Shifting Systems through Protocol Innovation
Caroline Paulick-Thiel & Felix Beer for 10x100
Facing the Coordination Challenge
Silos create the illusion that complex challenges can be resolved by working in isolation. — Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy-Secretary General
Climate breakdown, exponential technologies, pandemics, and escalating armed conflicts: the complexity of today’s interlocking crises requires coherence in response. Single-point solutions, one-off initiatives and linear planning are insufficient to tackle the gravity and nature of the so-called polycrisis.1
Numerous actors attempt to contribute to meaningful change — yet their efforts often remain fragmented, overlapping or even contradictory despite a shared set of aspirations. Pulling in many different directions, the lack of strategic coordination prevents change agents from effectively connecting, collaborating and delivering around joint missions.
The next 10x100 days of critical urgency are a scientifically backed inflection point2 for WHERE our planetary society is heading and HOW we coordinate for systemic shifts. Unlocking the potential of mission-oriented collaboration for a major upgrade3 has to become a contemporary priority for finding our way through the eye of this existential storm.
With this article, we focus on addressing the coordination challenge and explore how protocol innovation can strengthen the capability of our societies to co-create rapid transitions toward regenerative futures and planetary mutuality.4
Creating Leverage through Coherence
“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system.” — Ilya Prigogine, Physical Chemist
10x100 starts with the understanding that many valuable transformation initiatives and efforts already exist. However, for shifting complex dynamic systems, a multitude of actors need to share a transformative mission and work across different leverage points in an accountable manner. Helping change agents to find a sense of coherence is therefore crucial for accelerating large-scale transformations while navigating a new era of risk.5
Complex dynamic systems are defined by the patterns of interactions between their parts: relationships that result in conditions, structures and norms. Those interactions generate the outcomes of the system as a whole. Transforming the outcomes of a system requires remaking its relationships and therefore its patterns of interaction.6
Intentional systems change requires humanity to change the way change is organized. New relational architectures are needed so that people, organizations and resources can work together in alignment. How can we hack existing architectures and improve the coordination across organizations, networks and sectors for a collective breakthrough?
Architecting Systems Change through Protocols
Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. — Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician
10x100 is driven by an action alliance that understands the concept of protocols as a key for unlocking collaborative systems change at the scale, speed and complexity necessary to address the polycrisis. The term protocol has several different meanings, all connected to the idea of principles, guidelines or procedures to follow7:
The most common understanding of a protocol is “a system of rules that explain the correct conduct and procedures to be followed in formal situations.”
Protocol can also mean “a plan for a scientific experiment or for medical treatment.”
Furthermore, protocol can be used to mean “a set of rules used in programming computers so that they can communicate with each other.”
Protocols are part of the socio-technical fabric of society. They mediate evolving relationships between social and technological elements in the systems that define our world. In this way, they constitute an operational layer that governs patterns of interaction from a micro scale, like the touchpoint of a meeting among individuals, to a macro scale, like climate treaties among nations or cryptographic consensus mechanisms among computers.
Looking at large-scale transitions, they require a shift in the dynamic patterns of the relation between social, technical and ecological systems, and not just between new technology products and processes.8 For us, protocol innovation is a powerful leverage point for changing relational architectures and thereby, reorienting socio-technical systems to biophysical realities. Hence, (re-)configuring protocols can be a “hack” for shifting coordination mechanisms in transformative ways.
In the context of 10x100, we are especially interested in organizational protocols that support the convening and repatterning of numerous, otherwise fragmented efforts around purposeful systems transformation. On the social side, this includes regular routines for retrospectives within and across mission-oriented organizations or guidelines for collaboration amongst change agents from different sectors. On the technical side, this entails rules and procedures for the sharing of information, resources and capabilities through digital infrastructures.
Protocolizing Collaboration for Rapid Transitions
Radical uncertainty requires radical collaboration. — Kirsten Dunlop, Executive Director, EIT Climate-KIC
The 10x100 framework proposes a set of foundational principles, guidelines and procedures for organizing collaborative systems change. We are looking into protocol innovations that enable change makers to connect, cohere and catalyze their efforts more effectively around shared missions. The goal is to induce a protocol-led state of change or “socio-technical tipping point”9 for democratizing transformation towards regeneration instead of degeneration.
10x100 seeks to design an organizational protocol that leverages collective sensemaking in order to generate actionable intelligence, increase coherence of interventions and accelerate transformational efforts across silos. For example, a number of disconnected interventions on health and environment can be collectively recognized as associated with a particular intent such as regenerative development.
By seeing them within a new frame, these interventions can learn from each other, make shared sense and create insights together that can help them to coordinate their transformational activities across sectors. Just as new forms of organizing propelled the industrial revolution, new forms of collaboration across organizations can catalyze a fast and fair transition toward regenerative futures.
Delivering on these ambitions requires us to rethink the paradigms that sit at the core of our transition protocols. 10x100 recognizes that the dominant models of coordination are inadequate or even detrimental to unlocking the rapid and unprecedented transformations10 that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is calling for.
In addition to the research from the IPCC, another guiding body is needed that gathers knowledge of HOW to bridge the gap for implementing recommendations by enhancing civic agency. Combining cutting-edge insights from systems thinking, complexity science and network theory, we propose a protocol design that shifts the transition paradigm11 from incremental to catalytic collaboration.
At the core, the 10x100 protocol approach promotes a collaborative process of proactive evolution through iterative action-learning cycles. We understand that most systems we need to transform behave in complex adaptive ways. This means that there are no silver bullet solutions and that deterministic planning approaches are bound to fail. Instead, we acknowledge that exploration and experimentation are crucial to shift systems. By testing ourselves forward through real-world experience, by documenting our parallel “learning by doing” or interconnected “muddling through,”12 we can collectively ”learn the future into being.”13
Building Coordination Capabilities
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently. — David Graeber, Anthropologist
Centered around iterative action-learning cycles, 10x100 seeks to understand, prototype and upgrade protocols as a catalyst for accelerating coordination processes for large-scale transformation towards regenerative futures. Based on the understanding that these massive shifts have to happen in an environment that is automized for competition and degeneration, we are looking into four key levers for building capabilities in coordinating systemic shifts:
Reflexivity: The capability to become aware of one’s role in solving a systemic challenge and position within the related stakeholder network.
Connectivity: The capability to identify and build new, trustful relationships with other change agents around a shared mission.
Sensemaking: The capability to measure and make sense of what emerges in the system in order to build the collective intelligence needed to detect momentum and identify leverage points.
Adaptivity: The capability to develop interventions, build consortia, compose innovation portfolios, design pioneering experiments, and create a common voice for transformational action in policy and funding.
The current 10x100 protocol prototype is built on three iterative phases: 1) Looking outwards — acknowledging the increased dynamics of a rapidly changing environment, 2) Sensing inward — evaluating the way we respond to the science in our day to day capacities; 3) Leaping forward — shifting priorities drastically for combining short term crisis response with long term systemic change.
This simple structure can be understood as an essence of approaches that aim to relate biophysical realities to socio-technical practices and their drastic adaptation. The core protocol can be seen like a spiral that creates larger ripple effects around individuals, teams or organizations using it on a regular basis. It can be adapted and applied to different contexts based on need, interest and other conditions. In essence, 10x100 different types of actors to acknowledge, reflect, and – where necessary – shift their fundamental protocols of coordination.
Over the past months, we were able to test the 10x100 protocol in crisis response networks, public institutions, infrastructure organizations and civic alliances. There is a lot of potential in having overarching categories like - outward, inward, forward - for documentation, sense making and embedding learnings frequently. As we all know, 100 days are also a political timeframe that could encourage reporting and learning routines across different sectors.
Co-Designing Protocols for 10x100
Systems don’t change systems. People change systems. — Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator
Inspired by the “Summer of Protocol” pilot study14, we reviewed our current work based on different questions (see here). For us, this provided a new lens to adapt the 10x100 core protocol in a comprehensive way for it to work and evolve across different sectors.
We encourage anybody working with protocols to engage with this framework and the related research. Protocol innovation is key to leaping into a new mode of cooperating in this decisive decade. We look forward to hear from you for diving deeper into this possibility space: alliance@10x10.cc
“Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”15 For this to happen, all of us must acknowledge, reflect, and – where necessary – shift our fundamental protocols for coordinated action.
Tooze, A. 2022. Chartbook #130 Defining polycrisis - from crisis pictures to the crisis matrix. https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-130-defining-polycrisis or permaweird (see https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-permaweird)
IPCC. 2022. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, 3056 pp.
Earth4All. 2023. https://www.earth4all.life/a-major-upgrade
Rao, V. 2022. There Are Many Alternatives: Unlocking Civilizational Hypercomplexity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxBA_9dm6xk
Black R, Busby J, Dabelko GD, de Coning C, Maalim H, Ndiloseh M et al. Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk. Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 2022. 98 p. https://doi.org/10.55163/LCLS7037
Winhall, J. & Leadbeater, C. 2022. Patterns of Possibility. As retrieved from: https://www.systeminnovation.org/article-the-patterns-of-possibility
Cambridge Dictionary. As retrieved from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/protocol
Markard, J., Raven, R., Truffer, B. 2012. Sustainability transitions: An emerging field of research and its prospects. Research Policy 41, 955–967.
Otto, I. M., Donges, J. F., Cremades, R., Bhowmik, A., Hewitt, R. J., Lucht, W., Rockström, J., Allerberger, F., McCaffrey, M., Doe, S.S.P., Lenferna, A., Morán, N., van Vuuren, D.P. & Lenferna, A. 2020. Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(5), 2354-2365.
IPCC. 2023. AR6 Synthesis Report. Climate Change 2023. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/
Besharov, M., Joshi, R., Vaara, E., & West, D. 2021. The Decisive Decade: Organising Climate Action – Catalytic Collaboration for Systems Change. Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and the Mission 2020 Campaign.
Lindblom, C. 1959. The Science of Muddling Through. Public Administration Review Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 79-88 https://doi.org/10.2307/973677
Hofstetter, D. 2019. Innovating in Complexity (Part I): Why Most Roadmaps Lead Straight to the Graveyard. As retrieved from https://medium.com/in-search-of-leverage/innovating-in-complexity-part-i-why-most-roadmaps-lead-straight-to-the-graveyard-ced34b5a23fa
Rao, V., Beiko, T., Ryan, D., Stark, J., Van Epps, T. & Au, B. (2023). The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols. As retrieved from: https://venkatesh-rao.gitbook.io/summer-of-protocols/
Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general responding to the IPCC report launch in March 2023
Hi- I think there might be a link missing above on the questions used for the collective work