or stimulate efforts that would not otherwise come together. We use the word synergy, rather than system, to underline the dynamic aspect of this approach. Again, it’s not about ‘seeing the whole’ from some detached vantage point, but activating a sort of inner source of creativity and tapping into dormant potential. It’s about stimulating conditions where new relationships become perceptible or activated, so that new things become possible, and start happening. So that we feel compelled to feel, sense and act differently.

These initiatives exist, but they are rare and chronically underfunded. Most existing spaces are either too broad for real encounter or too narrow for genuine cross-pollination. The gap is not in the desire to connect. It is in the design of spaces adequate to the kind of listening that systemic coherence actually requires. Not just to offer the care and nurture needed for the transformation that comes with an evolution in our modes of knowing – although this too is important – but to grow bolder.

We need spaces where people working at different levels can genuinely hear each other. Not to ‘exchange information’ but to develop a felt sense of the broader field they are part of. So that we can begin to ‘hear’ the dormant potential of that field, and craft the conditions to activate it. In other words, designing better spaces for synergy, where diverse perspectives expand the scope of what seems possible, where unexpected connections prompt a felt sense of potential, and where unlikely alliances give rise to bold yet eerily well-calibrated initiatives. That in itself is an important act of field-building.

Making coherence visible

None of it is simple to resource. It sits, by definition, at the edges of what existing frameworks are designed to support. But if we want a field that produces systemic coherence, we need to make systemic coherence visible. That begins with the courage to notice what is missing, and address this gap together.

Does this resonate? Where do you see the gaps in this area? Where have you encountered spaces or structures that genuinely build connective tissue, and what made them work?

This essay is part of a six-part series by Luea Ritter, Dr Julien Leyre, Claudian Dobos, exploring the underlayer of systems transformation work. See the introductory essay to the series here, and the first essay here.