Post-Formal Actors inside Organizations: from Deviants to Lifeboats - with Bonnitta Roy

BOUNDARYLESS CONVERSATIONS PODCAST - SEASON 4 EP #2

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BOUNDARYLESS CONVERSATIONS PODCAST - SEASON 4 EP #2

Post-Formal Actors inside Organizations: from Deviants to Lifeboats - with Bonnitta Roy

Bonnitta Roy joins the show to talk about how post formal actors can give new perspectives and ways to organize, embracing the challenges we face. They can, as Bonnitta says “hedge against social collapse”.

Podcast Notes

Bonnitta Roy is a pioneer in education. She’s the founder of Alderlore Insight Center, the POP-UP School, and C-LABS. She teaches insight practices for individuals who are developing meta-cognitive skills, (ed: thinking about thinking) and hosts collective insight retreats for groups interested in breaking away from typical limiting patterns of thought. In addition, she also teaches a masters course in consciousness studies and trans-personal psychology at the Graduate Institute.

As an educator, Bonnitta Roy is focused on what she defines as Post Formal Actors: people who have strong intuition towards post formal thinking  without necessarily being sophisticated thinkers (yet) and who see formal rules as optional. According to Bonnitta this phenomenon occurs in different settings, for example  students who start to see their teachers don’t have educational authority. Without proper pedagogical support or guidance to become more sophisticated thinkers, however, post formal actors can be seen only as “deviants” rather than a resource.

On the other hand, because of their skills, post formal actors can give a new perspective and a new way to see and do things, embracing the challenges we  face. They can, as Bonnitta says “hedge against social collapse”. 

 

Key highlights from the conversation:

  • Post formal actors (PFA): how this definition was born;
  • The mismatch between skills we learn today in school and what we really need in life;
  • PFA as  a positive force for the world and for organisations
  • Tokenization of value and what it means for organizing 
  • The importance of the stability in a  system
  • Ontological design and modernity as “defuturing”

 

To find out more about Bonnitta Roy’s work:

Other references and mentions:

 

Bonitta’s suggested breadcrumbs (things listeners should check out):

 

Recorded on 19 September 2022.

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

 

Get in touch with Boundaryless:

Music 

Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music

Transcript

Simone Cicero:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast where we meet with pioneers, thinkers, doers, and entrepreneurs. And we speak about the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in this rapidly changing world we live. I’m Simone Cicero, and I’m joined by my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila. Hello, Stina.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, everybody.

Simone Cicero:
And today, we’re also joined by Bonnitta Roy. Hello, Bonnitta.

Bonnitta Roy:
Hi, everyone. Nice to be here.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you so much for joining us. Bonnitta is the founder of the Alderlore Insight Center. I hope I said it well. Pop-up school C Labs. Bonnitta also teaches insights, practices for individuals and groups, developing so-called “meta cognitive” skills, where meta cognitive means basically “thinking about thinking”, at least somehow. And she also hosts collective insights retreats. Bonnitta you’re very much into helping also people change about the way they think about stuff, the way they act on stuff. So, I think we are really excited to talk to you about how these skills are important, because they’re kind of the root of how we organize, how we move forward in the world of — in society, in the world of business as well.

Let me just give to our listeners a bit of context here. Bonnitta and myself, we shared recently, I think it was like first half of last year, we shared a podcast together. And essentially, we ended up the conversation talking about a concept that we wanted to come back here on the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast, the concept of post formal actors. Bonnitta, the best idea for us to start from is to give you some space to explore in a way you really know how to do this idea of post-formal actors.

Bonnitta Roy:
Yeah. Thanks for the introduction. So, this notion of post formal actors is related to all fields of inquiry that’s been used in a lot of organizational development in organizational coaching. So, let me explain the background that this new term came out of. So, your listeners may be aware of a lot of developmental stage theory, a lot of people are aware of Rob Kegan’s work, a lot of people are aware of the shorthand for these stages of colors in spiral dynamics. Anyway, this whole developmental stage theory has been brought into organizational work around the world. And in this developmental stage theory, there is a term called “post formal thinking”. It’s a high stage where people start to be able to question the mental models that they’ve been given to think with. They’ve been able to question some of the rules in society, they’ve been able to see, as Steve Jobs said, that everything that we work with has been invented by someone, and in a sense, they are replaceable, or revisable, or improvable.

And so in developmental stage theory, this notion of post formal thinking, or post formal cognition usually happens way at the end of development, after people have gone through many different levels of cognitive sophistication, and usually happens later on in life. Now, what was happening for me is I was teaching a Master’s course in consciousness studies for many years. And I was also doing these open participatory organizational workshops, primarily in Scandinavia, I was noticing that younger people seem to have some of the features or characteristics of a post formal thinker.

But if I really did my due diligence, they didn’t go through the stages of complexity, and they weren’t really complex thinkers. And so I started to see them as what I call post formal actors. Like they just break the rules, or they just understand or have this intuition that the rules are up for grabs, or they see through the rules. They go to school. When they see that it’s maybe meaningless or it doesn’t have a purpose to it. They’re not really sophisticated thinkers. They can’t tell you why — they don’t have a model or a theory. It’s kind of like a gut feeling or a gut reaction. I’m sure it has a lot to do with the proliferation of information in the digital age.

So, I started calling these people post formal actors, because they didn’t study philosophy, they didn’t study developmental stage, they hadn’t mastered how their minds work. But they had this intuition that the formal rules and the formal operations and the formal categories that society uses are optional. And they become curious about revising the rules or revising the structures or questioning the structures or questioning the assumptions, and they do this at a much earlier age. They seem to be doing it instinctively. So, I call them post formal actors, because naming this phenomenon is important for two reasons. And one is, I think, that post formal actors show up in schools and in the workplace as deviant, and they need a certain kind of support. But also, I think post formal actors are very skeptical about being mentored or being trained. And as teachers, we need to design certain pedagogies that will help them get to be more sophisticated thinkers, given that they already have this kind of intuition about working on the formal roles, the format of engagement, rather than just working within them to make improvement. So, that’s kind of where this term came from.

Simone Cicero:
Couldn’t it be that these kind of transition between the idea of a think into the idea of an actor, like a doer, if you want, it’s due to the particular I would say nexus that we are going through. Like a nexus that somehow doesn’t leave us any time to think. It’s funny, because in to many organizational efforts are related to the gravity, I would say, of the problems we live in society. And there’s always this kind of friction between doing – the necessity, or the feeling that we have to do — we have to organize. On the other hand, also this necessity to understand what’s going on and trying to maybe reason about the steps that we take. This also resonates with the quote by Bayo Akomolafe where he said: “times are urgent, let us slow down”. And so to some extent that there is this kind of friction between this necessity to go ahead, and the necessity to, I would say, integrate thinking more than just stop thinking. In this context, pedagogy, like you seem to talk about, isn’t it something not adequate to the times we’re living? So, is post formality also about feeling this urgency?

Bonnitta Roy:
I think that pedagogy is really a problem. I think most people or many people, if you have access to the internet and you’re curious, you will find things and be able to understand things that are ahead of what you’re being taught in the grade that you’re forced to be in, right? Because we do this kind of like at the age you’re at, you learn this thing, not what you’re curious about, not how far you can go. And so I think that once somebody sees that the teacher is behind the times, in terms of what the information is out there, you can become skeptical really fast. I mean, this happened to me years and years ago, because I didn’t go to a very good school, I went to a parochial school. And by the time I was in sixth grade, I was teaching the math and the sciences, because the teachers didn’t actually understand the textbooks that we used. And so you can become post formal really quickly by understanding that the people that are teaching you don’t have the teacherly authority as Zack Stein would say to be telling you things.

The other thing that we do is that institutions are very slow to change. So, that, for example, I was always confused why do we still teach the Bohr’s version of the atom? When two years later you say well, that’s not actually right, and then they teach another version of the atom. I understand that there’s stage-appropriate learning, but it doesn’t make sense to teach something that then a little later on, they’re just going to understand was a mistake in the way that that was taught. And this happens all the time. I mean, there’s so much misinformation in the pedagogical system now. And it’s easy to find the quick real answer on Wikipedia. And now you have this kind of tension between why am I going to school to learn this stuff and playing the game versus really learning what’s out there? So, I think that establishes a certain tension right then and there.

But there’s all kinds of other nuances. For example, we go to school and we teach people that there’s one right answer to every question. And if you help people get to that answer then that’s called cheating. And then way down the line in the middle of your career, we have coaches really trying to teach people how to be collaborative, when we should, if that’s what we recognize is a key skill in the new economy, then we should teach kids how to be collaborative from the beginning. Because research shows that kids before they go to school are more collaborative, and more willing to work for intrinsic rewards than three years down the line in school. We’ve actually schooled it out of them. So, there’s this mismatch between the kinds of skills that we need in the world today and the children understand that these skills, working at scale, all these skills like collaboration, they can feel the pressure that those are the skills they need. And then there’s a mismatch in terms of the kind of deskilling, really, that’s happening at school.

So, it creates, yeah, a sense of urgency and I think a big sense of confusion. Especially in really young people when they’re confused and there’s not a lot of teacherly authority, they become agitated and deviant. And so they become doers and a lot of times they become like destroyers. They’re not really post formal actors yet because they’re more just reacting. But out of that comes a class of people who take a constructive approach and say, well, instead of just pushing against the rules, let’s experiment with self-organization or experiment with how we can work together in new and collaborative ways.

Stina Heikkila:
When I listened to you talking about this post formal actors, it seems like it has a positive connotation somehow. It seems like something that has been called for somehow that society might need and that it’s – I don’t want to say shortcut, because it sounds a bit rudimentary – but you mentioned that these are individuals who have an instinct and intuition to reach, let’s say, a higher level of understanding of what needs to be done to some extent. So, why is this sort of happening in this context, and how can it be helpful for the challenges that humanity is facing?

Bonnitta Roy:
Yeah, it’s a complex question. Yes, in a sense, we can say post formal actors is a hopeful thing. But without the correct support it manifests more as deviance, right? It’s destructive. It’s deconstruction all the time. What we need to do is create pedagogies and mentorships so that their instincts can mature into full-fledged understanding. I’ll give you an example I like to use is the people who wrote the Agile Manifesto. What they understood is that a small group of people that had certain types of trust relationships, and perhaps even self-imposed rituals, could out compete all the formal structures of IBM and all the incentive structures and all the resources that IBM would be throwing at something. And what was interesting to me about the people who wrote the Agile Manifesto is not only did they do something different, but they knew that it wasn’t just circumstantial, that they out competed. They understood that the way they were working was the difference that made a difference. It wasn’t a handicap. They didn’t say despite the fact that we didn’t have resources and there was only 10 of us, we outcompeted Microsoft. They said because there was on only 10 of us, and we didn’t have resources, and those kinds of incentives we outcompeted them.

You see the difference? They understood that this wasn’t just background to their success, they started to — this is the meta cognitive piece, they started to understand that it was the secret sauce. And so for post formal actors, how can we reflect back to them from the whole suite of experiments they’re trying to do, what is working, versus perhaps what is not a good use of their time?

Stina Heikkila:
That’s a very good way to frame it. Because I was feeling it’s a bit more complicated.

Bonnitta Roy:
Yeah. It’s not just like, “oh, let’s hire a bunch of post formal actors” because your organization would be very chaotic, right? How do we establish the right trust relationships with post formal actors so we’re both saying, “hey, you’re probably seeing something that I don’t see”. I had a course the other day, and I was saying to young people: “you’re like our scouts. I’m an older person and you’re like my scouts, because I don’t live in the world that you live in. So, you’re kind of my organs of perception in many ways. And so your job is to explain to me your actual reality. And my job is trying to find some enduring principles that can help you”.

So, this gives you a little bit of the flavor of the kinds of relationships people can have; mentors at work or coaches can have with these post formal actors. It’s not just that all of a sudden they’re prodigies. This is actually also spoiling a lot of young people, because you have venture capitalists just pouring money in them and making them prodigies and turning them into basically narcissistic psychopaths, and then making a lot of money off of them, because they’re kind of leveraging that they have this instinct, right? It was a great question because you can see it’s a complex issue, and it requires something of society to respond to in an intelligent way.

Simone Cicero:
I’m wondering if this post formality, let’s say, or at least how it maps with ideas of management, control, industrialization. It sounds like post formal to some extent signals this idea of embracing kind of a stage in our evolution as a species, where we kind of agree that there is kind of ideas that backed modern management, industrialism, generally, rationalism are not apt to deal with complexity, right, to deal with the universe somehow. So, does a post formal actor also understands that the very idea of society that we have, which is based on authorities granting stability and so on, is somehow to be overcome? And if that’s the case, how do we articulate this idea of organizing post formally? Basically, in the past, I’ve been talking about this idea that we have to break frames as we think about new ways of organizing. So, to some extent we have to overcome some classic ideas that we have about organizations that are clearly inadequate. How does a post format organization look like? How do you see the post formal organization to really enact itself into society, into this world?

Bonnitta Roy:
I’m a little uncomfortable with that term, post formal organization, because I think that in order for people to collaborate successfully, they do have to make their implicit understanding of what they’re doing together explicit so that, in a sense, the implicit structures become formalized. Right? So, what makes it post formal is that they’re just not adopting them from like a rule book, or a previous set of standards that’s just assumed to work in all contexts. So, I would say what makes an organizational post formal is that they are working with structures that they realize function only if they match the contexts, right? So, a post formal organization might have different departments that had different rituals and different ways of working together because the contexts are different. So, I would say number one, that would be a key feature of it.

But for me, the way I approach this is that what you need to do is assure them that there are some enduring truths that they need to incorporate into their design or their way of thinking or their way of innovating. And depending upon what level of innovation you’re looking at, you have to design from very, very fundamental principles or source code or deep code. So, for example, people working in blockchain, they’re trying to design what is currency, like, going way back to asking the question, what is currency in the first place? So, what is trust in the first place? So, you see that to shore up some of these things, we need to go back and say, there’s a lot of intelligence in the human system, okay, we get late modernity, we get late capitalism, we’re kind of out of whack. So, what are we — how far back into these fundamental intelligences in the evolution of the human can we go back to and then move from there to a different place? One of the traps people get into is they don’t go back far enough to enduring truths, they go into just maybe a critique of what’s there. And they don’t really understand the fundamental evolutionary nature, let’s say of the human.

And so one of the things I do, for example, is I do a workshop on trust practices. And people are very surprised about how trust actually works in their lived experience. They come with all kinds of ideas. They may have a critique of all kinds of social trust networks, or the breakdown of trust in government, etc. But if we can experience in our own lived experience, for example, I think of someone I trust, and then I think of someone I trust less. And then I can ask myself, what’s measuring that? What is measuring that this person I trust and that person I trust them, but I can’t — I see that they’re a little further away in my trust network. And so then I’ll ask people, well, what’s inside you that’s measuring that? So, we do trust practices based upon not an ideology or competing ideas, we go back to the actual lived experience of these fundamental aspects of human nature, and say, okay, now we reoriented, we reconnected with the intelligence in the body, in the human system. How can we carry that forward into new structures, new explicit ways of working without working against these fundamental ways of being human?

And so this, for example, is very, very tricky because in many cases, we discover that a lot of the new ideas coming around, let’s say in blockchain, and in distributed autonomous organizations, in DAOs stacks and stuff, are actually built on a low trust environment, because they don’t understand the way trust acts for functions in human systems. So, that’s one way to do it is if you have people skeptical of all the constructs of modernity, you don’t want to go back and recreate what they did in the feudal times. You don’t want to go back to what Marx thought of. These are all reactions. You want to go back and try to work from some fundamental, enduring principles of the human intelligence itself.

Simone Cicero:
There is no blueprint. I understand you said, context is everything. And we already discussed this, I think a lot also with Nora a few years ago, a couple of years ago, the first season, I think, with Nora Bateson, we spoke about this idea of contextual elements in the idea of organization, yes, but at the same time, there are some fundamentals in the economy that we have to organize in terms of, for example, food economies, or energy, or welfare, or education, which I agree totally, they are very much contextual, and need to be taken contextually, if we really want to somehow overcome this kind of formality that in modern, modernism, and modernity more in general and in industrialism, I would say, as driven into these elements of society.

So, the question is, yes, there is context. But there is also some very common practice, very common elements of society that we may have to organize. And should we be thinking about really how to organize post formally into these spaces as well? Or your vision is more that industrialism, I would say, can continue to exist to maybe, I don’t know, cover some parts of the economy, and post formal actors will emerge on top of it, which I’m skeptical about. So, that’s why I’m asking you to maybe double click on this.

Bonnitta Roy:
So, I wouldn’t say that post formal actors are on the top of some kind of developmental stack of human systems, right. I think it’s an anomaly. Certainly in modernity, that it’s an anomaly that this kind of phenomenon happens. And I would say that, in other times in history, when we have these anomalies like this, it’s not that they become winners over the long run, they become winners if everything else collapses. So, there’s — we see in the history of civilizations, and in just biological evolution, that when there are extinction events, or collapses, like when the dinosaurs died, the humans evolved not from some higher form, but from the lowly shrew, which was just busy doing its own little thing when the dinosaurs were around and had no chance to be the winner in any kind of evolutionary sense until the age of the dinosaurs collapsed.

And I see post formal actors in this narrative more like this kind of evolutionary phenomenon, where it’s a hedge against collapse, it’s a hedge against — it exists because they’re pockets of innovation that hedge against social collapse. Now, if you believe in imminent social collapse at a large scale, then you’re very interested in the potential for new civilization or radically new time to emerge from this phenomenon. But I don’t see it as working at scale, in a way that overtakes the momentum of modernity in a kind of continuous way. So, when you see post formal actors, you see them mostly in experimental, local experiments, in some cool little organizations, you see most of the activity at that scale.

Simone Cicero:
This is something that deserves some kind of double click or underscore, this idea that post formal actors, post formal thinking, you see that a little bit more as a resilience element or as a kind of fallback solution. This kind of thing, of course, makes me think about asking you questions about technology, then because your position somehow is a position of — very much of realism and complexity awareness in front of techno optimism or something like that. So, what do you think about how post formal actors relate with technology? What is the role of technology in all this? Because it seems like an enabling process, but then suddenly, this kind of technological powered way to respond to the crisis is discarded, as I understand from your point of view.

Bonnitta Roy:
Yeah. So, I’ll just give you an example that hopefully will answer your question. I think technology is important and crucial. I don’t think that we see the technology we actually need today in any big manner. I’m not sure what’s happening in little pockets of technological innovation. But I think that in general technology we see today is captured by the same problems that modernity has, or late modernity has. And I’ll give you just an example, a little exercise that I run. There’s three people in this little imaginary world, we do it in breakout groups. One person grows mangoes and one person has chickens, and one person fishes and they have like through schismogenesis, which means the families tend to do the same thing over time, so they have this stable kind of economy. And what you do is you have people working in breakout groups. And for half the people, half the breakout groups, you just tell them, okay, decide who’s going to be the egg person, and who’s going to be the mango person and who’s going to be the fish person.

In the other breakout group, you say the same thing, and then you say, one fish gives you — is equal to one basket of eggs is equal to one mango, okay. The only difference you’ve made is in one group you relativize the value exchange amongst the products, right? Then what you do is you show both groups another picture. And the picture is that the chicken lady, one of the mangoes she didn’t eat, has grown into a mango tree. And so in the group that you didn’t relativize the value exchange, they’re like, oh, cool, more mangoes for us. And the mango person was like, well, easier for me. And then the group that the only difference you made is you told them that what the value exchange was equal to, the mango person feels under threat because now mangoes are devalued in their economy. So, this is what I’m talking about, the deep enduring subjectivity of people. This happens — And when I did this exercise, this one guy said, when I was in Nepal, I saw this play out on the street between two vendors that were like 30 meters away.

And so when I teach this stuff, the question is, do you really want your governance to be on a dowel stack where everything is tokenized? Because the tokenization of value itself creates the very internal conditions that you’re trying to design around. And so this is what I’m saying, I don’t know how to build blockchains. I don’t know a lot about technology. But I would support people doing this work in understanding these deeper evolutionary primes or source code about the human condition. It’s the same thing with trust, people have different trust practices and different trust styles. And there’s a very clear organization of how different people go about trusting. If you’re building a technology that’s basically trying to instructurate, or formalize different trust practices, and you don’t know anything about the deep phenomenology of trust that’s in the human system, you’re not — until you evolve as a different species, it’s not going away. Then chances are, you’re not either creating something that’s effective, or you’re wasting your time running around the bush.

So, this is the kind of pedagogy that people who are using technology and rushing ahead to recreate society, they need to have some kind of humility about what they need to learn about the human condition. And that, the fundamental human condition doesn’t change from context to context. This is an enduring truth.

Stina Heikkila:
These are quite sort of mentally challenging processes to engage with, right. In my experience, sometimes it’s really hard to motivate people to think. And I don’t know if you have come across this, but it’s easier to follow rules. We can think about industrial organizations or formal organizations and bureaucracy and hierarchy. There is a sort of comfort in being able to lean against that and “it’s not my fault, it’s not my responsibility” because there are these rules and so on. So, we’ve talked a lot about this post formal actors being hedging against this collapse, which I really liked that view, because it makes it very easy to sort of understand also the positioning in the systems perspective. But how do you see that as a systems change? Is what is needed a systemic change, and in that case, is this movement of trying to get people to think more and to like, we were mentioning meta cognitive skills. So, I guess that is really the essence of your work. I admire that challenge that you have because I just have a feeling that it’s so much easier to fall into rule-based behavior than to actually have to reflect on it.

Bonnitta Roy:
So, this is where we actually can get optimistic because the fact that so many people are continuing to follow rules and keep the economy going, I mean, nobody — I’m not advocating for like, all of a sudden, we wake up tomorrow and more back to the Stone Age because all the systems has collapsed. So, we can have quite a lot of faith that there’s enough stability in the system to keep us going as we innovate, right? So, I actually don’t see that as a problem. I mean, of course, in some cases, it’s a problem. But it’s also a real important benefit, that the system is both extremely precarious, and yet, I mean, it’s amazing. People go to work. One of the things that amazes me is, when I was a kid, you would never see someone who was responsible for repairing the telephone lines, you would never see them working alone. And now everybody works alone. I mean, they’re up on a forklift, and they’re just all alone. But they get up every day, and they go to work and they know they’re not paid well. And there’s all these pressures on the average worker, or even people who have office jobs, and it’s kind of a play office and it’s a bullshit job, as Graeber said.

The fact that there’s so much stability in the human system at that level is actually very important. When there are other people that are trying to recreate society or reclaim our future, as innovators, we can be happy about that. There’s enough stability in the system that we don’t have to worry about it. I mean, we still have to worry about it. But that’s one thing. But also, it’s something to celebrate because if you get it right, and if you get something that is — if you lower the action threshold, so you make it easier to do one of these new kinds of organizational structures, and people are happier, then people — the same kinds of people will just move, because you can understand it, if you make it understandable, you make it easier, you make it more intrinsically rewarding, then they’ll just move.

So, it’s kind of like build it and they will come and all the onus is on the social innovators, that we really don’t have the thing yet, or else it would just be radically adopted because people are suffering and their lives are miserable. And they just want to follow the rules. But there aren’t any better rules, there aren’t any — or the onboarding or the learning curve is too high. So, we have to continue to lower the action thresholds for people to move. But they will move and then they’ll stay there because humans are endurers, we endure things.

Stina Heikkila:
I love that perspective.

Simone Cicero:
When we speak about you have to make it easier, right, you helped me catch up on maybe the last bits of the conversation towards this idea of the role of the designer, the architect, let’s say. Because if you are to make it easier, is this a design problem, and what is the design space then if we embrace this from the perspective of post formality? So, what can we design? How far can we push the design space as we think about making it easier for people to start thinking, as Stina said, start engaging with the need to build these kinds of, I would say — how do you call the little boats on the big boats when the big boat could sink?

Bonnitta Roy:
Rafts, yeah, the life rafts. Yeah.

Simone Cicero:
That kind of stuff.

Bonnitta Roy:
Well, I wanted to talk about ontological design, just throw it out there, this is where your question is going. And one of the things that I learned from Arturo Escobar ontological design, what he said is that modernity is a process of de-futuring. So, modernity looks into the future and it doesn’t really have any ideas for the future, because it’s just a line that it just does what it keeps — keeps on doing what it’s already done. So, he’s like, that’s just expanding the status quo. It’s a de-futuring. And he talks about can we get down to actually futuring the human condition and that means designing for a lot of micro niches and different ways in which to make a living. So, that’s kind of, it was an interesting way that really made me rethink or really reimagine the whole project is to not de-future by thinking of what is our future, that’s a one and done, but to really create futures.

Simone Cicero:
I love this idea of modernity being a process of de-futuring. Right? It really looks like de-risking to some extent. And so, at the end of the day, I think a lot of what we said about post formal actors, to me, sounds like actors, people that are not afraid to embrace a kind of full understanding of complexity and embracing risk to some extent, right? It’s about really engaging with the context, because the context is the only thing you can really engage with. Otherwise, you’re just playing the same old plot that now we increasingly understand is not going to work. So, this conversation I think we had on the podcast today really connects with several very important aspects of purpose, meaning, what drives work, to some extent, even if I must say, probably, we are not able to answer these questions. But to some extent, it is more like an epistemic approach.

Like I think I was talking to Stina in the background, these kinds of discussion about post formality connects with another meme or tribe, let’s say, that we are basically part of that is the kind of meme around Doomer optimism. So, to some extent, it’s really about acting in a different, from a Doomer perspective, right, from the perspective of understanding the complexity and the gravity of the inter laced problems that, the weaker problems that we are all immersed in. But at the same time, engaging with it, right, showing up and trying to kind of make things happen if you want. I don’t know if you have anything else to add, please do that in that case. But then I will also ask you to share with our listeners something, which is what we call bread crumbs, maybe one, two, three, whatever, as much as you want of suggestions, right. So, things that people can listen to, can kind of consume and they should be looking into.

Bonnitta Roy:
Okay. So, I will double click on the Doomer optimist podcast. And I totally agree with you that there’s an overlap. And I would suggest two recommendations, a short video that you can Google called A Hundred Thousand Beating Hearts, and a great documentary by Wim Wenders, called The Salt of the Earth. It’s a documentary about the photographer Sebastiao Salgado, and it will take you to places that you’ll be very surprised about.

Simone Cicero:
That’s great. So, Bonnitta, I cannot describe how much I enjoyed this conversation. I think you have been really available for us in this conversation to explore this idea where we don’t have many answers yet. So, thank you so much for your time, I hope you also enjoyed the conversation.

Bonnitta Roy:
Yeah, I loved it, it went by really fast. So, that’s how I know it was good.

Simone Cicero:
Right.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you so much. I love the conversation. There was a lot of like new things, because I guess I came from this idea with a little bit of a negative slant, I have sometimes a feeling that people are too slow to change or want to embrace change, and actually to put that in the light that we need some stability in the system, and we have those hedges of — against collapse. So, that really gave me a lot of food for thought. So, thank you very much. And we have mentioned a lot of resources in this conversation and to find them and to find out more about Bonnitta’s work you can head to boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. And you will find Bonnitta Roy’s episode there and you will find all the links to the relevant things including those last breadcrumbs that you gave us. So, thank you all for listening and remember to think boundaryless.