Reflect

We spend a lot of time trying to scale change. If something works, we assume the next step is to scale it—standardize it, replicate it, roll it out more broadly. But what if change in complex human systems doesn’t always move the way we think? As spring arrives, my family has been spending more time at the park. I’ve been watching kids play a game called grounders—a game I never played growing up—and it got me thinking about how things spread. One child introduces it. Others

An exploration of knowledge as a living process that moves through sensing, acting, reflecting, and stabilizing

I’ve been thinking a lot about emergence lately. Emergence is frequently named in conversations about complexity and systems change, yet its implications for how we plan, lead, and make decisions are often left under-explored. If emergence is a natural phenomenon in complex systems, what does that mean for where we actually have agency, how we show up in the systems we’re part of, and whether the future that unfolds is generative—or extractive? I recently wrote a longer refle

The seeds for Whole Story were planted long before I knew what it would become. In 2008, I co-founded a non-profit, Cross Community...