Organising from elsewhere

This is an article about a radical idea that might just transform the way we organise to bring about the economic, political and social changes so urgently needed. However, before we begin, let’s place ourselves in space and time.

Amsterdam. This once small fishing village which some 750 years ago built a dam at the mouth of the Amstel River. This dammed land that birthed the East and West India company, the stock exchange, capitalism. This city, where we now find ourselves, experiencing ourselves as awake, trapped in our heads, looking out onto the world, separate and alone, atomised and commodified.

As Amsterdam Alternative turns 10 years old, it’s time to reflect. Our ways of organising have not yet built enough collective strength to overcome the systems that suppress our movements for change. Too often our ways of working together result in infighting and power struggles, reproducing the very culture we are trying to challenge. It is time for a radically different approach. 

The city, capitalism and the paradigm of separation
Ownership is at the beating heart of this capitalist city. On the face of it, ownership is an irrational idea: how can I own a building when it existed long before I came along and will remain long after I’m gone, when I wasn’t involved in building it? Yet, I have no problem believing in ownership – try taking this MacBook from me, I’ll shout it’s mine and call you a thief.

A paradigm is our framework for interacting with the world – fundamental ideas and principles that shape what we can think and do. The socio-economic paradigm framing our current extractive system is an extreme form of individualism: a comprehensive disregard of togetherness,  of our connections to nature, to each other and to our own needs.

A core assumption of this paradigm is our ‘felt’ understanding of separation: that there is an ‘I’ experienced as separate from everything else. Core ideas like ‘the individual’, ‘ownership’, ’competition’ and ‘dominion over nature’ depend on this assumption. Core institutions like markets, private property and wage labour embody and depend on these ideas.

Our current ways of organising – hierarchical, democratic, consensus-based – have arisen from and are underpinned by this notion of separation: Organisation is perceived as solving the problem of coordination between individuals that are separated by their goals and preferences.

Yet, if we use modes of organising based on this notion of separation, we inadvertently strengthen this extractive system by reproducing and reinforcing its core ideas. We open the doors for assimilation of the system’s dynamics into any change we achieve – tainting even our successes. Worse still, this limits our option space: we never explore ways of organising based on different core assumptions, ones that might be more successful.

The result: organisations beset internally by the destructive dynamics they are attempting to change externally, and any change achieved at risk of reproducing existing dynamics in a different form. In the words of feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” If we continue to use organisational methods shaped by this assumption of separation, we will continue to fail – as seen recently in our failure to prevent the ongoing holocaust in Gaza or the rise of the Far Right. 

Complex systems and feedback loops
We need ways of organising underpinned by an assumption of interconnection, not separation. Let’s dive more deeply into why. 

Our extractive system is a complex system, meaning that it’s behaviour isn’t governed by a central control or blueprint, but rather emerges from countless interactions and changes dynamically to adapt to its environment.

We change complex systems by altering the environment within which they operate. Imagine rioting elephants in a dry riverbed. We can’t control individual elephants, but by reshaping the riverbed – narrowing it in one direction, widening in another – we influence their collective movement. 

Our current extractive system results from feedback loops of ever-increasing separation: systems built on separation create environments where separation-based strategies thrive. To fundamentally change it, we need to establish counter-loops of increasing interconnection instead. As nearly everything we do must be organised with others, organisational methods shape and limit what we can achieve.

If we develop effective methods of organising based on interconnectedness, what we organise will reproduce and reinforce this assumption. This means we’ll approach everything differently – from working together to growing food to providing shelter – in ways that embody and encourage interconnection rather than separation. Effective organisational methods will spread quickly because they are useful, creating feedback loops of evermore interconnection that can transform our entire system.

The intelligence of interconnected systems
Science increasingly recognises intelligence beyond human minds. Biologist Michael Levin’s research demonstrates that intelligence exists at multiple scales, from cellular problem-solving to ecosystem self-regulation. 

Our modern fixation on individual ‘rational’ thought diverts attention from the vital information that flows via chemical signals, somatic sensations, images, impulses, and intuitions. When we don’t register this somatic information, our mental processes operate with incomplete data, like navigating with a partial map.

Organising from an assumption of interconnectedness can help us harness this collective intelligence, empowering us to be more effective, provide care in the face of trauma, and better build bonds of trust. These are key advantages when facing forces of oppression that are themselves constrained and atomised by ideas of separation, hopefully making it more likely we can overcome them.

It is for these reasons, we, at Organising from Elsewhere, have been exploring how we might organise from this radically different assumption. 

Organising from Elsewhere
In 2022, I went to work with a Shipibo shaman in Peru. There in the middle of the heaving Amazon rainforest –where the cacophony of insects, birds and creatures that slither and crawl and climb sound like the very breathing in and out of the earth – an idea arrived. Since then, a team of brilliant minds have gathered around this project. The creative tension between complexity theory and spirituality, western activism and Indigenous ways of being, has led to the creation of a framework for radical organisational innovation.

It starts with a simple commitment: 
We commit to always doing things in a way that increases a felt-sense of interconnectedness. Whenever there is a choice to imcrease interconnectedness or increase separation, we choose the option that increases an experience of interconnectedness.

This commitment focuses us on actual work, not theoretical discussion, motivating us to discover what works in our specific context. From experience of success and failure, we can build a repertoire of new organisational methods.

To fulfil it, we first need to understand what interconnectedness is and how it feels. We need to identify enablers, such as practices that support us to enter flow states and bring awareness to the ‘somatic’ experience of interconnectedness. We need ways of making sense of the intuitions, images and impulses that occur when our experience of the separate ‘I’ dissolves. We must also identify disablers, like trauma and colonial mindsets, that reinforce separation. Finally, we need a learning cycle consisting of three steps:

1. Pick a way to do a task that supports a flow state, directing attention to somatic information that feels like it’s arriving from beyond the individual self.
2. Do what you need to do guided by, and making sense of, this somatic information without assimilating it into an individualistic way of being.
3. Review how it went, identify enablers and disablers, draw lessons for the next cycle.

This approach creates ‘feedback loops of more interconnectedness’ applicable to any relational context, from conversations to large-scale projects. To be effective, this cycle must be simple, scalable, effective at identifying enablers and disablers, allow space for skill acquisition, highlight patterns, and, most importantly, help us work more effectively.

What might this look like in practice?
Here’s an example: Before writing a report, I choose to do Holotropic Breathwork to experience somatic interconnectedness. In this flow state, freed from distracting thoughts and worry, the words feel as if they flow through me and the report is written quickly and effectively. However, just before emailing the report, I get an impulse to scream, which I interpret as a sign we’re taking the wrong approach. I share this with my Oxford University-educated colleague who strongly disagrees, and we argue, leaving me feeling angry. After completing each task, I mark dots on a canvas to capture enablers and disablers. At the end of the week, these simple post-task reviews which have been  done by all team members are collated in a team review. Patterns emerge: we see that difficulties in making sense of somatic information in a way that was useful, trauma, and colonial mindsets, all played a significant role in blocking our experience of interconnectedness. In response, the team books sessions with a somatic trauma facilitator and a decolonial educator. 

At Organising from Elsewhere, we’ve been developing a Scalable Learning Cycle to support this approach. There is much more work to be done, but what excites us is that this approach builds on what makes any organisation effective: plan, do, review, learn. Its success is built on its ability to highlight barriers to experiencing interconnectedness, empowering us to address mindsets and traumas that maintain separation and to identify practices and ways of making sense of somatic information that support us to do the work at hand. In this way, feedback loops of ever more interconnectedness naturally arise.

In this city that gave birth to modern capitalism, perhaps we can now nurture something different 

For 10 years, Amsterdam Alternative has been a living laboratory for different ways of organising – creating spaces that encourage cooperation and community, working to challenge profit, ownership and alienation. Our framework continues this tradition of seeking practical approaches to building the world we want to see. We could apply it here in Amsterdam: to committees that organise collectively owned spaces, to campaign groups working to solve the housing crisis, to activist networks fighting the rise of the Far Right. It offers an approach that works with our understanding of how complex systems can be encouraged to change and offers hope of fundamentally new ways of doing things that challenge the foundational ideas sustaining capitalism. In this city that gave birth to modern capitalism, perhaps we can now nurture something different – ways of organising that recognise our fundamental interconnection and that harnesses the collective intelligence that emerges when we work with rather than against the interconnected nature of all things. 

www.organisingfromelsewhere.org