Evolving Shared
Infrastructure for
Planetary Governance
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order”
Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize-winning chemist
The sideways approach
Cultivating New
Systems Amidst Change
In a world going sideways, people are coming together to create new ways: ways on the side of the existing system; ways that are feeding from and feeding into the existing system. These side-ways offer promise to evolve out of the existing breakdowns and become the new ways, the new evolution of social, economic, and governance systems as the existing ways break down.
At Sideways we build coherence among groups through shared experiences, stories and network infrastructure. We believe that systemic transformations happen at the ground level through small groups that create clusters of coherence around a new system, which can emerge as existing systems become outdated.
Areas of work
Our Areas of Work
In-Person Experiences
In-Person Experiences
Coherence grows when people get together, and continues when they are geographically near enough to keep meeting and deepening those relationships. Through a variety of physical experiences we seek to create opportunities for groups to transcend siloes and co-create new ways of working together.
Sideways offers two flavors of in-person experience which are grounded in our Foundational Questions:
Common Goals experiences bring together organizations with similar goals (for example food security) to facilitate combined efforts and formation of coalitions or mergers.
Synergistic experiences bring together organizations with different skillsets or goals (for example food security and ecological farming) to form synergies where the combined skillsets form functioning ecologies.
Find an upcoming event.Registration.Co-host with usWhat do we offer?
Possibility-Led Stories
Possibility-Led Stories
Familiar ways of seeing and sensing the world keep us locked into dominant paradigms, but stories have the potential to open new possibilities for human and more-than-human collaboration.
Our generative journalism project, rather than seeking “objectivity” dives deep into our foundational questions with people who are working for positive change in the face of uncertainty. And our More-than-Human podcast is exploring how to integrate the needs of the planet and its living forms into our governance decisions. This experimental exploration looks into how to understand more-than-human perspectives.
Would you like to be interviewed?Would you like to interview?Would you like to join a Generative Journalism training workshop series?Trust-Building Software
Trust-Building Software
Digital infrastructure based on group reputation, credentialing and records of interactions for building trust within networks. By creating a repository of the value shared and the reputation of the entities in the network, groups are able to establish trust relationships that reduce the friction among entities for expanding their sharing. Network-level memory means organizations can discover who to trust without having to start from zero each time they meet, creating more opportunities for meaningful collaboration and sharing of resources.
We are working to develop a platform that enables groups to begin sharing credentials within networks, which we will be deploying in our in-person experiences.
Join the beta.Attend an event where we will be piloting this software.
How we work
Our Core Principles
Our responses start from a possibility:
We respond to today’s problems through an unbounded possibility-led approach.
Our actions happen at the speed of relationships:
We nurture caring and trusting relationships between people and organizations, creating the conditions for new transboundary responses to emerge.
Our systems are seen as interconnected:
our team
Lakshmi
Venugopal
India
Gijs
Spoor
India
Rebecca (Grace)
Rachmany
Slovenia
Jack
Becher
Germany
James
Lock
United Kingdom
contact us
Reach out to explore together!
Our team are open to questions, ideas and new opportunities to collaborate.
Follow us
Get More Information!
Our team is open to new questions, ideas and opportunities to collaborate.
FaQ
Everything You Need to Know About Us
Why are you called Sideways?
Are you serious?
How can I be involved?
You can be involved in all of our areas of work, for example by joining or co-hosting an event, testing and developing trust-building software through our in-person gatherings, or being interviewed or interviewing someone else in a possibility-led style.