In Planetary Dreaming, we are focused on exploring new ways to challenge the systems that humanity itself has created, but which have proven unsustainable. How can we, through methods from design and storytelling, contribute to unraveling the complexities of these systems’ dreams and aspirations, so that new and sustainable societies can emerge?

One approach among several to achieve this is what systemic management thinking refers to as ‘container building’ or incubation cells, where new ideas can be incubated before being introduced to the wider system. PLANETAR DREAMING serves as one such container, and subsequent activities will initiate more containers within existing organizations, companies, and industries, thereby testing and nurturing new ideas that can drive the necessary systemic change.

The concept was first introduced by management thinker Peter Senge, who traced the practice of container-building all the way back to Medieval alchemy, which produced some of the earliest known theories of transformation.

For alchemists, the container in question was a closed pot that was slowly warmed over the fire, precipitating the transformation of the elements in it.

David Teniers: Alchemist Heating a Pot, by (ca 1650).

Senge refers to the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who argued that writings on alchemy are as much about psychological transformation as about material transformation, meaning that the concept of the creative container can equally well be applied to social and organizational change.

According to Senge, these kinds of containers can also be found in the natural environment, as for example in the butterfly’s cocoon: within this silky container, a transformation takes place, the organism ‘melts’ into a new form, and a battle takes place between the old and new. The larvae cells actually attack the newly made butterfly cells, until the latter take over and begin to find their form.

Container building can be part of a process of what I call systems acupuncture. It is here illustrated as red dots, that can serve as the cradles for new ideas and aspirations, and they can potentially emerge at all levels of organizations and society. They can be created within an organizational pyramid – at the top, in the middle, or at the bottom – or they can be the framework for a given team in a matrix organization or serve to incubate a new venture in a project-based organization. They can form one or more cells in an organization, in civil society, or among groups of engaged citizens.

In a longer perspective such containers can metaphorically be compared with worms in an apple. If successful over time more containers within the same system will be connected, weaving a new web of beliefs and thereby new systems, practices, and social and cultural settings.

Working with system acupuncture therefore not only has to do with the establishing of singular containers that can hatch new aspirations and actions, but also about connecting initiatives and thereby growing ecologies of interconnected interventions.