Organising When the Ground Shifts
Towards a shared scaffolding for reflexive large-scale organising
When plans that once held together start to come apart, decisions unravel without notice, or coalitions stall on questions no one feels responsible to answer, it is tempting to conclude that commitment has faded. But perhaps it is not (only) commitment or care that is thinning; what if the baseline of collective coordination itself is moving?
Traditional organising from five-year plans, national reform programmes to the implementation of sustainable development goals assumed stable ground: clear authority, fixed goals, predictable landscapes. Today’s reality is closer to shifting sand. Strategies that cling to certainty become brittle; strategies that dissolve into fluidity lose anchor.
Working across a broad range of communities, we see a growing need for architectures that create coherence across difference. For scaffolding that can hold plural agents, changing conditions, and contested sovereignties without collapsing back into command-and-control.
Large-Scale Organising (LSO) describes this emergent coordination: diverse actors moving together at scales beyond the control of any single institution. It is not a solution in itself, but a way of engaging with complex adaptive systems — dynamic, entangled, and blind to limits if left unchecked.
The wager of 10×100, and of its emergent framework, is that LSO can be reoriented: away from extractive growth and towards mature progress that strengthens resilience. Reflexivity becomes the compass for this shift — an invitation to experiment together with forms of organising that are legitimate and adaptive, decisive and regenerative.
The evolution of organising
For most of human history, organising was small in scale. Hunter–gatherer bands coordinated through kinship and ritual, where survival depended on reciprocity, oral memory, and seasonal movement. Authority was situational, shared, and close to the land.
The first great leap came with agriculture. Surplus food enabled cities, armies, priesthoods, and empires. Written scripts and bureaucracies carried decisions across distances. But organising remained fragile: drought, invasion, or crop failure could unravel entire systems.
The second leap came with fossil energy: the carbon pulse. Coal and oil compressed millenia of solar energy into decades of extraction. This enabled unprecedented scales of production, war, and communication. Industrial states, colonial empires, and global corporations became possible only with this energy density. Humanity became a superorganism: billions of people, machines, and infrastructures coupled through flows of carbon, steel, finance, and data. The grammar of organising tilted toward maximizing throughput, often blind to limits and externalities.
We are now at a third leap. The carbon pulse is fading, and with it the illusion of infinite throughput. At the same time, new digital infrastructures — AI, distributed ledgers, planetary sensing — allow coordination in ways that were impossible before. We can perceive our collective footprint in real time, simulate scenarios across generations, and connect across sovereignties at planetary scale.
These new infrastructures don’t just accelerate past organising models; they enable new “grammars” of coordination. From shared risk perception to commitment architectures, from cascading invitations to ambient care, a new civic operating system is emerging. We can now make visible and amplify forms of coordination that were previously invisible or bounded by geography and institutional intermediaries.
This moment creates both peril and promise. On one side, authoritarian reflexes are supercharged by surveillance, concentrated capital, and algorithmic control. On the other, a unique capacity is opening: to develop forms of Reflexive Large-Scale Organising (RLSO) — adaptive, plural, regenerative. Not just organising at scale, but organising that can see itself, learn, and course-correct.
Reflexivity as a core challenge
At the heart of Large-Scale Organising (LSO) lies the question of: “What are we aiming for, and how do we know when to change course?” In stable contexts, the answer seemed simple: fix the target, design the plan, deliver. Certainty was imagined as possible, even desirable. Yet today, the pace of change unsettles this pattern. New threats intrude without warning, and unanticipated horizons of possibility emerge.
This is where reflexivity enters the frame. Direction and goals can no longer stand alone; they need something that keeps them responsive without losing their weight. A reflexive organising approach holds goals not as final endpoints but as living orientations: porous to signals and limits, open to plural futures, grounded enough to still give shape to collective action.
Seen this way, direction is not a single line but a weave. Large-scale organising carries multiple threads of intention at once:
Anchoring (fixed commitments) — Promises that stabilize attention, attract resources, and create trust.
Learning (adaptive adjustments) — Shifts that respond to feedback, keeping action relevant as conditions evolve.
Discovery (emergent horizons) — Open explorations that surface new pathways, unexpected allies, and regenerative possibilities.
Each thread alone carries risk. Anchoring without learning becomes brittle. Learning without anchoring drifts incoherently. Discovery without either scatters into noise. 10x100’s contribution is to design for these functions to coexist, not in sequence but in parallel.
These threads manifest in different ways depending on the organising context. Sometimes anchoring looks like visible commitments that aggregate into collective scaffolds. Sometimes learning unfolds through cascading invitations where each action generates the next. Sometimes discovery emerges through sustained care and attention that holds space for what cannot yet be named. The art is knowing which grammar fits the situation and how to weave them together.
Reflexive Large-Scale Organising (RLSO) highlights institutions and practices that do not treat anchoring, learning, and discovery as sequential stages, but as simultaneous layers of orientation — tethered to ecological realities and covenantal commitments, yet alive to the uncertainties of the present.
The architecture of scaffolding
The scaffolding we are building is less a blueprint and more a table of contents. It is to hold open the essential questions of large-scale organising. Each chapter offers a lens: why, what for, how, what, who, when, where, with what, whereby.
Through these lenses, we begin to map the terrain. Each one surfaces a spectrum of practice: from overshoot to reciprocity, from local to planetary, from short-term mobilisation to long-term stewardship. Each lens also establishes a baseline — the material or historical constraints that shape what is possible, and contains principles for design — not as fixed rules, but as patterns that can be tested, adapted, and revised.
The logic is simple: no single actor, theory, or tradition can make sense of all these questions by itself. By mapping the work into lenses, the scaffolding creates a shared compass. It allows contributors to enter from different angles, compare perspectives, and add detail without collapsing diversity into uniformity.
Crucially, this framework is a living structure. The spectra are provisional. The baselines will shift as conditions change. The principles are prompts for collective debate. What matters is not closure but contribution: each chapter is an invitation to expand, contest, and re-shape.
In this way, the scaffolding is not an end in itself but a framework for learning together — a container that can grow in depth and complexity as more voices and practices are woven in.
What is ahead
We are curious to learn more about what you are organising for, at what scale, with whom and under which limits (please use the comments for feedback).
In the next pieces, we will begin to explore this scaffolding — lens by lens, question by question — tracing spectra and naming trade-offs that are usually felt but rarely mapped.
If you are reading this from inside the 10×100 Converter, you are invited to contribute to the framework with your practices, doubts, and questions.
This article was compiled by Robyn Bennett & Caroline Paulick-Thiel, including comments from the LSO framework circle, building on work from Indy Johar (strategic outline) and core material from the 10×100 Converter. This work was developed between September and November 2025, based on original content discussed in the context of 10×100, structured and fine-tuned with AI assistance.
Thanks for this, the bit about strategies that cling to certainty becoming brittle really naile it. How do you see AI playing into these new flexible architectures?