Day 17 of 2022 and we’re still making the most of Zoom rooms with New Year check-ins. Yesterday, amongst an international group of regenerative practitioners, several called this the Year of Collaboration. Not simply as a plea – how many decades have we all been calling for greater working together? - but as a focus of activity. Less carving out of territory, articulating vision, attracting followers. More patiently identifying common purpose, building infrastructure to connect activity, sharing resources.

This might cause alarm amongst the more radical – or original - of those hoping to grow their base. “Are you requiring us to drop what makes us unique in the process of reaching consensus?” Yet there is a new recognition of - and capacity for - diversity in the mix of people in our networks hoping to come together. An acceptance of multiple forms of agency which give rise to quite different narratives or motivations to act.

For example, here are four, traditionally contrasting worlds of radical change, which always compete for attention and resources. They often overlap but are always distinct in their priorities, and therefore in their invitations to the public:

· Social justice movements, often intersecting with each other (BLM, LBGTQ, Feminism), calling for upgrading social structure and behaviour

· Party-political activism, challenging for representative power at the state level

· Systems-change agents, often – but not only - NGOs and third sector organisations that often focus on institutional culture and narrative

· Self-development and spiritual communities that focus on inner development as the most effective strategy for achieving external transformation. Their offer to change movements often takes the form of sense-making conversations – observing the environment, then registering how it appears dynamically within our own minds and bodies.

Within each of these movements there is also a variety of different forms of agency, arising from the circumstances and skills of those engaged:

· Developing a voice, demanding to be heard, intent on freedom of expression

· Focused on tools of organisation, creating rules, building platforms and institutions that give stability and even suggest permanence

· Mapping and building strategy for coalition with partners, against the others (taking numerous forms)

· Connecting, weaving, finding consensus. Seeking the broadest possible church, by co-creating solutions with whoever wants to participate

· Systems-convening, creating conditions for self-organisation throughout the current socio-economic-political system welcoming complexity as key to the emergence of something new

In their efforts to attract new participants, all these movements also share a variety of attractors, make different emotional appeals:

· Human-centred, emotionally literate, compassionate - offering belonging

· Technocratic - implying realistic, ambitious achievement

· Diverse and plural - offering maximum inclusion and connectivity

· Open and technically versatile - offering status to all participants

· Transformation narratives - often challenging, offering meaning and purpose to readers and contributors

More like cooperation in the making of this apple

When we try to add all those distinctions together - contrasting worlds, different forms of agency, answering diverse emotional needs - a kaleidoscope of combinations is possible. For example, when we look at the differences between the many existing forms of citizen action networks (CANs) – from ecovillages to civil rights organisations – it’s difficult to see how they could work together.

When looking at these pluralities from the perspective of what divides one from the other, then bringing people together might succeed better through cooperation – working alongside each other towards the same end. However, collaboration – re-organising in order to, for example, share resources or eliminate duplication - is more demanding.

For example, cooperation between two organisations might look like naming a shared goal and each contributing what they can. For example, between Flatpack Democracy and Trust the People working co-operatively during the 2021 local elections.

Between many, cooperation might look more like a murmuration of birds: each powered by its own perspective within the swarm, but somehow moving in rhythm with each other, creating a beautiful new reality out of their shared direction and purpose. Of course, there is a range of explanations for this phenomenon, both in reality and as a useful metaphor. Some say murmurations (and cooperation) appear spontaneously in response to danger – a form of solidarity. Others – like Oli Sylvester Bradley writing for us here – moves it closer to collaboration, but keeping a distinction between the public facing and internal wiring of cooperation.The cooperation between the many partners in CtrlShift – from Shared Assets to Our Future Leeds - is a great example of diverse forms and styles of change moving together, while autonomous.

Collaboration – at least at the level being called for now - requires more than visible cohesion. If the goal is to accelerate and amplify the changes they can do on their own, then both – or all – have to change their internal dynamics too. For example, they might begin to share communication tools which would mean change in the way they go about their daily business.

Or they might decide to share resources: in the best of all worlds that would mean adding more tools, tech and money to the pile everyone has access to. But in some cases, it means rationalising – getting rid of duplication. New roles have to be created to oversee that process and jobs are also lost when two people – or two departments - overlap.

But there is something about this moment of great ambition that suggests that the kind of collaboration now possible is much more than the old company mergers that I’m half describing in the paragraph above. This is not about financial gain or the better management of material output, it’s about releasing new energy never before unleashed. Where what is created adds up to more than the sum of the parts. Responding together to the demands for radical innovation in a moment of extremis for our survival. To make the distinction clearer, let’s call it deep collaboration. This from facilitators Respectful Confrontation:

“Deep Collaboration is the outcome when each member of a team brings their full self to a project or initiative, and then has the skills and capacity to powerfully and respectfully engage with others.

This requires a shift in viewpoints, patterns, and habits that need to be understood, contemplated, and experienced directly.”

Deep collaboration is what happened when numerous social movements realized their intersectionality – the common roots of their problems – and began to organise differently to maximise their impact for change. Or when First Nations and other multicultural Australians began to develop shared leadership.

There are also examples from our daily lives. Sometimes when two people get together, they form a new unit that becomes a container for a family. However, these can be more or less successful transformational. In some cases, both partners are profoundly changed by becoming parents. In others, only the presence of the children brings out that new form of relating, and only temporarily, sometimes reluctantly. When the children grow up and leave, they revert to their former, more autonomous way of being in the world.

It’s very common for one change initiative to look at the networks they’re connected to, and offer themselves as an umbrella organisation under which they should all organise. To those being invited, that can look like ten families being invited to share one surname. In other words, to give their hard earned capital – of all kinds – away to another brand. Yet when the deep collaboration is undertaken, these tensions disappear: a new name appears to describe that evolved entity.

We at A/UK ourselves might now be poised for radical collaboration with others (see our New Year Editorial ref) which might require us to shed many of our signature ways of working, changing our outward appearance. A caterpillar has to let go of walking on the ground in order to become a butterfly and fly. Let’s see how it unfolds.

Meanwhile, on reading this, are you feeling the vital importance of retaining your essential identity and practices as you move into 2022? That it’s too early for you to do much more than build your base upwards and outwards? If so, you might be more in favour of cooperation with others as as many people as possible move into a much expanded, shared space of regeneration.

But if you are looking to co-evolve, to give rise to something which - until now - has not yet emerged, then deep collaboration might take you there. Deciding to move into new relationship with others but also with yourself, as you move towards a future you’ve only dreamed of till now. It may be a small and still rare space of activity, but the promise is enormous.

To give us all a clue to what that looks and feels like, let’s borrow from science as it stands on its own precipice, hoping to leap into a new possibility in the world of energy. Scientists, please allow the imprecision of this comparison – we’re inviting it as a metaphor only. Taking license to be excited by the breakthrough being described below and how it ‘feels like’ when deep collaboration happens in different parts of an emergent system.

“With some of the most powerful machines ever built, scientists are trying to refine delicate, subatomic mechanics to achieve a pivotal milestone: getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than they put in. Researchers say they are closer than ever.

Fusion is way more powerful than any other energy source we have

Nuclear fission is what happens when big atoms like uranium and plutonium split apart and release energy. These reactions powered the very first atomic bombs, and today they power conventional nuclear reactors.

Fusion is even more potent. It’s what happens when the nuclei of small atoms stick together, fusing to create a new element and releasing energy. The most common form is two hydrogen atoms fusing to create helium.

The reason that fusion generates so much energy is that the new element weighs a smidgen less than the sum of its parts. That tiny bit of lost matter is converted into energy according to Albert Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2. “E” stands for energy and “m” stands for mass.

The last part of the formula is “c,” a constant that measures the speed of light — 300,000 kilometers per second, which is then squared. So there’s an enormous multiplier for matter that’s converted into energy, making fusion an extraordinarily powerful reaction.”

Let’s make 2022 a year of multiple levels of cooperation and collaboration and hope that, here and there, deep collaboration leads to explosions of energy that can take us all forward.

Alternative Editorial: How Deep Can You Go?