Participative Repatterning

Learn methods for releasing outdated patterns and establishing new, resilient ones together.

All life and most activities show up in patterns, helpful and otherwise. To keep anything going at all entails some form of patterning. Once established, patterns tend to be persistent, engaging anyone entering a system and disengaging people who leave it, for example. Patterns may seem invisible and elusive until, through focused observation, they are traced and mapped out.

The tendency of patterns to persist is helpful when they are valuable and challenging when they are not. Well established patterns, held within the people who have been trained to use them, tend to reassert themselves, which means that they can prove very tough to change. Change is easier if the desired new patterning and its advantages are clear for people to learn and practice.

However, in many cases, especially with challenges arising in the uncertainties of Anthropocene, experimentation may well be needed to discover new patterns for viability. Repatterning must counter the tendency of old patterns to persist, while exploring and establishing the form that new patterns need to take. A process that is most necessary, and at the same time difficult and subject to risk.

H3Uni’s approach to repatterning recognises the unavoidable complexities, along with the vital urgencies, of these tasks. The variety of emergent challenges to the repatterning that is sought after needs to be met with variety in the range and scope of methods that can be deployed to secure effective and viable embedded change. [ref. Ashby’s law of requisite variety]

The five core methods we have focused upon have each been demonstrated to have a lasting impact on transformative change. These methods make up a learning journey; a journey of journeys, in fact, for each method creates its own learning journey. Singly and severally, they open pathways for growth: in purpose, spirit, understanding, insight and competence.

Each method is complete on its own and forms part of a whole journey. This is a feature of holism, that at any level of recursion, the whole is a complete entity in itself; while it also contributes to a larger whole, whose combined properties have greater impact than the sum of its components.

Experienced systemic practitioners will naturally want to explore, apply and develop many more methods and combinations of methods than these, and more are on offer in our Resource Library, where H3uni has a growing repository of methods for transformative practice. All are made available under our Creative Commons license. Practitioners are warmly encouraged to propose their proven methods to this accumulating resource.