Rolling Up Our Sleeves

Notes from the 10×100 Converter Launch at the European Forum Alpbach

When people talk about “large-scale transformation”, the verbs are usually abstract: accelerate, unlock, mobilise, coordinate. The diagrams are neat, the arrows are straight, while the actual muddy and strenuous work involved is rarely mentioned.

In August 2025, we invited ourselves to a different approach.

For three days at the European Forum Alpbach, about 35 people from politics, administration, science, finance, law, activism, business, and design met to ask a simple but demanding question:

If collapse is no longer a metaphor but a backdrop, how do we organise across scales in ways that are actually livable – for people and for places?

The gathering was the launch of the 10×100 Converter: a three-year field for learning how to do large-scale organising in practice, across cities and bioregions. For us, Alpbach was less a conference to “discuss the future” but a seedbed: three days to surface shared conditions, agree some ground rules, and make concrete 100-day commitments that can be tested in the real world.

This article is an attempt to distill what we learned there in a way that might be useful beyond this specific cohort – a field note from one experiment in how to organise when the ground is moving.

Photo: Andrei Pungovschi, 10×100 Lab at EFA25

Starting from patterns, not achievements

Before Alpbach, we asked participants to share their current organising practice – what to pay attention to, what to let go of, and what to protect at all costs in their work.

Across very different contexts, three organising patterns appeared:

• Caring – attending to emotional stamina, honest politics, and rituals that actually nourish rather than perform.

• Relating – building trust across differences through human moments, translation across worlds, and shared “barn-raising” rather than big declarations.

• Landing – establishing enough clarity early on: presence before purpose, explicit norms around power and pace, and transparent co-ownership.

In other words: before we talk about scaling, we need to talk about how we show up, how we relate, and how we decide what is ours to do.

So we began there. The first evening was deliberately relational: a long dinner in a Tyrolean restaurant, arriving as humans rather than job titles, telling the stories of how each of us ended up caring about regeneration in the first place.

On the second day we moved from why to how – mapping personal lineages into current organising roles, and then stepping outside to co-write a simple covenant: behaviours we can live by amid uncertainty.

By the third morning, we were ready to talk about projects and infrastructure. Now, our discussions were rooted in something more durable: a shared diagnosis of the field we work in.

Organising challenges that are not personal failures

When people work on climate, justice, or democratic renewal, they often assume that the difficulties they encounter are “their own fault”: not strategic enough, not disciplined enough, not optimistic enough.

At Alpbach, a different picture emerged. When we mapped “what is hard” about organising across difference and scale, the patterns that showed up were remarkably consistent across sectors and countries. They are less about individual shortcomings, and more about field conditions.

1. System logics & institutional capture

• Institutions operating in a permanent state of denial and paralysis, despite decades of warnings.

• Economic architectures that actively reward extraction and penalise regeneration.

• Narrow, monopolised knowledge infrastructures; public discourse that feels joyless, polarised, and heated.

Organising question: Where do we create cracks in dominant logics and grow regenerative ones – even while working inside slow, sometimes captured institutions?

2. Trust & relational fabric

• Erosion of trust in public institutions, across partnerships, and inside teams.

• Silence born of fear of conflict; ego and self-protection undermining solidarity.

• Collaboration that is fragile: strong in good weather, brittle when tension arrives.

Organising question: How do we weave resilient structures of trust that can hold conflict, align contributions, and survive the next disagreement?

3. Capacity & agency

• The recurring mismatch between ambition and bandwidth: “city-wide climate neutrality” with a handful of overstretched people.

• Over-production of ideas and under-investment in follow-through.

• Burnout as a structural feature, not a personal flaw.

Organising question: How do we build capacity and discipline without reproducing the extractive tempo we are trying to move beyond?

4. Meaning & motivation

• Hope and despair are tightly interwoven.

• Visions of success that don’t match – across departments, movements, regions.

• Difficulty translating regenerative ideas into stories that are read, understood, and acted upon.

Organising question: How do we sustain meaning and shared motivation in the middle of distraction, grief, and moral fatigue?

5. Existential orientation

• A sense of being too small for the scale of crisis, yet constantly pulled toward short-term urgencies.

• A longing for forms of work that recognise us as relational beings, not just productivity units.

• The need to hold urgency and serenity in the same body.

Organising question: What does it mean to orient ourselves – personally and collectively – in a time when “normal” is not coming back?

These five challenges are not exclusive to the 10×100 cohort. They are, increasingly, the background climate for anyone trying to work toward systemic change. Naming them clearly was the first step in treating them as design constraints rather than private burdens.

Photo: Magdalena Prettenthaler, 10×100 Lab at EFA25

Designing a “stack” for large-scale organising

It is tempting to respond to complexity with one more project, one more pilot, one more tool. Alpbach helped us see that what is missing is not more activity, but a stack of functions that allows existing efforts to add up to more than their parts.

Out of our conversations, a set of interlocking questions emerged. Together they outline a first attempt at such a stack – spanning from field reflexivity to on-the-ground practice and enabling infrastructure. Rather than “work packages”, they can be understood as functions a field needs someone to care for.

As the cohort continues – including those who joined in the online onboarding – people can locate themselves in relation to these questions and form constellations that explore them, test first proposals, and share back what they learn.

Scaffolding large-scale organising

What could become shared concepts and patterns for organising in a world of fractured sovereignties and mass agency?

Here the focus is on articulating why large-scale organising (LSO) needs to shift from rule-based certainty to learning-based, care-infused, reflexive strategies.

Early work includes assembling a matrix of organising grammars and mapping different organising approaches. Over time, this points toward a living field guide that can be updated as practices evolve.

City practice & narrative translation

How can city teams coordinate across competing mandates – climate, housing, mobility, finance, public health – in ways that are both practical and trust-building?

This function concentrates on facilitation patterns paired with communication practices that help city teams work together at scale.

The intention is to assemble an open playbook of rituals, prompts, and guardrails, test it in different city contexts, and gradually back it with a lightweight co-coaching tool rather than a heavy new platform.

Local commons across boundaries

How can privately owned and public spaces and capacities be coordinated into new common infrastructures at neighbourhood, city, and bioregional scale?

This function looks at transformation as something physically located – a neighbourhood, watershed, forest edge – but institutionally fragmented across public, private, and civic actors.

The work starts from concrete pilots (for instance, edible-city projects or nature-based flood protection) and asks: who stewards what, under which rules, and with which protections against enclosure? Insights can then be transferred across regions.

Finance & investment for place-based flows

What would it take to redirect existing financial flows into real, regional nature-based investments, and to make these flows visible enough for coordinated action?

Here the function is to re-orient financial logics so that regeneration is not merely decorative.

A practical entry point is education and regrouping of regional banks, pooling their efforts into instruments that are legible to regulators and genuinely useful for places, and mapping the “hidden pipeline” of projects that lack suitable financing.

Integrated science & decision infrastructure

How can data, models, and lived experience be brought together so that different actors can explore consequences and trade-offs at the right level of complexity?

This function works on integrated regional models that can feed into “Decision Theater” formats: immersive settings where policymakers, communities, scientists, and investors explore scenarios together.

A transversal technology and data hub underpins all of the above as a mobile consulting squad that helps cohorts choose appropriate tools, data schemas, and AI patterns, instead of reinventing the wheel each time.

A manifesto to the policy sphere

What concise message to the policy sphere would genuinely help – in terms of regulatory room, funding architecture, and governance experiments – when trying to do regenerative work on the ground?

Instead of producing another set of recommendations that disappear into a PDF archive, this function gathers practice-based insights into a shared signal to policymakers and funders.

The aim is not a grand theory of everything, but a clear, grounded orientation that others can endorse, adapt, and use in their own contexts.

A handbook for regenerative law

Where do existing legal frameworks block, enable, or simply ignore regenerative practices – and what practical pathways exist to work with and around them?

Here the attention is on turning law from a perceived wall into a toolkit or rather playbook.

The ambition is a Regenerative Law Handbook that combines precedents, patterns, and concrete pathways for regulatory experiments – written not only for lawyers, but also for city teams, communities, and funders who need legally robust next steps.

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Based on these questions, the Converter offers an architecture in which different constellations can form, dissolve, and re-form while the underlying functions remain visible and collectively held.

Across all of these, the different groups in the cohort work with two horizons:

• a 100-day “smallest viable move” that can be tested quickly;

• and a 1,000-day minimum viable product that could, if useful, be picked up well beyond this cohort.

The intention is not to “scale 10×100” as a brand – but to develop patterns and infrastructures that other alliances, cities, or bioregions can adapt, fork, and use.

Photo: Andrei Pungovschi, 10×100 Lab at EFA25

Agreements for working together when everything is frayed

Many ambitious initiatives carry strong ideas and deep commitment and still come under strain once pressure and conflict rise. We therefore spent significant time not only on what we do, but on how we work together when things get tense – with the modest aim of agreeing on a few simple, memorable rules we can actually return to when it matters.

A few elements of this shared covenant:

• Consciousness & self-reflection
  We encourage each other to notice our own patterns – including when we slip into saviour, cynic, or spectator modes – and to make that visible enough so others can work with us, not around us.

• Joy, grief & emotions
  The emotional range is not a side story. Grief for what is lost and joy in what is still possible sit next to each other; both are legitimate signals rather than obstacles to “professionalism”.

• Communication & attention
  We commit to clarity and care in how we speak, and to honour each other’s time and presence. Phones on silent is the easy part; the harder part is resisting the urge to perform or persuade, and instead practising listening.

• Tension & conflict
  We assume tension will arise. When it does, the protocol is: name it early, slow down, choose a container. That might be a mediated conversation, a written “care note” to hold context until someone is ready to talk, or bringing in a neutral steward.

• Knowledge as commons
  We treat what we learn together as commons-first intelligence, not private IP. That means open attribution, clear consent around sensitive material, and a deliberate bias toward sharing unless there is a good reason not to.

None of this is revolutionary in itself. What felt different was the explicitness: putting these norms into words, outside in the fresh air, and agreeing that we will revisit them when we inevitably fail to live up to them.

The quiet discipline of 100-day commitments

We closed the Launch with a round of smallest viable commitments.

Each person named one thing they would do in the next 100 days that would keep this field alive: convene an editorial team, adapt a framework with a city partner, host a legal clinic, test a playbook in a live process, co-design a bank education format, secure a small pot of resources, or simply keep the rhythm of group calls going.

Individually, these are modest actions. Together, they form something more interesting: a mesh of weak signals that allows us to find each other again in three months’ time and ask, “What did reality say?”

The 100-day rhythm sits deliberately between political and ecological time. It echoes familiar political milestones (“first 100 days”) while roughly matching a season in which something can be sown, tended, and observed. It is long enough to move beyond talk into practice, and short enough for reality to give precise feedback – a span that shifts us from announcing transformations to designing the next concrete experiment.

Why this might matter

If you are reading this from a different context – another city, network, institution, or movement – you might reasonably ask why this is relevant to your work.

A few reflections that may travel:

Large-scale organising is a field problem, not a project problem.
Most of the barriers people described were systemic – logics, incentives, narratives – rather than individual. That suggests our responses also need to be field-level: shared scaffolding, coordinated experiments, and enabling infrastructure

How we work together is part of the infrastructure.
Investing time in covenants, conflict protocols, and knowledge commons is not a luxury. It is the difference between yet another short-lived coalition and a field that can hold friction without fragmenting.

Temporal architecture is important to outgrowing modernity.
Having both 100-day and 1,000-day horizons creates a rhythm between experiment and institution. It helps prevent two familiar traps: endless piloting with no institutional consequences, and grand strategies that never touch ground.

Relational density is a metric, not an afterthought.
We increasingly judge the success of 10×100 not by how many outputs we generate, but by the resilience and vitality of the field: who calls whom when something breaks; how quickly people can align around an opportunity; how conflict is metabolised.

The work is already happening.
None of the streams described here start from zero. They build on decades of practice – in solidarity economies, municipalist movements, indigenous governance, community organising, co-operative finance, systems science, and more. The task is less to invent and more to connect, protect, and adapt.

An open invitation

The 10×100 Converter is one experiment among many in learning how to organise for life in a time of breakdown and deep change. Its relevance will be measured less by internal activity than by whether the patterns and tools developed here are taken up in practice – within the cohort, and by people or organisations who are dedicated to work in service of life.

If any of the challenges or roles described here resonate with your context – whether you are working in a municipality, a movement, a ministry, a cooperative, or a bank – consider this an invitation to treat them as commons, not property:

• take what is useful;

• adapt it to your conditions;

• discard what doesn’t fit;

• and, where possible, feed your learning back into the wider field.

We do not know yet what large-scale organising will need to look like in 2030, or 2040. But we can already say this much: it will not be delivered by a single institution, model, or framework. It could be held – if we coordinate – by dense, resilient webs of people and places who know how to work together, disagree productively, share what they learn, and stay oriented toward the protection and regeneration of life.

The launch lab in Alpbach was one small rehearsal for that future. The real performance is everywhere else.