“Wayfinders”: The Resistance, Impediments, and Principles

Exploring resistance as a form of generative meaning-making

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite — the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment — is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most important challenge of our times. ~Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

Barrett Biggers Art

The Resistance

Wayfinders are organizations, institutions, communities, and collectives that have dared to dream of a different destiny. Their very resistance to the current narrative is a form of generative response to being and meaning-making. Their resistance is their raison d’etre. This resistance takes the form of fearless imagination, collective dreaming and visioning, sense-making and meaning-making — all towards envisioning a pluriversal world, a ‘world where many worlds fit’.

Let me break this down further. Organizations today are entrapped by the economic monomyth of growthism and the hegemonic narrative of power, productivity, and privilege. By resisting the lure of this toxic narrative, Wayfinders lay the foundations for vastly different civilizational narratives of which they are the seed-bearers, the imaginal cells. I have written earlier in this series about Wayfinders becoming crucibles and containers for the emergent future to take shape and manifest.

Let me reiterate, I am not describing a homogenous, singular ‘future’ to be imposed on all. The future is essentially pluriversal, heterogenous, contextual, and cultural. The very word ‘future’ means different things to different cultures and cosmologies. The Wayfinders decentralize and dismantle the current story, which becomes merely one of many lenses, and draws in and from the wisdom already existing in the peripheries and margins. This makes for a localized, decentralized, and contextualized emergence of futures where many voices, many narratives, and many ontologies find their rightful places.

The diverse cosmologies, epistemologies, and ontologies intersect, interweave, and interconnect creating a glorious amalgamation of completely new, elegant, and emergent ways of relating to and living on this planet. This, I believe, will be the foundational work of Wayfinders. Being a Wayfinder is, thus, an intergenerational project. It is a post-human, post-growth, post-capitalist vision of organizations laying the groundwrok for a civilizational transition and moving from Anthropocentrism towards Biocentrism. In brief, these are organization who not only believe in but embody regeneration in the true sense of the word. They understand that ‘regeneration’ doesn’t mean well-being for a few communities or a few cultures.

To be profoundly regenerative is thus a form of resistance. It is resistance to the idea of human exceptionalism, to the narrative that centers a few cultures and bodies, to the techno-vision that continues to seek solutions in technology, to any form of power-centrism, and to all forms of exploitation, expropriation, and extraction. In short, Wayfinders arise as and in response to the pluri-crises of our times and embody a world that moves from artificial growth and scarcity to the paradigms of abundance and enough-ness.

Wayfinders are the visionaries of an emergent future. Visionary organizations are needed to inspire and model generative sensibilities. It is “a practice that starts by reframing the world around us in radically new ways,” writes Sascha Haselmayer in The Slow Lane. Becoming a Wayfinder thus requires a recognition of the power of fearless imagination and shared dreaming, collective sensemaking, and the holding of space for what wants to emerge.

What organizations decide to do now doesn’t just matter. It matters exponentially more!

Deep in our hearts we know that a different world is possible…

What narratives must Wayfinders envision and energize to act as compasses toward the New Story?

How can Wayfinders hold space for meaning-making, sensing, and emergence?

What are some of the foundational principles of Wayfinders?

Being a Wayfinder is a little like steering by starlight. You need to have compasses and acute sensemaking abilities that allow for navigation in uncertain, complex, and shifting terrains. This requires an ability to dialogue with one’s environment rather than diagnose it.

Organizations today are caught between what spelled success in the past and a gradually dawning sense of a doomed future. They have to cut exponentially more corners to stay profitable. The mega profits being made by a few at the cost of life on this planet are rapidly decreasing all future potentials, unravelling the social fabric across communities and cultures, and creating intergenerational havoc with the looming prospects of turmoil and civil wars. Organizations are not going to come out of this mess unscathed.

The one way to redeem themselves is to let go of the narratives that bind them and blind them, incapacitating them from taking meaningful actions. The cracks and fissures are already visible; but they can also be places of emergence and possibilities. The trick is to stay in the cracks, move beyond human-centrism, and sense into our profound interconnectedness. Only by completely upending our narratives and decentering our gaze can we appreciate the messages of the cracks. The collapse of organizations as we know them is inevitable. Wayfinders embrace this collapse, this descent into the cracks and reimagine themselves anew.

Organizations of yore banked upon their diagnostic, predictive, and forecasting abilities based on controlling uncertainties, managing risks, removing obstacles to one’s goals, beating competition and defining precise milestones and timelines. Dialogic approach of the Wayfinders, on the other hand, is relational, convivial, emergent, and imaginative. This requires staying with and befriending uncertainties, seeing obstacles as opportunities for expanding one’s peripheral vision and inclusion of diverse cosmologies, collaborating with other Wayfinders, sharing methods and practices, and listening to the collective wisdom hitherto ignored and delegitimized.

The Impediments

However, there are obstacles and roadblocks, many of them. Some are visible and tangible, but most are invisible, implicit, buried deep within our mindsets, cultures, and narratives.

• We are psychologically addicted to certainty and predictability.
  “The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives?” ~Uncivilisation, The Dark Mountain Manifesto.
  Organization strive against odds to grasp at predictability, doing everything in their power to erase all vestiges of uncertainty. It is this inherent tendency that blocks organizations from reimagining different futures. They mistake innovation for transformation and end up tweaking surface issues while never really rooting within.
  This pattern was broken by the pandemic, tearing the fabric of the well-constructed facades of modernity for good. Simultaneous systems collapse showed not only their fragility but the underlying obsolescence embedded in those systems. As we lurch from crises to crises, it is evident that the old order has been upended. And it is time for Wayfinders to step up to the call of their destinies or else be swept away by the same.

• We want to appear in control, even when there is nothing to control. This is directly linked to the first point. The entire premise of predictability is linked to the illusion of control that humans (a handful at least) wanted to have over nature. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. This birthed the story of separation underscored by quantification, reductionism, rationalism, human exceptionalism and Anthropocentrism.
  Modern civilization is an outcome of a hegemonic Eurocentric narrative of control, colonization, and capitalization — of nature, certain bodies and cultures, and life. Now that the control is irrefutably slipping away in the shape of fires, floods, and furies, modernity/coloniality is making a last-bid desperate attempt to farther their powers through generative AI and other exponential technology. The problem is they are merely exacerbating the underlying root causes while pushing the world ever faster to the brink.
  The addiction with control, like all addictions, need ever larger fixes to work, and eventually destroys the self.

• We want answers rather than staying with questions.
  Again, connected with the need for certainty and control is the inability to stay with questions. This is exacerbated by our education systems ‘one right answer’ approach, recognition for speedy problem-solving in corporate, the reward systems in all institutions from education to business that glorify ‘quick thinking,’ rapid decision making, ‘smart problem solving’ and other similar skills all associated with a reductionist and piecemeal approach at the cost of holistic understanding. Since the system as a whole is rarely understood, superficial questions get answered, root problems continue, new issues crop up elsewhere as feedback loops set in triggering unthought of reactions.

• We are caught in the trap of separation.
  The current machine metaphor hooked to reductionist thinking and a powerful controlling urge keep individuals in their atomized, isolated, fractured bubbles exacerbated by a materialist and competitive narrative. However, the pandemic was a portal into the felt sense of our interconnectedness. Even as the invisible virus ravaged the globe — caste, class, race, gender, nation-state borders and boundaries proved pointless. The facade of separation was ripped off although the powers in control refused to see it.
  Nonetheless, if enough people have a felt sense of our indelible interconnectedness, there is bound to be an underlying shift in the metaphors and narratives that drive civilization.

• We are stumped by the fragility and the boundarylessness of this life. The complexity is overwhelming. With the veil of predictability gone, the fragility feels overwhelming. Because the current narrative upholds the substantial and tangible, the quantifiable and manageable, the visible and the material, individuals and organizations tend to grasp at its pseudo-support like a drowning man at a straw forgetting that human civilization is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than beliefs and values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future. Now a familiar human story is being played out.

It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story. ~Uncivilisation, The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

• We are not used to slowing down.
  The current narrative glorifies speed to a pathological extent. It’s biggest selling point seems to be getting humans and machines to be more ‘productive,’ ‘efficient,’ ‘fast,’ ‘accurate,’ and other such measures that apparently justify our existence. The very exaltation of AI rests on its seeming capacity to reduce hours of work to seconds.
  Given this underlying obsessive compulsive disorder with speed, it is little wonder that when asked to slow down, individuals (especially high profile, powerful ones) and organizations are rendered clueless. Since speed equals success, slowing down is seen as failure, a kind of passivity akin to giving up.
  This deep-seated fear of slowing down arises from an essentially vacuous narrative that strips one of humanity, meaning, connection, and purpose. To regain our true sense of being, it is important that this gimmick be seen and exposed for what it is — a bid by those in power to extract the most in terms of human labor and time towards accumulation of capital. To expose the narrative, it is crucial that we slow down, that organizations take a pause, and look within.

The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly. ~Uncivilisation, The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

The Eight Principles

So far, I have explored Wayfinders as embodying forms of resistance and the obstacles they will encounter as they traverse this map-less territory of transformation. Here, I have also explored a few guiding principles that can be their compasses in this long and eventful journey.

1. Wayfinders come into existence in times of social, economic, and ecological unravelling. They acknowledge that a whole way of living is passing into history. They face this reality and commit to engaging with radical fearlessness in re-imagining different futures.

2. Wayfinders don’t see problems and challenges as requiring immediate solutions. For Wayfinders, problems are cracks to be explored. They stay with and in the cracks, and recognize that the cracks are the gaps through which the glimpses of different possible futures become visible.Ring the bells that still can ring
   Forget your perfect offering
   There is a crack, a crack in everything
   That’s how the light gets in
   ~Leonard Cohen, Anthem

3. Wayfinders understand that the roots of the crises lie in the underlying narrative. They resist the power of the old story and commit to becoming containers for different narratives that are pluriversal, biocentric, and emerge from the wisdom of interbeing and wholeness.

4. Wayfinders invite the practice of fearless imagination that go beyond the cognitive; storytellers, weavers, connectors, poets, and artists have important roles to play in harnessing the collective wisdom that arise. It is through shaping, telling, and re-telling of stories through different forms that realities are formed. They do so by deliberately designing infrastructures of imagination.

5. Wayfinders attempt to step out of the bubble of human-centeredness with its power centered around a few cultures and bodies; they strive to move towards a Biocentric vision that is in affirmation of all life — bears and beavers, mountains and oceans, forests and coral reefs, ants and bees, of which humans are another interconnected part.

6. Wayfinders are grounded in their local contexts and cultures, cosmologies and ontologies while accepting the realities of a networked and globalized world. They see these connections as opportunities for collaboration and co-sensing rather than as power hierarchies.

7. Wayfinders welcome the interconnection and weaving of myriad world visions and ontologies and don’t attempt to give precedence to a few. They celebrate the coexistence of diverse ways of being and understand that the foundational narratives and collective vision will create the necessary coherence.

8. Wayfinders understand that ‘power’ is a form of energy that will keep flowing. Power hoarding leads to loss of well-being for the whole. Therefore, Wayfinders design and facilitate spaces to be dialogic and convivial rather than diagnostic and authoritative.

   In the next part, I explore some of the infrastructure of imagination that organizations can use to seed the new stories of our pluriversal and possible futures.