The Storms to Come

Hope in an Uncertain Future

Yesterday I saw a post on Twitter by a guy I do not know personally, his whole garden was washed away, full of stones. Still, he was lucky after the hurricane hit, sharing how,thanks to his neighbours, his basic needs are met, and now he’s going to volunteer and help others in need. With all the flooding and disruption due to climate change, this message is one of many. Yet, even if I was sitting 5,000 miles away, it touched me. I’ve been following him for some time, reading his messages about his potatoes, the simple life with nature he chose, the hard work, and the everyday beauty of living and working on the land. Maybe that’s why seeing his garden destroyed felt so personal? He also paints a different perspective than figures like Trump or Musk—highlighting how, on the ground, people really stick together, giving each other a helping hand and bringing out some of the best virtues we have. In moments of chaos and despair, many small actions can lead to direct change and impact. Will this stop the climate crisis? Of course not. But we can learn from these moments, seeing how small interactions, scaled up, are key to managing chaos and complex adaptive systems.

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The Bigger Picture...

It’s easy to talk about the big picture, to speak of holistic approaches, or to suggest we need to map the system to identify leverage points. Yet when it comes to regenerative action and complex phenomena like climate change, we still fall short in shifting the status quo, even with all these beautiful system maps, while time is running out. The problems have been clear since the 1970s: an economy externalizing costs and depleting natural resources, building unprecedented material wealth for a few. Despite the mushrooming of good initiatives worldwide—building bioregional governance systems, and experimenting with new currencies and economic models—current pathways seem more like a highway to disaster. Wars, viruses, and crises pile up, worsening the situation.

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I’m not optimistic but I do have hope

The empathy I feel for a man I don’t know grew from seeing the images of his garden over two years. It’s not just intellectual understanding; it’s something I feel, the connection cuts through my projections, stereotypes,  and categorisations. He becomes real as a human.
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As with a garden, such a connection takes time to grow and can be taken away as quickly as a hurricane destroys potato plants. What is system change for one person is a hurricane for another. Many Trump supporters believe he brings the needed system change, but I am afraid he adds to the conditions for more storms to come. Too often we stick to our ideals because it is too painful to feel the disconnect with our neighbour we have not taken the time to grow connections through day-to-day micro-actions, such as reading a story about somebody growing a garden because we are too busy changing the world. I’m not optimistic but I do have hope.

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More players, organizations, and funders are realizing the challenge of measuring impact beyond numbers. Intangibles in human ecosystems—such as trust, collaboration, and resilience—are essential ingredients for abundance, yet they can’t be measured in traditional ways. Like flowers in a garden, these emergent properties grow over time, sprouting unexpectedly, like in the aftermath of a hurricane.

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If applied complexity science taught me one thing it is that change happens through many micro-moments. The emergence of all of those messy micro-interactions in a complex system is what we call change. My noticing shifted a statistical number of hurricane victims towards a relationship with a human being. That in itself is more than we need for change. Let's not search for the big, systemic change to the extent that we overlook the power of micro-shifts. Let’s not rush in with ideals rather than working with what is, let's not fall into the trap of naive idealism.

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We don’t and can’t fully understand the system—it’s too complex. But more and more people seem willing to take the next right step. With the right approach we can notice those micro-moments that are leaning in the right direction more often, make them more visible and even scale those micro-interactions to effect real change.
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This is where hope for me comes in—applying complexity science, micro-moment by micro-moment, and then scaling that. With humans in the driver’s seat, not AI. We are designed to make sense of the world, and given the right constraints, we can avoid falling too soon into the first pattern we see. By building these constraints into organizations, and monitoring the emergence of intangibles like trust and empathy, we may find that coordinating and shifting a complex system takes less effort than expected. The time seems ripe to organize around lived experiences, make sense of them, and shift interactions on the ground at scale. It’s not a one-man hero's journey, or the next linear change theory that explains everything but from my experience something that works in a humble, gentle and beautiful way. Change is happening anyway—the question is how painful or graceful it continues to unfold.

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