Sensing Towards Personal & Cultural Transformation
A conversation with Phoebe Tickell on imagination, complexity, and change.
How does personal and cultural transformation happen, and what does it feel like? It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with as I notice how many conversations about change happen in bubbles of privilege, in boardrooms, ecovillages, and festivals. It’s easy to make well-publicized proclamations to others who are on the same page, or in places where there is little friction, few people to offer resistance. What’s harder is recognizing that lasting, positive transformations - whether personal or collective - are often slow, nonlinear, and incredibly demanding.
I think of the transformations in my own life. Some changes were initiated by circumstances completely out of my control, like the emergency surgery on my gut, which took a decade to heal but gifted me with a deep appreciation for the intelligence of my body. Others were the result of intentional decisions that required focus, determination, and support to follow through on, like exercise and meditation.
In a crisis-infused civilization, it’s easy to forget that meaningful change is slow and messy. As philosopher Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “the times are urgent; let us slow down.” To explore the texture of this change, I’m excited to share a conversation I had with Phoebe Tickell, a scientist, artist, and system thinker based in London. Phoebe is the founder of Moral Imaginations, an organization which expands people's imaginative capacities to envision and create better futures through strategic alliances, public activations, and the flagship Imagination Activism training program. It works with individuals, organizations, and communities to integrate imagination into diverse settings and promote systemic change that places ethical considerations at the center of society, including taking into account the more-than-human world, future generations, and ancestors.
Since 2022, she has collaborated with the London Borough of Camden (260,000+ population) to train 32 city workers in the practice of moral imagination. But instead of only involving the executive leadership of the borough, she deliberately invited participants from different departments that have close contact with the public. The idea was to bring in a wider set of lived experiences and sensibilities
As you’ll read in the interview, Phoebe places a lot of emphasis on the quality of the containers and contexts she holds for people. Informed by her background as a biologist, she argues that changing complex systems requires us to allow for the complexity of life itself. This echoes the work of trauma-informed therapists who emphasize that the various crises we face in the world today are the culminating manifestations of untended cultural suffering and dis-relation. Phoebe sees our healing as deeply entangled with the more-than-human and wider world, with no separation between what we see as interior or imaginary and exterior and material.
I’m sharing this conversation because I want us all to step outside the frictionless space of comfort and into the messy weeds of engagement. You see, it’s easy for a person like me, born with many privileges, to walk away from the inertia of our existing systems. I admire Phoebe for bringing radical ideas into the heart of organizations and city governments, in what I like to call a form of bureaucratic rewilding. I hope this conversation can help us attune to the texture and timbre of personal and collective change.
Félix: The post-capitalist activist Alnoor Ladha says “If you do not have a critique of capitalist modernity, you are contextually irrelevant. But if all you have is a critique, you are spiritually and creatively impoverished.” How can imagination strengthen critique?
Phoebe: When you start seeing what's wrong, in the world you just find all of these things to criticize. I think that systemic humility comes from accepting that if I walked a lifetime in the shoes of the people currently in power, maybe I would do exactly the same thing. If I suddenly got plucked to be prime minister, I cannot with good faith say that I know that I would be able to act differently in those constraints. It's very easy to critique from the outside. I think of that quote by Brene Brown which is cheesy but goes something like "If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I am not interested in your feedback." It's very difficult to go and actually try and do something different and improve the current system. I think that's one of the issues I see with thought-leadership, complexity, and systems change spaces.
We need people acting differently from deep within the system. Unfortunately the people who are deep in the system often don't have the capacity and the time and space to do the deeper or big picture thinking. When you’re nose is up against the wall there isn’t the time and space to do the work of shifting perception. Part of what I feel is important right now is to be in the system and to be creating these pockets and spaces and kind of stretching the constraints of people deeply in the current broken system to think differently, to expand their perspective, to exercise their moral imagination to look at a situation from a seven generations in the future, or from the non-human perspective to shift their ontology.
But we need imagination and critique: imagining and inventing without criticism is just capitalist innovation, like Disney or the huge corporate engines of Meta or Google. The core of moral imagination is to encapsulate both - a valid criticism of modernity, and a heavy dose of radical imagination.
Félix: There’s that well known quote by Buckminster Fuller - that “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” The quote is often interpreted as an excuse to not engage the existing system. So, how do we apply your ideas of critique and imagination to system change?
Phoebe: If all our energy goes into fighting the current system, then our efforts can become reactionary. And we limit our imagination, and limit our potential to create drastically and radically different solutions. Because we'll just end up funneling into the current system, trying to make tweaks and changing it. That's just kind of inevitable if you're looking at something and thinking, how do I change this?
Where ecovillages or a retreat center can fail is when they don't make the current system obsolete. In fact, they actually just work as part of the capitalist system. There’s a book - Capitalist Realism - by Mark Fisher about capitalism as a kind of a virus, a living entity that cannibalizes any attempt to change it into yet another source of income. You try to create an alternative and it becomes a perfect retreat getaway that serves the purpose of any other capitalist product or service, selling tours and retreats. That's the risk of doing something totally outside the system: you're not actually providing a genuine and rigorous critique and an effort to try and change the current one.
As a biologist, I am sensitive to when there are adaptive solutions or inventions that genuinely work for lots of people so they end up scaling. Scaling not in the mechanical and industrial sense, but in the sense of a proliferation and multiplying. Like an infection. Because that's how evolution works: some novelty happens or an ingenuity evolves a mutation in a limb to create a wing. If that works then suddenly you get that proliferation and that new wing structure will spread throughout society and create different organisms with wings. If it doesn't work, it stays as a strange mutant. Currently we see a lot of alternatives, but they're often weird mutants that aren't actually taking off evolutionarily. At the same time, it would be foolish to discount them. Just like a novel gene can stay dormant for generations only to become useful later, ideas and experiments today may show something is possible and be picked up later, perhaps in a crisis, becoming useful where before it seemed irrelevant.
Félix: I really want to hear about your work with Camden Council. It's one of the few projects I know that’s cultivating deep ontological shifts with city authorities. How are you feeling about this work today?
Phoebe: I feel thrilled and grateful to be doing the work, and also awake to the limitations of it. I'm not going to pretend it's a panacea and that we've managed to change all local government overnight. It’s been a really interesting lesson in change and how change happens. We ran that first program with the 32 Council officers in November 2022 and put a huge amount of energy and effort into creating the conditions for that change that happened to be possible. There were about 70 conversations that myself and the team had with different people in the council, from different departments; adult social care, green spaces, recycling, refugee support, job centers. It was a full-on reckoning with human complexity.
It's easy to just come in and run an off-the-shelf course and say, “oh my God, we've changed everything”. No, that doesn't work. It’s not how change happens. It’s not how complexity works. If you want to change a complex system, you need to meet it with complexity. These people are super busy, and speak a completely different language. The local council is a complex system of its own. They've got their own rules, regulations, language, culture, and red tape bureaucracy. It took a year of really understanding who these people are. What makes somebody want to work for local government? What are the incentives there? It’s certainly not salary! Then, of course, there's the organizational hierarchy and understanding where the points of influence are, where we need to work in order to get this implemented into policy. There are the formal power structures, but then there are the informal power structures about who is actually deciding what happens.
So I found it fascinating, and exhausting. It really humbled me in terms of what real systems change takes: a hell of a lot of effort. It's so different from offering a course online where people sign up and most of them are kind of independently wealthy visionary people, or ‘changemakers’ or people with the privilege to think about social innovation. A lot of our systems change scene is basically elites. Not that there’s a problem with that, but it’s context that needs acknowledging.
It’s also important to acknowledge that the systems change or innovation scene is not the only place where change and innovation is happening. Real change doesn’t always get recognised as something novel or innovative. Because it’s so novel and innovative it doesn’t get recognised at all! I’m interested in that kind of change. The novelty at the edge of the system and outside the halls of power. I felt close to burnout at the end my work with Camden, but when we published our summary report last year, it's incredible to see the ripple effects: we've had about 30 local councils reach out genuinely interested in doing something similar, and wanting to follow in Camden's footsteps, and there's also a growing ecosystem in the UK for municipal imagination thanks to the work of many others.
Felix: Can you tell me why you chose the word imagination in your project? Some would say it’s not “serious” enough.
Phoebe: I chose the word imagination because it’s far more likely to be accepted in the mainstream system than if I described the shifts I am working with academically, like ontology or epistemology or even the language of complexity which I used before. There's a decision I think everybody who's making change needs to make which is around terminology. Do you create something new that potentially alienates people and creates separation or a sense of academic complexity? Or do you choose something that actually just gets this work out as much as possible as quickly as possible, while maintaining integrity of the ideas?
Félix: I'm curious, with Camden Council, or when you have these meetings with different stakeholders present, what types of embodied practices do you have to ensure you’re not just talking about things from a narrow, mental perspective?
Phoebe: Well, we try to talk about things as little as possible which is hard because so much of the shift is also a shift in thinking. And that requires theory, and changing concepts through the mind. It’s also one of the places where I'm most comfortable, having been an academic and a researcher and being a storyteller. But I’m careful to not talk too much because, actually, people learn through you giving 5 minutes of theory and input and then allowing them to practice.
There’s also a lot that is important in the quality of the space created, the sense of psychological safety that is felt in these sessions. It's less about what you do and more about what you are able to do. Who are you able to be? What is possible in this space that isn’t possible elsewhere? So we paid a lot of attention to the quality of the space, the way we showed up, the humor, the kind of vulnerability, the openness, the slowness of the sessions. As a result, something different became possible. A lot of what is going on is at the level of “I can actually be someone different in this space. There are different sets of rules in this autonomous zone. There are different rules about what I'm allowed to say, who I'm allowed to be, whether I'm welcome with all my complexity in this space.”
Then there are different practical exercises: immersive, role play exercises, reflection exercises, guided visualizations, somatic embodiment, time outside connecting with nature. I invited five guest speakers, people from different cultures and perspectives, for example a decolonial thinker from South Africa, bringing the lens of someone from the global majority, and someone bringing in indigenous perspectives.
So it's about creating a different kind of space and then giving people practical tools, such as “Here are three questions that you can bring in if you want to bring in a future generations perspective”, or if you're in a meeting and you're stuck in a rut and you can't come up with new ideas, here are three ways that you can create mutations in your discussion and introduce randomness and creativity. There are different exercises that remind people to be more ridiculous and entertain the impossible, introducing that boundless creativity that we have when we're kids and where we have far fewer filters.
Our tools focus on cultivating awareness and connection to six “widening circles” as a portal to systemic and holistic thinking: imagination, future generations, the more-than-human world, ancestors, others alive in this time, and the wider paradigm shift towards a life-centric society.
Félix: Can you speak about how to move beyond the comfort of critique and start working within spaces that are perceived to be stagnant or slow moving, like municipal councils?
Phoebe: I don't think I'm an expert and I fall into all sorts of traps. Even me critiquing the critique is a trap that makes me feel smug. If I was to give any advice, I think I would speak to all the perfectionists out there who offer ideas - maybe they even run a workshop - but they're not getting into the weeds of a community garden or the health system or a local school. What happens when you take these big ideas, these ontological shifts, and then you get into the current system, is that it's disappointing. It's frustrating. It's very easy to say “Oh, I'm not going to engage with this because this is too slow, they don’t get it, it’s below me.” But actually that's what change feels like. And you can bet that you will be changed in the process. I think there’s a lot of sitting in ivory towers or home offices and wanting to stay unchanged, perfect and have these perfect ideas. Change and working with complexity isn’t like that. It’s messy as hell.
It's far easier to give a lecture where nobody can critique it. You're just there on a stage, untouchable. The ideas stay perfect and untarnished and nothing changes. I promise you that your ideas will improve ten-fold because when you come out of that experience, you'll have so much more richness, so much more dimensionality to not just understand how the current system works, but also having the ability to bridge the perfect world of ideas and the muck of everyday life.
There's something about dwelling in ideas and the perfect sphere of philosophy that feels linked to immortality. Getting deeply stuck into the current system reminds us of our mortality because even just to change something small takes so much time and genuine bodily effort and life force that it's scary. It reminds you that most of us only have around 80 years to live on this planet. It took me two years to introduce a tiny amount of change into one local Council in London.
When you look at inspiring organizers from history, such as MLK and the leading lights in the Black Freedom struggle, you see that their change was based on a micro human level. It was just a tiny little shift every single day, one conversation with someone in the neighborhood, going and knocking on doors. So as a human, you're going to die, you're actually quite insignificant, but you can contribute your tiny little piece to human history. And together, we can make a huge difference.
Félix: I think this relates to the modern bias towards scalability. We want everything we do to have a massive impact. How can we balance quality and substance with scale?
Phoebe: This scalability can be the enemy of getting really involved in the weeds. I sometimes refer to myself as a practical visionary. I think it's good to have both. We shouldn’t throw away the visions and ambitions of global governance, DAOs and blockchain based decentralized collaboration, but we also need to go into our local communities and work there. That's what really drove me out of my involvement in the blockchain based distributed governance space: I was just so bored by all the blog posts and white papers. It's so boring after a while. It left me hungry for practical practical change. You could check out the work of Benjamin Life, who is one the rare practical visionaries in that space that I know about who’s taking the power of mass, decentralized autonomous tech but actually applying it to neighborhoods in the US.
Félix: Thanks for this time Phoebe.
Phoebe: Thank you for this chance to reflect on this work together Felix. As you’ve gifted me with a quote, to finish I'll read you this quote I was reminded of when you first started speaking at the beginning of our call. It’s from The Matrix. Neo says: “I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you that this is going to end. No, I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone and then show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.”
