S3 Ep. 15 Phoebe Tickell – Growing Institutional Imagination Capacity and Collective Intelligence in a Complex World

Phoebe Tickell is a biologist and systems thinker developing methodologies and approaches  suited for a better world. She is an innovator with a background in the biological sciences, technology, social entrepreneurship and systems design. She left the scientific academy with the knowledge that an understanding of complex systems could be applied to real world pressing issues and that bridges were needed to stretch from theory to practice. 

She works across multiple societal contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and has worked in organisational design, advised government, the education sector and the food and farming sector. She is a co-founder of the DGov Foundation – a community of distributed governance practitioners – and Member of Enspiral, a community that innovates in decentralising power and developing decentralised tools and technologies to do so. She also created Moral Imaginations in 2020 to push the frontier of research and implementation of research-backed collective imagination exercises and training to inspire change and find new solutions in an era of unprecedented disruption and potential for transformation.

It’s clear that society needs direction when it comes to change, and in today’s episode we explore how imagination gives us the ability to think beyond traditional frames. Join us as we delve into training a new breed of activists, mapping unintended consequences, how to coordinate at a massive scale – and accounting for future generations with the choices that we make.  

A full transcript of the episode can be found on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/phoebe-tickell/

Key highlights we discussed:

> Why imagination has become central to building the future

> The moral elements of new ways of organising

> How diverse teams or communities can work from shared principles

> Why we need to stay connected to our local communities

> Why coordination is not ‘everything’ for DAOs 

To find out more about Phoebe’s work:

> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phoebetickell/ 

> Twitter: https://twitter.com/solarpunk_girl 

> Website: http://www.phoebetickell.com/ 

> Moral Imaginations: https://www.moralimaginations.com/ 

> Moral Imaginations Twitter: https://twitter.com/moral_imagining 

> Moral Imaginations Substack: https://moralimaginations.substack.com/ 

Other references and mentions:

> Indy Johar, A Development Future: https://medium.com/hub-engine/a-developmental-future-21bf6412625e  

> The Manifesto for Moral Imagination: https://medium.com/moral-imaginations/a-manifesto-for-moral-imagination-dbf62f0cb7aa 

> Trans-contextual Organizing: Shifting Perceptions — with Nora Bateson: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/nora-bateson/ 

> Daniel Schmachtenberger: https://civilizationemerging.com/about/ 

> Kevin Owocki, The Green Pill, with Phoebe Tickell: https://greenpill.substack.com/p/12-solarpunk-girl-phoebe-tickell?s=r 

> L. M. Sacasas – Building a convivial society: autonomy, tools, scale and capabilities: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/l-m-sacasas/

> MetaGov: https://metagov.org/

> Colony: distributed organizations that actually work – with Aron Fischer and Jack du Rose: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/colony/

> Samantha Slay, Going Horizontal: https://goinghorizontal.co/ 

> New Citizenship Project: https://www.newcitizenship.org.uk/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://boundaryless.io/podcast-music

Recorded on 19 April 2022.