The Scintilla Way: A Framework of Skillsets for Changemakers
The World As It Is and The World As It Could Be…
I love this concept.
I first came across it at a community organising training, when I was just beginning my work. I wasn't sure how I would use it, or why these words would stick so closely, but they planted this seed in me that’s grown over the years - a seed that has now evolved into Scintilla.
I’ve come to understand these words – the world as it is and the world as it could be – as articulating a gap I was trying to stand in, a space between worlds; between reality and possibility, between what we can see and what we can feel, between crisis and possibility.
A gap in which I believe we must stand as changemakers – holding the messy reality of a world that is transforming - if we’re to bring forth genuine social healing and change.
Our Capacities for Change
I've known from my own journey that we have a deep capacity for change as human beings. The chapters and lessons of my life have been rich and diverse: from a troubled, rage-filled adolescent, to a young conservative voter, to a nomadic 20-something on a years long healing journey, to a climate activist and trainer of nonviolent direct action.
I have not always thought the same as I do now, or approached life or changemaking the same way as I currently do – and I would imagine the same is true of you.
After all, if we are to live whole human lives, we will be in evolution throughout them.
While I hope to remain humble enough to know that my thinking and approaches to life & change will evolve in future, I have learned a few things along the way.
The first is that for change to be authentic and lasting - for it to be a form of healing, liberation or transformation - it must be accompanied by the right container, the right skills and the right conditions.
These three components - container, skills and conditions - shape our capacity, willingness and ability for deeper change.
Read another way: Not all efforts will lead to lasting, or meaningful change!
Sometimes in changemaking we try to create change from a place of shaming, blaming or otherising. It’s not uncommon we try this with ourselves too – the inner critic can be strong!
However, shame generally is a very poor driver of change. When we first encounter it most of us will try to run 100 miles from it – it’s deeply uncomfortable, and unless accompanied by a safe environment in which to process and share it, or a mindset or community that believes in redemption – it’s more likely to result in a doubling down, an insistence on being right, or a nervous system too dysregulated to unpack anything with intention.
Transformative change also can’t come from violence, overwork or attack. It’s not uncommon that we try to apply the same energy or method of the systems we’re changing, to changing the system.
We push through our limits, work till exhaustion (or burnout), ignoring the needs of our body – mimicking the energy of capitalism.
We use the language of violence in the pursuit of liberation - the fight, the struggle, the resistance!
But we cannot create change by mirroring the same energy we want to disrupt.
Audre Lorde, in all her wisdom, put it this way:
“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
Instead the capacity for transformative change comes with certain requirements - including safety, time, and intentionality.
What do I mean by this?
Well, safety is one of those core conditions we need: it’s not about comfort - it’s about allowing space for others (and ourselves!) to unpack beliefs and values, including how and why they exist, with a knowing that self-worth is inherent regardless of any change.
It’s ensuring there is enough holding to allow someone to remain intact while letting go of what no longer serves them. (When ideology becomes identity, our very sense of self can become threatened with change - and let’s just say, if letting go of an identity feels like death, or who even am I beyond this, the survival instinct can be strong).
Don’t get me wrong - the desire to otherise can be strong! And I get it - there are certain people doing really awful, abhorrent things in the world right now, and those people and structures need to be stopped and held accountable. And we are not creating the conditions for genuine change by refusing conversation, understanding, empathy or worthiness with those who disagree with us. Without safety, we will stay in survival mode, and survival mode has little capacity for adaptation.
This work isn’t about tolerating or condoning, it’s about developing the capacity to hold our own certainty lightly; to hold the both/and of a situation, to sit in the messy nuance and grey. It’s about a willingness to be with that which is different, and with that we don’t necessarily agree with.
Secondly, intentionality is formed in the containers we’re creating change in - our movements, our relationships, our teams, our communities. It’s being strategic in our choices - where we apply leverage and seek impact. It’s being mindful of the energy with which we’re approaching change (and indeed, whether we’re ‘embodying the change’).
This intentionality is also honed by increasing our sense of agency and power; the reminder that we get to choose who we are – it's not written in destiny or foregone at the time of our birth. We get to choose, and every day we get to choose again.
And this choice extends beyond our individual identities – we are also choosing and creating our collective world. Our societies, systems, and institutions aren't inevitable or natural laws; they are human constructions that we have collectively agreed upon and continually recreate through our participation.
Different choices can lead to entirely different worlds - we must be embracing of our capacity to choose again.
Of course, the conditions for change are also structural – that we have the time, the resources, the environment, the safety in which to evolve – personally and collectively.
The work of remaking the world will not happen overnight, because true transformation doesn’t just require a shift in policy or government – it requires a fundamental shift in the beliefs, mindsets, values and stories that underpin our culture and systems, that shape our shared world.
This work has a gestational time that we cannot rush. The natural world operates at a variety of speeds - from the force of a hurricane, to the speed of a cheetah, to the pace of a snail. But when our culture is obsessed with speed and scale, we assume that slowness is indicative of failure, rather than an organic re-emergence that requires its own timescale.
Just as in our personal lives we cannot rush ourselves out of the liminal, that the in-between goo is where we are re-formed, the same is true of our wider social world. That we are in an in-between goo right now; and there’s no promise that we will make it out of this liminal space intact (in fact, if we consider the caterpillar, we likely won’t), but there’s also no rushing the process that we must individually and collectively move through.
And yet, while the in-between can’t be rushed, it still calls for our participation. Liminality is not a waiting room - it’s a practice ground. We’re not passive passengers but co-creators of what comes next. This means attending not only to what is falling apart - the world as it is - but also to what is ready to be born - the world as it could be.
And for our work to have its greatest impact, we must attend to the roots of the crises we face, not just the symptoms.
Our outer crises are deeply entangled with our inner wounds, and transformation at the systemic level requires transformation at the personal, relational, and cultural levels too.
This is the work Scintilla Centre was created for - a space to equip changemakers with the skills, wisdom and community to do this deeper work; to address the systemic, spiritual, and somatic layers of change.
The Depth of Our Crises
Till recently, a common model used to explain our world was VUCA - volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. It was a term coined by the US Army War College, and it quickly was adopted as an understanding across the world.
In 2018 however, futurist Jamais Cascio suggested this was outdated, and proposed a new model for the world we live in - BANI: brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible.
You see, we live in an age of polycrisis, meaning there’s not just one crisis – there’s multiple, and each is deeply interconnected with the other.
We face economic downturns, trade wars and rising inflation (and indeed, an entire economic system that’s goals are out of sync with our planetary boundaries).
We face climate change and biodiversity crises – ecosystem collapse, food insecurity, water scarcity, increasing (in both frequency and severity) natural disasters.
We face a rise in populism, authoritarianism and a resurgence of far-right movements; movements that present threats to democracy, and that threaten the major social progress of the last 60 years, including racial and gender justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate action.
We face rising global conflict and violence, escalating in no small part by the last three crises.
We face increasing numbers of refugees and large-scale mass migration, as people are forcibly displaced from their homes by all of the previous events.
None of these crises are happening in a vacuum - each intersects and is entangled with the other.
There are many names for this time: the polycrisis, the metacrisis, the Great Unravelling, the Long Dark. Some have predicted it for many years, and and it’s expected this time will last many more.
As changemakers however, key to working in this time is understanding that our crises also run deeper than they appear on the surface. Open the news and you'll see the latest horror: deportations, rising authoritarianism, political chaos, violence waged on innocent people, or the latest climate catastrophe.
Our news and political system present the headline as the problem – and with this, it's easy to think that if we just fixed this particular policy, stopped that one person, raised more money, developed more technology, toppled that toxic party, pushed a little harder, win the next election - we'll be okay.
But the deeper causes of these crises are woven into the foundations of our modern world. They cut to the heart of what it means to be human - our relationship with each other, with the more-than-human world, with power, and with the stories we live inside.
The polycrisis didn’t emerge overnight – it is rooted in centuries of harm: colonisation, slavery, genocide, ecocide. Violence begets more violence until it is interrupted. Trauma, unseen and unheard, begets more pain until it is seen and processed.
So what’s underneath these crises? What is the foundation of our modern world?
First, we can consider the stories that shape our world.
Imagine for a moment that you are growing a strawberry plant. You probably hoped for a healthy plant when you sowed the seeds, but instead it’s struggling to survive, producing only a few tart strawberries at a time.
What are you likely to do?
In most likelihood, it wouldn’t be to blame the plant, or give it a pep talk filled with messages of endurance or how strong it could be after this experience. It’s also unlikely that you would judge or criticise the plant, condemning it for not thriving like the silverbeet you planted nearby.
Instead, you would likely look at the plant’s conditions: the soil, sunlight, rain, or quality of the nutrients.
Stories are the soil of our shared world, shaping our mindset and values. They’re beliefs, values and assumptions, conscious and unconscious, that play out in our thoughts, words, and actions.
Stories determine the shared reality of a culture, they define the limits of what we believe to be possible or impossible, normal or abnormal, wise or reckless, desired or undesirable, and they’re cemented into our world through systems – cultural, economic, and political.
Stories, it is no exaggeration to say, make our world. In today’s interconnected age however, many of the stories underpinning our systems do not serve us:
We have the story of scarcity - a story that says there’s not enough to go around, and that we must hoard, restrict, or dominate to ensure there’s enough.
We have stories of supremacy - that say a certain race, gender, or body is superior to another. That bodies of a certain size, colour, or ability are either undesirable or less valuable.
We have the story of separation - that says humans are separate from the natural world, that we can somehow thrive apart from it. It’s this mindset, one that has forgotten the ways of old cultures, that knew us to be part of a living world, that is at the heart of extractivism and climate change.
It’s these stories that underpin our crises, that shape our relationship to power and resources, and that form the very mindset through which we engage with the crises themselves.
Going further, these stories don't just live outside of us - they live in us, as us and through us.
Between self and world there is not a boundary but a mirror, reflecting patterns that flow in both directions.
I’ll share more on this another week, but in our personal struggles - burnout, exhaustion, imposter syndrome, loneliness - we embody microcosms of our larger cultural narratives; ones built on extraction and scarcity, on domination and control, and on the illusion of separation from the living world that we are made from.
The same mindset that treats the Earth as a resource to be extracted from treats our bodies and spirits as machines to be optimised.
Changemaking for this reason must integrate the inner and the outer, recognising the inherent symbiosis of these domains. The emotional, spiritual and somatic terrain of transformation is as critical as the political and systemic. As we work on one, the other shifts in response, and when we attend to both simultaneously, our efforts gain coherence and power.
Beyond our cultural stories however, there are two other defining factors at the heart of the polycrisis.
The first, is our wisdom gap There is a vast gap between the technological capabilities we hold - weapons of mass horror and destruction, AI and its unfolding capabilities - and the capacity we have to use these tools well. (Which, to be clear, in one of these cases, means *not* using).
As a species, intellectually and capably, we are genius and brilliant. We sometimes forget the wonder behind things we consider every day: phones, video calls, electricity, plumbing, flying.
But the dominant culture we live within, and the stories it is founded on, does not support the development of wisdom; instead it says that greed, fear, domination and control are the natural ways of us, or are instincts to be celebrated. Our ideas of success are correlated with individualism, power, winning and being the top of a hierarchy.
Instincts - equally as instinctive to us as humans, and to the formation of societies - such as care, cooperation, compassion, reflection, love, or empathy are disregarded as ‘soft’, ‘nice-to-haves’, or ‘feminine’.
It is these instincts, however, that allow us to act wisely, and along with long-term thinking, we must develop them to bridge the gap we face.
The second, is the fraying of our relational fabric - our lack of trust in one another, in our public institutions and a rising sense of loneliness.
A study at the University of Southampton showed trust in parliament is declining in 36 democracies, including Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Australia and the United States.
A study in the US said the share of adults who agreed “most people can be trusted” declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018.
There are genuine reasons for this - many valid.
But we need one another - we are communal and relational beings. We thrive in relationship. We cannot do this work alone, and we weren’t meant to.
Without restitching our relational fabric, without nurturing our most beautiful instincts as humans - compassion and love - and without re-writing the stories that underpin our systems and culture, addressing the challenges of this time will feel like a game of whack-a-mole.
To address the depth of our crises, we must return to the foundations: story, wisdom, connection.
Because a polycrisis is also a moment of polyopportunity. If our crises are entangled with one another, unexpected leverage points exist – small places where we can make big change.
Our work is not to prioritise one crisis over another, or to try to tackle the total big picture, but to recognise that each piece of work matters – that each thread is connected to a larger fabric.
In this time, we need economists and activists and politicians – and we also need farmers, and creatives, and teachers, and medical workers, and conservationists, and accountants, and lawyers, and engineers, and artists and all of us, wherever we are, committing to transforming the foundations of our shared world.
(Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote, “Wherever You Go, There You Are” - I think of it this way, wherever you are, there lies the work.)
If our crises run deeper than the surface, than each and every one of us also has a role to play in the world's remaking, because each and every one of us has something to offer, something unique, something beautiful.
The Scintilla Approach: Building Capacity for Transformation
I believe not so much that we were made for these times, but that we are in them. And that brings with it a sobering reality: we must greet this moment with whatever capacity we have, while developing and trusting our ability to stretch and grow to meet what is coming.
So how do we do this? How do we stand in the gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be? How do we create the conditions for change, and address the deeper causes of our crises?
What does this all mean, tangibly?
First, we start with building the capacity to meet this moment. This means developing the ability to feel and honour our grief rather than suppress it, to channel our rage into creative action, and to see our overwhelm as a teacher rather than an obstacle. Learning to work with our emotions as a guide and compass sets us on the path to deeper wisdom and transformation.
From here, we work on restoring right relationship - with our hearts, with each other and with and the living systems we're a part of. It means deliberately interrupting the cycles and patterns that no longer serve us - both the ones we hold collectively (ahem, the war machine) and the ones that play out in our personal lives.
This work requires us to develop both inner resilience and outer skillfullness in equal measure. It means training ourselves to discern when to act swiftly and when to create space for emergence. It means learning how to move from integrity rather than reactivity, especially when under pressure.
Perhaps most importantly, it requires that we cultivate the capacity to hold paradox and complexity - to embrace the both/and over the either/or, and the reality that two things can be true at once. Without the capacity to hold this tension, we remain trapped in the same paradigms we're trying to transcend, unconsciously reproducing the very patterns we seek to transform.
Importantly, this work isn't abstract.
There are tangible, teachable skills that we can develop to grow as changemakers and as humans.
The Five Dimensions of Changemaking
At the Scintilla Centre, we've developed a framework of five interconnected domains of skills that support changemakers in deepening their impact in this time.
Importantly - these domains are not silos, nor do they occur in easy to tick boxes. They’re practices – muscles – and they speak to one another.
1. To Lead & Inspire Communities.
Skilled leadership is not about titles or control - it's about the energy we bring to the work, and the tangible skills that allow for ideas, movements, and energies to build and grow. These look like:
Cultivating an Internal Compass: This is knowing what matters most to you, listening to deeper callings, and being able to navigate by those stars even in the dark of night. It means learning to distinguish between external pressures – faster, quick, more, now - and internal wisdom, and involves recognising the difference between reaction and response, between urgency and importance.
Inspire a Vision: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we are, often, in this world starved for a vision. It’s not enough to know what you’re against, or to simply resist the old. We must also be writing and sharing the story of something new, something beautiful, something regenerative, something possible. To inspire a vision is a skill of many great changemakers through history, from Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr, to Ghandi, to Jesus.
Sensemaking & Pattern Recognition: The ability to distinguish signs & signals from noise, to identify patterns, and to make meaning from complexity. This involves cultivating both an analytical approach but also intuitive knowing - learning to recognise when something significant is emerging before it's fully visible.
Coalition-Building & Network-Weaving: The work never belongs to us alone - whether that ‘us’ is as an individual or organisation. This skill involves bringing diverse perspectives together, finding common ground, and creating structures for collective action that honour our unique gifts.
2. To Seed & Shape Change
Remaking the world requires us to reimagine what's possible, to lean into vision, creativity, and moral imagination. This looks like:
Systems Thinking: Seeing the interconnections between parts, understanding feedback loops, and recognising leverage points for change are essential skills for addressing root causes rather than symptoms. This also means seeing the way systems exist within us, because underneath every system is a story - a mindset, set of values or beliefs.
Radical Imagination & Visionary Thinking: Our world is shaped by imagination - but whose, and for whose benefit? The capacity to imagine beyond current constraints is essential for remaking the world. This involves practices that help us expand our creativity, envision radically different futures, and then work to seed them into reality.
Prototyping & Experimenting: In a world that is composting and collapsing, we need to be willing to try new approaches, to learn through doing, and to iterate based on feedback. This includes developing comfort with uncertainty and failure as part of the creative process.
Storytelling of Ideas & Cultural Narratives: We’re narrative driven creatures, and stories shape reality. The ability to identify and shift cultural stories (including the ones that live within us), to craft compelling narratives that inspire action (give us something to say yes to!), and to clearly articulate visions of what could be are powerful tools for transformation.
3. To Anchor Inner Wholeness & Wellbeing
This is long haul work, and we need to cultivate the conditions within us for an enjoyable, and sustainable journey. As changemakers, this means developing:
Self-Awareness & Emotional Maturity: The ability to recognise our own patterns, triggers, and biases is fundamental to impact as a changemaker. Without this, we risk unconsciously reproducing harmful dynamics even as we try to transform them.
Adaptability & Resilience: In rapidly changing conditions - which our world is in - the capacity to adapt is critical – both individually, and collectively. This means learning to bend without breaking, creating the conditions for our flourishing, and cultivating a mindset that looks for opportunity.
Presence & Somatic Awareness: Our bodies hold wisdom that our minds can sometimes miss. Developing embodied awareness helps us access our intuition, honour our authentic capacity and callings, and remain grounded in challenging situations.
Self-Care & Joy: Real self-care is not bubble baths or face masks - it’s not anything you have to buy. It’s honouring our physical, emotional and spiritual needs. This means developing practices that replenish your energy, finding joy in the journey, and creating cultures of care rather than exploitation - because self-care is a pathway to collective care.
4. To Tend to Soul Work
We’re collectively in a dark night of the soul: a moment of moral and spiritual reckoning, and the way out is unclear. We must consider the soul work of this time as an integral part of our human and changemaker journey. This looks like:
Navigating Grief & Dark Nights of the Soul: As we face ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and personal loss, the ability to move through grief rather suppress it becomes essential. This involves developing practices that help us process collective and personal sorrow, finding meaning and purpose even in darkness.
Ritual & Meaning-Making: Creating meaningful practices that honour transitions, mark important moments, and connect us to something larger than ourselves. These are the practices we return to, spaces to cultivate wisdom and meaning.
Humility & Moral Courage: This paradoxical pairing - the humility to know we don't have all the answers, that we can’t do all the work, and the courage to act anyway - is at the heart of the Scintilla Way.
Connection with the More-than-Human World: Rebuilding our relationship with the living systems we are a part of is both practical and spiritual work. This involves practices that help us recognise ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it, and that restore our sense of belonging to the web of life.
5. To Restitch our Relational Fabric
Our relational fabric is fraying, both with each other and the more-than-human world. Repairing trust, stewarding our power, and learning how to work across lines of difference are necessary skills in these times.
Empathy, Deep Listening & Perspective-Taking: The capacity to genuinely understand others' experiences and perspectives, even when they are radically different from our own, is essential for building bridges. This involves practices that help us move beyond judgment to curiosity and connection.
Navigating Complexity - Holding Nuance & Paradox: Our polarised world often demands binary thinking - us vs them, right vs wrong, this vs that - but transformation requires holding multiple perspectives simultaneously. This involves developing comfort with ambiguity, the knowledge that two things can be true at once, and skills for facilitating dialogue across difference.
Power Literacy & Stewardship: Understanding how power operates and learning to work with it ethically is crucial. This includes recognising your own power, using it with care and intention, and helping challenge or redistribute power in ways that serve collective flourishing.
Nonviolence & Conflict Reconciliation: In a world with increasing conflict and violence, nonviolence offers an embodied and relational path to transformation. This involves developing both the philosophical understanding and practical skills to engage with conflict as a creative rather than destructive force.
Each of these skill domains represents a skill and practice.
At Scintilla, we believe that by cultivating these capacities in ourselves and each other, we can stand more effectively in that crucial gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be - and help birth a more just and regenerative world.
Why Scintilla?
When launching the Scintilla Centre, I chose the name "Scintilla" - meaning a tiny spark or trace - because transformation often begins with the smallest spark.
An idea or calling that won't let you go.
A moment of insight.
An act of kindness or compassion that challenges our preconceptions.
These scintillas, when tended carefully, can light whole landscapes of possibility.
Our intention at Scintilla is to equip changemakers with the skills, wisdom, and community to remake the world. To greet this moment not just with action (although that is necessary), but with a different quality of being.
This isn't about denying the reality we live in - we face existential threats and risks, and opening the news can feel like a tidal wave of grief, of sadness, of rage.
But collapse is not just an ending - it is a threshold.
Polycrisis holds polyopportunity.
It is in the rubble of what is unravelling that new ways of being are waiting to emerge.
